California’s Emeryville is third city to pass Fair Workweek policy
California’s Emeryville is third city to pass Fair Workweek policy
EMERYVILLE, Calif. – On Oct. 18, this city became the third in the nation to pass a Fair Workweek policy. The City...
EMERYVILLE, Calif. – On Oct. 18, this city became the third in the nation to pass a Fair Workweek policy. The City Council passed the ordinance unanimously at its first reading, following testimony at a pre-meeting press conference and during the meeting itself, by those most affected.
Under the new policy, employers will have to give workers their schedules two weeks in advance, compensating them for last-minute changes. When more hours become available, current workers will have priority so they can get closer to fulltime work.
The council must confirm its action with a second vote, scheduled for Nov. 1. The new law, which will affect some 4,000 fast food and retail workers, is to become effective in July 2017.
Almost two years ago, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed the first such measure, the Retail Workers Bill of Rights, and just last month, Seattle followed suit http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/tale-of-two-cities-yes-vs-no-on-fair....
New York City may be next: Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Council members are pressing legislation to require employers to give some 65,000 hourly fast food workers a two week notice of changes in their shift assignments. However, the bill doesn’t extend such requirements to retail stores or full-service restaurants.
Emeryville, a small city across the Bay from San Francisco with a large concentration of retail stores, already has the country’s highest minimum wage, with large employers required to pay their workers at least $14.82 per hour. Smaller businesses must pay at least $13 per hour.
At the state level, earlier this year California passed a new minimum wage law with a path to a $15 hourly minimum.
At the press conference, low wage workers, local residents, community and labor organizations, faith leaders and academic researchers told of the many challenges faced by retail workers who must deal with constantly shifting and unpredictable schedules and variable numbers of work hours.
Moriah Larkins, an Emeryville retail worker and activist with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) who MC’d the press conference, told of her own experience working six days a week for a “bad apple” employer. “And on my days off they would call me in, and I have my son, who was two years old at the time.”
At first, Larkins said, she used to scramble and pay extra for last minute child care. But as she realized her extra hours, and less time for her son, were making him unhappy, she started refusing the extra shifts. After that, her hours, which had been 32 to 40 per week, were cut in half.
“Now,” she said, “I work for a ‘good apple.’ I work 28 hours per week, I can pay all my bills, I can spend time with my son and finish my nursing degree.”
In a conversation after the press conference, Larkins said she hoped the ordinance would pass “without exceptions.” She and others are warning that before the final vote Nov. 1, the California Retail Association is trying hard to weaken the measure.
Other retail and fast food workers described their experiences, including a past employer who paid subminimum wages and another who fired a worker after “forgetting” he had accepted her timely request for a day off.
The new ordinance has been in the making for a while. In May, Emeryville Mayor Dianne Martinez and Councilmember Ruth Atkin wrote an op-ed published by the San Francisco Chronicle, in which they said a regional fair workweek was needed to assure workers “stable schedules so they can pay the bills, live healthier lives, “and contribute more to our communities.
A recent study, Wages and Hours: Why workers in Emeryville’s service sector need a fair workweek, conducted by ACCE, the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), and the Center for Popular Democracy found that in a sample of more than 100 frontline Emeryville retail workers, some 68 percent had part-time schedules, 82 percent were people of color, eight out of 10 had variable schedules and nearly two-thirds only got their schedules a week or less in advance. Over two-thirds said they wanted to work more hours, while over half said they were scheduled for “clopening” shifts, or back-to-back closings and openings with less than 11 hours off.
The study concluded that employers need to commit to predictable, flexible and responsive schedules that allow for adequate rest.
At the Oct. 18 press conference, EBASE Deputy Director Jennifer Lin said, “Providing a fair work week is not only good for workers, it’s good for business, too.” With many retailers already scheduling in advance, she said, the new ordinance will help level the playing field, and stable schedules and more adequate hours also reduce turnover and absenteeism.
In an article earlier this month in The Nation magazine, author Michelle Chen noted that the Fight for $15 and Fair Workweek struggles are “converging on sectors that used to be known as bastions of dead-end jobs.” The next step, she said, is “to organize, and unionize, to give workers real collective bargaining leverage over their wages and working conditions. Work-life balance comes by shifting the power balance on the job, so that workers have the final say over when they’re on call.”
By Marilyn Bechtel
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Dreamers Deferred As Congress Lets DACA Deadline Pass
Dreamers Deferred As Congress Lets DACA Deadline Pass
"For most of us, DACA was the only opportunity we had to come out of the shadows and show everyone what we are capable...
