Warren leads crusade for diversity at Fed
Warren leads crusade for diversity at Fed
“I’m judging John Williams based on the last several years of him being wrong about the levels of maximum employment...
“I’m judging John Williams based on the last several years of him being wrong about the levels of maximum employment and pushing for additional [interest rate hikes] prematurely because that mistake puts millions of jobs at risk,” said Shawn Sebastian, who co-leads the Fed Up coalition comprising advocacy groups and unions.
Read the full article here.
ACORN-linked Center for Popular Democracy aims for big GOTV operation
ACORN-linked Center for Popular Democracy aims for big GOTV operation
A left-wing nonprofit called the Center for Popular Democracy is working with the ACORN-tainted Working Families...
A left-wing nonprofit called the Center for Popular Democracy is working with the ACORN-tainted Working Families Organization in a more than $7 million get-out-the-vote operation in battleground states in the upcoming presidential and U.S. Senate elections, reports Lachlan Markay of the Washington Free Beacon.
The WFB reports:
Documents detailing those efforts shed new light on how the left’s organizing apparatus is collaborating with prominent progressive groups such as MoveOn.org, labor unions, and foundations to build a campaign apparatus that can win short-term policy victories and translate those victories into a lasting political operation.
The nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy and its 501(c)(4) dark money arm, the Center for Popular Democracy Action, work with 42 partner organizations—including labor unions, community organizing groups, and other left-wing nonprofits—in 30 states to advance its goals.
The group’s $14 million budget supports a staff of more than 60 employees. In 2015, it sub-granted more than $7 million to its partner organizations. Those partners boast more than 400,000 members, 800 state-based staffers, and combined budgets of roughly $85 million.
That organizing power is diffused throughout the states, but a document obtained by the Free Beacon reveals that efforts have been underway since December to centralize decision-making in committees that represent both CPD and its local and state partners. […]
By MATTHEW VADUM
Source
Parents as Decision Makers
Parents as Decision Makers
All the time, parents are making decisions about what happens in their children’s lives. The same needs to be true when...
All the time, parents are making decisions about what happens in their children’s lives. The same needs to be true when it comes to choosing what happens with their child’s academic education. It is more than just choosing a school but also what happens in the school building. With the sustainable community school model, parents are very much part of the decision-making process. This goes beyond the realm of engagement but views them as collaborators in the achievements of the school. The Community Schools Toolkit created by The Center for Popular Democracy signifies the importance of this involvement by stating, “parent engagement is promoted so the full community actively participates in planning and decision-making.” It is important to consider parents in the same manner as teachers and administrators although they provide a different perspective. It is like pieces to a puzzle, each one has a part to contribute which must be done for it to be whole. Parents must be at the table with equal input regarding the daily activities that happen in the school building from academics to after-school programming and other aspects such as community events.
It is quite understood, parents are not formally trained as educators; however, they are the first teachers of children. This is a shared experience we all have as adults. Yes, some were better than others but it was those things our parents taught us which have a lasting impact. As a result, parents possess the necessary qualities to be involved with the process of choosing curriculum, managing the budget, and identifying staff, teachers, and administrators who are a good fit with the school’s climate. The parents have a particular perspective when it comes to their involvement and their inclusion and embracement would create a cohesive culture for success. They need not be considered an option but one of the main individuals in building the school’s environment conducive to learning.
This role of parent involvement is different and separate from PTAs or PTOs. These organizations are representative of an existing institution within the school. It may not necessarily project the sole interests of parents since it is also an organization comprised of other members. Additionally, the groups are connected to a national organization where the interests may align with corporations. Parents as decision-makers bring a different viewpoint as a result of their concern for children and the community and not institutions or corporations.
The relationship between the school and parents needs to be one of partnership instead of a dichotomous one. They both are involved with developing the child to become a successful adult who can function as a productive member of society. One thing a parent is free to do when compared to those who work for the school district is aggressively advocate. There is every reason to take the risk where the answer may be no for others. They aren’t at risk of losing their job, adverse disciplinary action, or retaliation. So, parents can do what the others can’t which is lobby elected officials, make demands with the central office leadership and Superintendent, speak out against the unequal and unfair treatment, and actively galvanize all stakeholders to be involved in the process of making not only the school better but the overall community.
Since parents possess a variety of resources, it’s proper for them to assist with the development of the school. Some of these assets which can be contributed are time, talents, knowledge, and skills. For example, I am a Social Worker by profession and I can be utilized to provide a range of services to the school community. A benefit with having a parent involved is their existing relationship with the school along with their knowledge of the community, and their vested interest of the best possible outcome for the children, the school, and neighborhood.
There are times when parents are regarded as an after-thought and advisors. Ultimately, the successful outcome of the school is comprised of the necessary ingredient which is parent engagement. But, parents as decision makers goes beyond the realm of engagement to the extent of involvement in every aspect of the school’s functioning. Recently, there was reporting of lead levels above the EPA threshold in Newark, NJ public schools. Although this was an ongoing problem for some years and known to Newark Public School officials, this information wasn’t disclosed to the parents or the community. It is important for parents to be provided with the necessary information so they can determine how to proceed with it. Also, their inclusion recognizes the link between the overall success of the school and the progressive development of the community. When all of us embrace the inclusion of the children’s first teachers in the process of academic development, we will understand the essential impact of parents as decision-makers.