"For most of us, DACA was the only opportunity we had to come out of the shadows and show everyone what we are capable of doing, regardless of the legal status in which we stand in,” Aguilera said in a testimonial provided by the Center for Popular Democracy to ABC News...“With no clear path forward on the horizon to protect Dreamers, thousands of immigrant youth are left in limbo and in the sights of Trump’s deportation machine,” said Ana Maria Archila, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy in a statement to ABC News.
Read the full article here.
Fed Chair Candidate Kevin Warsh Draws Opposition From Left and Right
Fed Chair Candidate Kevin Warsh Draws Opposition From Left and Right
On a Wednesday in mid-September, a group of progressive activists concerned about the stewardship of the American...
On a Wednesday in mid-September, a group of progressive activists concerned about the stewardship of the American economy packed a meeting room on Capitol Hill with staff of Senate Democrats. Part strategy session and part pep talk, the gathering had a very specific aim.
“We’ll do whatever we can do to prevent Kevin Warsh from taking on the role of chair of the Federal Reserve,” Jennifer Epps-Addison, president of the Center for Popular Democracy, told the gathering.
Read the full article here.
Warren blasts Yellen for endorsing very white, very male regional Fed presidents
Warren blasts Yellen for endorsing very white, very male regional Fed presidents
Around this time last year, as another white male took the reins at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the Fed’s...
Around this time last year, as another white male took the reins at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the Fed’s archaic and opaque system of choosing its regional presidents started to come under fire. At first the criticism was over the way the system appeared to favor insiders. Patrick Harker, at the time the new Philadelphia Fed President, had sat on the regional Fed board that was tasked with filling that position. Later that summer the Dallas Fed would name Robert Kaplan, who is also white, as its president despite the fact that he was a director at the executive search firm that that regional Fed board hired to find candidates. When the Minneapolis Fed named Neel Kashkari its president later in 2015, groups like the Fed Up Coalition pointed out that while he was the only non-white regional president, he, like Harker and Kaplan, had former ties to Goldman Sachs.
Since these presidents have rotating votes on U.S. interest rate policy, many saw the selections as a critical failure to reflect the country’s diversity of gender, race and background. As it stands, 11 of the 12 regional Fed presidents are white, 10 of them are male, and none are black or Latino. Fed Up, a network of community organizations and labor unions calling for changes to the central bank, also points out that there has never been a black regional president in the Fed’s 102-year history.
To be sure, the central bank was set up in 1913 in this decentralized way to check the power of the Washington-based Fed Board, whose seven governors are nominated by the U.S. President and confirmed by the Senate in public hearings and votes. The Fed presidents scattered around the country, meanwhile, are quietly chosen by their regional directors (usually corporate, industry and civic heads) and then, again with little or no public input or transparency, approved by the Fed governors after a series of private interviews with them in Washington. All 12 presidents had their terms extended earlier this year.
So the stage was set on Tuesday for Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat who some see as a potential running mate for U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, to make a point about diversity at the Fed while making things rather uncomfortable for Fed Chair Janet Yellen, who was testifying before the Senate Banking Committee – and who, it may be noted, is the first woman to lead the central bank:
Warren: “Does the lack of diversity among the regional Fed Presidents concern you?”
Yellen: “Yes, and I believe it is important to have a diverse group of policymakers who can bring different perspectives to bear. As you know, it’s the responsibility of the regional banks’ Class B and C directors to conduct a search and to identify candidates. The (Fed) Board reviews those candidates and we insist that the search be national and that every attempt be made to identify a diverse pool of candidates…”
Warren: “The Fed Board recently re-appointed each and every one of these presidents without any public debate or any public discussion about it. So the question I have is, if you’re concerned about this diversity issue, why didn’t you take (any) of these opportunities to say, ‘Enough is enough, let’s go back and see if we can find qualified regional Fed presidents who also contribute to the overall diversity of the Fed’s leadership’?”
Yellen: “We did undertake a thorough review of the re-appointments of the performances of the presidents. The Board of Governors has oversight of the reserve banks, there are annual meetings between the Board’s bank affairs committee and the leadership of those banks to review the performance of the presidents, and there were thorough reviews of…”
Warren: “But you’re telling me diversity is important and yet you signed off on all these folks without any public discussion about it. I appreciate your commitment to diversity and I have no doubt about it. I don’t question it. It just shows me that the selection process for regional Fed presidents is broken because the current process has not allowed you and the rest of the Board to address the persistent lack of diversity among the regional Fed presidents. I think that Congress should take a hard look at reforming the regional Fed selection process so that we can all benefit from a Fed leadership that reflects a broader array of both backgrounds and interests.”
As it happens, Clinton said last month that she, too, supports an ongoing push by Warren and other liberal members of Congress to exclude bankers from the regional Fed boards and to make the central bank more diverse.
By Jonathan Spicer
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COMPTROLLER STRINGER DEBARS CONTRACTOR THAT CHEATED IMMIGRANT WORKERS OUT OF $1.7 MILLION IN PREVAILING WAGES AND BENEFITS
COMPTROLLER STRINGER DEBARS CONTRACTOR THAT CHEATED IMMIGRANT WORKERS OUT OF $1.7 MILLION IN PREVAILING WAGES AND BENEFITS
(New York, NY) – New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer today assessed $3.2 million in fines against K.S....
(New York, NY) – New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer today assessed $3.2 million in fines against K.S. Contracting Corporation and its owner, Paresh Shah, for cheating dozens of workers out of the prevailing wages and benefits they were owed under the New York State Labor Law. In addition to being assessed $3.2 million in unpaid wages, interest, and civil penalties, K.S Contracting and Mr. Shah will be barred from working on New York City and State contracts for five years.
K.S. Contracting was named as one of the worst wage theft violators in New York in a report by the Center for Popular Democracy in 2015.
“With President Trump taking clear aim at immigrants across the country, we need to stand up and protect the foreign-born New Yorkers who keep our City running. Every New Yorker has rights, and my office won’t back down in defending them,” New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer said. “Contractors might think they can take advantage of immigrants, but today we’re sending a strong message: my office will fight for every worker in New York City. This is about basic fairness and accountability.”
K.S. Contracting was awarded more than $21 million in contracts by the City Departments of Design and Construction, Parks and Recreation, and Sanitation between 2007 and 2010. Projects included the Morrisania Health Center in the Bronx, the 122 Community Center in Manhattan, the Barbara S. Kleinman Men’s Residence in Brooklyn, the North Infirmary Command Building on Rikers Island, Bronx River Park, the District 15 Sanitation Garage in Brooklyn, and various City sidewalks in Queens.
The Comptroller’s Office began investigating the company after an employee filed a complaint with the office in May 2010. The multi-year investigation used subpoenas, video evidence, union records, and City agency data to uncover a kickback scheme that preyed on immigrant workers.
After a four-day administrative trial in May 2016, the Comptroller found that K.S. Contracting routinely issued paychecks to just half of its workforce and then required those employees to cash the checks and surrender the money to company supervisors. Those supervisors would then redistribute the cash to all of the employees on a jobsite, paying them at rates significantly below prevailing wages. K.S. Contracting, however, falsely reported to City agencies that all employees on the jobsite who received checks were paid the prevailing wage.
Between August 2008 and November 2011, the company cheated at least 36 workers out of $1.7 million in wages and benefits on seven New York City public works projects. K.S. Contracting reported that it paid its workers combined wage and benefit rates starting at $50 per hour but actually paid daily cash salaries starting at $90 per day. The majority of the workers impacted were immigrants of Latino, South Asian, or West Indian descent.
The New York City Comptroller’s office enforces state and local laws which require private contractors working on New York City public works projects or those with service contracts with City agencies to pay no less than the prevailing wage or living wage rate to their employees.
When workers are underpaid, the New York City Comptroller’s office works to recoup the amount of the underpayment plus interest.
Since taking office in 2014, Comptroller Scott M. Stringer’s Bureau of Labor Law has assessed over $20 million and barred 40 contractors from state and City contracts due to prevailing wage violations, both record amounts. The assessed violation number includes underpayment of wages and benefits with interest payable to workers, and civil penalties payable to the City treasury.
“We applaud the Comptroller for standing up for the rights of immigrant workers and debarring bad actors like K.S. Contracting – a company identified by the Center for Popular Democracy as one of the worst violators of wage theft laws in New York. The Comptroller’s aggressive enforcement of prevailing wage law is a perfect example of what is needed to effectively combat wage theft throughout the city and state,” said Kate Hamaji, Center for Popular Democracy.