By Viva White
Source
Can We Head Off a Long Hot Summer of Riots and Rebellion?
Huffington Post - 05.27.2015 - The nation's attention has been focused on the recent riots in Baltimore, but the harsh...
Huffington Post - 05.27.2015 - The nation's attention has been focused on the recent riots in Baltimore, but the harsh truth is that they could have happened in any major city. Indeed, we could see a long hot summer of urban (and, as in places like Ferguson, suburban) riots that would make the two-day disturbances in Baltimore seem trivial in comparison.
We can surely expect more turmoil next year, too, if social and economic conditions continue to deteriorate, and if candidates for president and Congress fail to make specific suggestions for addressing the suffering and hardship facing the nation.
But promises can only quell riots for so long. Hope soon turns to frustration, and then anger, unless there's real action to change conditions.
The turmoil in Baltimore followed the trajectory of the urban riots of the 1960s (in Detroit, Newark, Los Angeles, and 161 other cities) and subsequent civil disorders in Miami (1980), Los Angeles (1992) and elsewhere. It typically begins with an incident of police abuse against an African-American resident. Outraged members of the black community organize nonviolent protests, the police over-react and the protests become violent and threatening.
In Baltimore, the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old unarmed black man, at the hands of the police, triggered the demonstrations, but the city was already a powder keg of economic and racial grievances. The same is true in cities across America.
Fixing racist police practices and bias in our criminal justice system is important. But the underlying cause of riots is the hopelessness that comes with persistent poverty, unemployment, slum housing, widespread sickness, underfunded schools and lack of opportunity to escape such intolerable conditions.
Since Baltimore exploded, many pundits have taken to quoting Martin Luther King, who once said that "a riot is the language of the unheard." But few pundits have discovered another one of King's profound insights: "There is no noise as powerful as the sound of the marching feet of a determined people."
Riots are not truly political protests. They are expressions of hot anger -- outrage about social conditions. They do not have a clear objective, a policy agenda or a strategy for bringing about change. They are a wake-up call to those in power.
In contrast, social movements reflect cold anger. They are intentional and strategic. They take place when people are hopeful -- when people believe not only that things should be different, but also that they can be different.
Riots tell us what desperate people are against. Social movements tell us what hopeful people are for.
To avoid a long hot summer this year and in the future, but also to address the underlying causes and tensions in our communities, we need to do two things. First, strengthen and invest in the social movements -- grassroots organizing and coalition building -- that have emerged in cities across the country. Second, engage the country in a policy conversation about full employment, and then take action to guarantee every American a good job.
Invest in Grassroots Organizing and Coalition Building
Visiting the U.S. in the 1830s, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, was impressed by the outpouring of local voluntary organizations that brought Americans together to solve problems, provide a sense of community and public purpose, and tame the hyper-individualism that he considered a threat to democracy.
Every fight for social reform since then -- from the abolition movement to the labor movement's fight against sweatshops in the early 1900s, to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, to the environmental and women's movements of the past half century -- has reflected elements of the self-help spirit that Tocqueville observed.
America's struggling families -- including the residents of poor communities, like inner city Baltimore -- need stronger vehicles to gain a voice in their cities and the larger society. This is the most effective alternative to riots.
Studies show that voluntary associations and interest groups today are titled toward affluent Americans. As political scientist Martin Gilens demonstrates in Affluence and Influence, America's policymakers respond almost exclusively to the policy preferences of the economically advantaged. But under specific circumstances -- especially during impending elections, and when ordinary Americans are well-organized -- the preferences of the middle class and the poor do matter.
Around the country, there are thousands of local nonprofit community groups that organize and mobilize people around their everyday concerns -- from the lack of stop signs at dangerous intersections, to police misconduct and racial profiling, to the proliferation of killings by people with assault weapons, to environmental and health hazards in poor communities, to predatory bank lending and the epidemic of foreclosures, to the repression of basic voting rights, to inadequate funding for public schools, to the shortage of decent affordable housing, to the lack of jobs and decent pay.
Groups such as the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and the fledgling Black Lives Matter movement (created in 2012 after Trayvon Martin's murder in Florida) channel people's anger into constructive action around specific policy demands. Some of these groups are part of regional and national advocacy networks, such as the Center for Community Change, National People's Action, the Partnership for Working Families, US Action, PICO, the Industrial Areas Foundation and the Center for Popular Democracy.
Most of these organizations, however, operate on shoe-string budgets. In addition to dues and bake sales, they rely on private foundations to help them hire staff, maintain an office, conduct research and, occasionally, engage a lawyer. Their funding for organizing, research, publicity, policy advocacy and other tasks is minuscule when compared with big corporations that have armies of high-paid lobbyists, donate billions in campaign contributions and have huge war chests devoted to public relations and propaganda.