“We commend Comptroller Stringer for defending the rights of immigrant workers and ensure that they receive the wages and benefits that they deserve,” said Steven Choi, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “In a time when immigrant communities are worried for their future in this country, it is essential that we have strong city advocates who will ensure that their rights are protected.”
“At a time when exploitative employers are feeling increasingly emboldened by Trump’s hateful rhetoric, it is imperative that our City’s leaders are taking a strong stance in defense of immigrant workers. Wage theft is a persistent and pervasive problem in New York, with employers like Paresh Shah cheating their immigrant workers out of millions of dollars in lawful wages and benefits each year. We commend the Comptroller for fighting to recuperate wages for the workers at KS Contracting and for showing employers like Paresh Shah that their behavior will not be tolerated by the City of New York,” said Deborah Axt, Executive Director, Make the Road New York.
“I want to thank New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer for taking the lead in fighting wage theft. Unfortunately wage theft is a crime that is running rampart throughout the construction industry. Hard working men and women, who expect nothing more than a fair day’s pay for a fair’s day’s work are constantly seeing their hard earned wages stolen by dishonest, criminal employers. By debarring KS Contracting for five years, Comptroller Stringer and his office have sent a message loud and clear – stealing workers’ wages will not be tolerated in New York.” said Robert Bonanza, Business Manager, Mason Tenders District Council of Greater New York, LiUNA!.
“I would like to thank Comptroller Stringer and his team in the Bureau of Labor Law for bringing justice to the workers at K.S. Contracting. Unfortunately the Comptroller’s task is made more difficult by the fact that many City agencies do not put top priority on monitoring projects for labor violations. Too many employers in New York City exploit minority and immigrant workers. And it’s no secret that many immigrant workers are fearful of retaliation for standing up for their rights, especially in an environment where they are afraid of being deported. This undercuts labor standards for all workers, and safe, educated workers are our City’s most valuable resource. We need more responsible and proactive leaders like Comptroller Stringer to protect that resource,” said Lowell Barton, Vice President/Organizing Director, Laborers Local 1010, LiUNA!.
“In a city where diversity is our greatest strength, we will not let anyone target our immigrant workers for abuse. Undermining labor standards for immigrants it’s an attack on all workers. I commend Comptroller Stringer for standing up for immigrant workers and against wage theft at a time when our immigrant communities are under attack,” said Renata Pumarol, Communications Director, New York Communities for Change.
“We at the Alliance of South Asian American Labor (ASAAL) are extremely conscious of the rights of every human being who lives in this great nation no matter what their immigration status. Many hard working individuals are taken advantage of by unscrupulous employers. We greatly applaud Comptroller Scott Stringer’s aggressive approach to combat wage theft violations and in this way protect the rights of all workers. I applaud his historic record of debarring 40 contractors since taking office and assessing over $20 million in prevailing wage violations, including today’s order against K.S. Contracting,” said Maf Misbah Uddin, ASAAL National President.
By TIP NEWS
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New York City allocates $500K to fight feds on deportation
US News - July 17, 2013, by Steven Nelson - Immigration advocates are thrilled that New York City is footing the bill...
US News - July 17, 2013, by Steven Nelson - Immigration advocates are thrilled that New York City is footing the bill for a pilot program to provide free legal representation to people fighting deportation.
The City Council allocated $500,000 in June for the pilot program, with Speaker Christine Quinn – a candidate for mayor – taking the lead in shepherding the funds into the fiscal year 2014 budget, advocates say.
"There really was no controversy because the statistics bore out the injustice," Angela Fernandez of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights told U.S. News.
Non-citizens living in the U.S. without legal permission aren't guaranteed a free lawyer in non-criminal deportation cases.
Immigration law is "as complex as tax law," Fernandez said. She pointed to a research conducted by federal judge Robert Katzmann that found defendants without attorneys prevail less than 10 percent of the time in immigration cases.
"If they have access to a high-quality deportation defense attorney, their chances of prevailing is 67 percent," she said.
The Vera Institute of Justice, a legal advocacy group, will administer the program and approve grants to experienced non-profits whose attorneys specialize in immigration defense.
Fernandez said is costs up to $4,000 to defend a person during the course of immigration proceedings.
"The stakes are pretty high," said Brittny Saunders of the Center for Popular Democracy. "Folks who are detained, in many cases on minor infractions of immigration law, have no right to counsel ... so they're going up against federally trained attorneys."
Fernandez and Saunders agreed that the pilot program - officially called the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project – is the first publicly funded endeavor to defend immigrants against deportation, and they hope it will become permanent.
Quinn's office confirmed to U.S. News that the program was funded in the city's recently approved budget.
The immigration advocates, attorneys and Quinn are scheduled to discuss the program during a Friday event at Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law.
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Protester shouts at Sen. Jeff Flake in elevator: ‘Tell me it doesn’t matter’
Protester shouts at Sen. Jeff Flake in elevator: ‘Tell me it doesn’t matter’
A protester who said she was sexually assaulted approached Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator Friday after he released a...
A protester who said she was sexually assaulted approached Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator Friday after he released a statement saying he would be voting in favor of Brett Kavanaugh for a seat on the Supreme Court.
Read the article and watch the video here.
Fed, Eager to Show It’s Listening, Welcomes Protesters
Fed, Eager to Show It’s Listening, Welcomes Protesters
WASHINGTON — When a dozen protesters in green T-shirts showed up two years ago at the Federal Reserve’s annual...
WASHINGTON — When a dozen protesters in green T-shirts showed up two years ago at the Federal Reserve’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., they were regarded by many participants as an amusing addition.
Two years later, they have won a place on the schedule.
The protesters, who want the Fed to extend its economic stimulus campaign, are scheduled to meet on Thursday with eight members of the central bank’s policy-making committee. At the start of a conference devoted to esoteric debates about monetary policy, officials will hear from people struggling to make ends meet.
The Fed’s effort to show that it is listening to its critics reflects the central bank’s broader struggle to find its footing in an era whose great challenge is not the strength of inflation, but the weakness of economic growth.
Officials are wrestling with the limits of monetary policy, the focus of the conference, even as they try to address simmering discontent among liberals who want stronger action and among conservatives who say the Fed has done too much.
The meeting also represents an unlikely victory for Ady Barkan, the 32-year-old lawyer who decided in 2012 that liberals should pay more attention to monetary policy. He now heads the “Fed Up” campaign, a national coalition of community and labor groups that plans to bring more than 100 protesters to Jackson Hole.
“We want to make sure that regular voices are being heard,” Mr. Barkan said in beginning the campaign two years ago. The American economy, he said, was not working for all Americans — particularly not for blacks and other minority groups.
Fed officials so far have chosen to accommodate the group by applauding its efforts at public education, not by seriously engaging its arguments that interest rates should be raised more slowly. Esther George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which hosts the Jackson Hole conference, arranged Thursday’s meeting with the activists. She said in an interview earlier this year that the Fed must balance job growth with other issues, like financial stability.
“I am completely sympathetic,” she said of the group’s concerns.
But she cautioned that the Fed’s powers were limited. Pushing too hard to lower unemployment could lead to higher inflation, or speculative bubbles, that would force the Fed to raise interest rates more quickly. The resulting economic volatility could end up doing more harm than good.
“The Federal Reserve has become somehow the answer to many problems far beyond what we can actually address,” she said. “I wish I could fix all of it with a tool like monetary policy. But we can’t.”
Even Mr. Barkan’s supporters acknowledge the long odds. Fed Up’s budget has grown to $2 million this year, from $145,000 in 2014, mostly from Good Ventures, a nonprofit foundation created by the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, which describes the campaign as “relatively unlikely to have an impact.”
Fed Up’s more visible success has come in pursuit of a longer-term goal: advocating for changes in the Fed’s governance that could eventually shift its decision-making.
In a report published earlier this year, Fed Up highlighted the Fed’s lack of diversity. There are no blacks or Hispanics among the 17 officials on the Fed’s policy-making committee of 12 regional bank presidents and five governors. No black or Hispanic has ever served as president of a regional reserve bank.
Moreover, the report said that whites composed 83 percent of the directors of the Fed’s 12 regional reserve banks, who select the regional presidents.
Narayana Kocherlakota, former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said that the absence of minorities was “quite troubling.”
“Those kinds of persistent absences of key demographic groups really suggest that the appointment process, there is something that can be fixed there,” he said.
Fed Up also argued that bank executives should not sit on regional Fed boards. Under current law, bankers hold three of the nine seats on each board. The regional reserve banks are owned by the commercial banks in each district, although they operate under the authority of the Fed’s board, a government agency whose members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
In May, 127 congressional Democrats signed a letter to Janet L. Yellen, the Fed chairwoman, calling attention to the Fed’s lack of diversity and the influence of the banking industry.
On the same day, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign said in a statement that “Secretary Clinton believes that the Fed needs to be more representative of America as a whole and that common sense reforms — like getting bankers off the boards of regional Federal Reserve Banks — are long overdue.”
Two months later, the Democratic Party adopted a campaign platform that included similar language, the first time in recent decades it mentioned the Fed.
Andrew Levin, an economist at Dartmouth College, said Fed Up’s greatest chance for significant influence was not in framing the current debate about interest rates, but in changing the Fed itself. He co-wrote a report that the campaign published Monday detailing a proposal to make the Fed a fully public institution.
“Having a diverse set of policy makers — including African-Americans and Hispanics — will influence the Fed’s decision-making,” he said. “And it should. The public should have confidence that the public is well represented at the F.O.M.C. table.”
Mr. Barkan started the “Fed Up” campaign after joining the Center for Popular Democracy in 2012, a few years after graduating from Yale Law School. He had read a 2011 article by the journalist Matthew Yglesias, titled “Fed Up.” Unions and other advocacy groups were focused on minimum-wage laws. Mr. Barkan was compelled by the argument that they also should be focused on interest rates.
“Even if they move once less over the course of several years, that’s still massive,” he said earlier this year. “The number of people who have jobs because of that, or higher wages, that dwarves a $15-an-hour wage increase in a smaller city.”
The campaign has gained traction in part because the Fed is eager to show that it is listening. During the first protest two years ago, Mr. Barkan approached Ms. Yellen, who listened politely and invited him to bring a group of workers to Washington, where she met with them in November 2014.
Lael Brainard, a Fed governor who plans to attend the Thursday meeting, made a point last year of visiting the parallel conference Mr. Barkan staged on the sidelines of the Fed event. And Mr. Barkan’s group has now succeeded in persuading each of the regional reserve presidents to meet with groups of local workers.
Neel Kashkari, the new president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, met with Fed Up’s local affiliate, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, this month, telling the group that he shared their concern about the persistence of higher rates of unemployment among blacks and other minority groups.
Mr. Kashkari also accepted an invitation to spend a day with one of the group’s members, Rosheeda Credit, a Minneapolis resident who described the struggles she and her boyfriend faced to cover the cost of rent and child care for their five children.
“Walking a day in somebody else’s shoes is actually — it makes the anecdotes that much more real,” Mr. Kashkari, who arrived at the bank in January, told reporters after the meeting. “It influences how I think about the problems we face.”
By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM
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Protesters rip Chase for funding private prisons, immig jails
Protesters rip Chase for funding private prisons, immig jails
Over 100 protesters weathered a sudden downpour as they gathered outside JPMorgan Chase headquarters in Midtown...
Over 100 protesters weathered a sudden downpour as they gathered outside JPMorgan Chase headquarters in Midtown Manhattan Wednesday to challenge the bank's investment and funding of private prisons and for-profit immigrant detention centers.
The protesters laid out pairs of shoes in front of the bank's main office on Fifth Ave. before the rally began.
Read the full article here.
Flexible Schedules vs. Workers’ Burdened Life
Flexible Schedules vs. Workers’ Burdened Life
Michael Saltsman’s “A Stiff Jab at Flexible Work Schedules” (op-ed, March 30) misses the mark. Policy makers don’t want...
Michael Saltsman’s “A Stiff Jab at Flexible Work Schedules” (op-ed, March 30) misses the mark. Policy makers don’t want to “dictate how businesses schedule employees’ work”—but rather ensure employees no longer have every hour of their lives dictated by increasingly unpredictable schedules.
Today, most Americans are not working nine to five. Instead, they’re in hourly jobs that demand they be constantly available for ever-changing schedules, and require working moms, students and others to regularly cancel child care, classes and other commitments. Researchers at the University of Chicago have shown us just how little flexibility workers have, finding that fully 41% of early career hourly workers receive their schedules less than a week in advance, and half have no say in their schedule. Working should not be this hard—and until recently, it wasn’t.
Ideally, businesses would make changes on their own. When a spotlight is aimed at them, they do. In the past year, major retailers including Gap and J. Crew ended on-call shifts after an inquiry from the New York attorney general and, under continued pressure from workers, Starbucks continues to strive to deliver scheduling reforms it has promised. Forward-thinking employers are starting to recognize that scheduling improvements are good for business, reducing turnover and improving productivity.
Even so, public policy is needed to set a baseline standard that all businesses can follow and that level the playing field across the economy. It is about simply catching up with a changing workforce.
By Carrie Gleason
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1 month ago
1 month ago