Despite a playing field that is tilted heavily in favor of big business and wealthy people, grassroots organizing groups and advocacy networks have won some significant victories at the local, state and federal levels.
A growing number of cities, including Seattle and Los Angeles, have adopted municipal wages that will reach $15 an hour within a few years. In response to pressure from community groups and its own employees, Walmart -- the nation's largest private employer with 1.3 million workers -- earlier this year, announced that it would boost pay for its lowest-level workers to at least $9 an hour starting this spring, and raise that to $10 next year. Walmart estimated that about 500,000 employees will receive a raise, totaling roughly $1 billion a year. In April, McDonald's announced its own wage increases -- also in response to protests by employees and community groups, as well as support from elected officials. The company said that, beginning July 1 of this year, starting wages at company-owned McDonald's would be one dollar over the locally mandated minimum wage. Last year, minimum wage increases passed by wide margins in five states, including decidedly red states like Arkansas, Alaska, South Dakota and Nebraska. Paid sick time passed by a wide margin in Massachusetts and in three cities. New York is moving rapidly toward high quality, free, full-day pre-kindergarten educational options for every family -- every child, rich, middle and poor. In California, there are significant efforts to curb carbon emissions and explicitly link those efforts to job creation and investment in low-income communities. The criminal justice reform movement has secured breakthroughs on "ban the box" that open up employment opportunities for the formerly incarcerated The immigrant rights movement has successfully pushed 20 states to authorize in-state college tuition for undocumented students The Black Lives Matter movement is connecting criminal justice and police reform to the "Fight for $15" among low-wage workers of color.These and other movements represent a powerful convergence of constituencies and social forces with the potential to reshape the national agenda. But to be effective, they need more resources to hire staff, reach more people in their communities and workplaces, and get their voices heard in the corridors of power.
America's foundations -- which are funded by wealthy people and corporations that get generous tax breaks for their philanthropic giving -- donate about $55 billion a year to a wide variety of causes. They devote less than to 10 percent of that amount to groups engaged in organizing and advocacy for social justice.
Perhaps not surprisingly, most foundations allocate the vast bulk of their donations to institutions (such as elite colleges and universities, hospitals, museums and others arts organizations) that primarily serve the affluent. It is time for these tax-exempt foundations to invest in organizations that promote grassroots organizing and help give working families and the poor a stronger voice in our democracy.
Inequality, Poverty, Joblessness and Economic Insecurity
Ironically, while most of the media were focusing on the Baltimore riots, it was John Angelos, the Baltimore Orioles's chief operating officer, who seized the opportunity to redirected attention to the root causes of the city's turmoil. He tweeted:
My greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night's property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American's civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.
The shape of the current crisis is by now very familiar. The harsh reality is that no other wealthy nation allows the level of sheer destitution and misery found in the United States, including poverty, hunger, slums, homelessness and ill-health.
About 50 million Americans live below the official poverty line. One-third of the country-- over 100 million people-- cannot make ends meet. They don't earn enough to sustain their families. One in three American households say they are living paycheck to paycheck, continuously on the brink of financial disaster. A staggering 36 percent say that they or someone else in their household had to reduce meals or cut back on food to save money during the past year.
Because incomes and wages have declined, a record number of Americans are in debt. They mortgage their future to pay for their homes, a college education, and, with credit cards, day-to-day expenses
Some $7 trillion of Americans' household wealth evaporated in the housing crash that began in 2007. The burden has fallen disproportionately on African American and Latino families, who saw more than half of their total wealth disappear as a result of Wall Street's risky and reckless practices.
The current official unemployment rate is 5.4 percent, but it varies considerably by race. It is 4.7 percent for whites compared with 6.9 percent for Hispanics, and 9.6 percent for African-Americans. But several years into the so-called "recovery," the real unemployment rate -- which also includes discouraged workers who've given up trying to find a job and those who are employed part time but not able to secure full-time work -- is double the official rate.
Almost one-third of America's jobless have been out of work for 27 weeks or more. Among those lucky enough to have jobs, women earn only 78 percent of what men make. African American women make 64 percent and Hispanic women 54 percent of men's earnings.
The United States is the most unequal of the world's wealthiest societies. The richest one percent of all Americans take home approximately 20 percent of the country's total income and owns 40 percent of the nation's wealth. Since 1979, wages for the richest one percent have increased by 138 percent; in contrast, wages for the bottom 90 percent have increased just 15 percent. In the last few years, as the country has struggled to recover from the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, this top tier has received nearly all of the added income generated from economic growth.
A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that the $26.7 billion in bonuses handed to 165,200 executives by Wall Street banks in 2013 would be enough to more than double the pay for all 1,085,000 Americans who work full time at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25-per-hour.
The low wages paid by many employers cost taxpayers about $153 billion each year by forcing employees to rely on public assistance to afford food, healthcare and other basic necessities, according to a recent study conducted by the University of California's Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. This is more than the annual budgets of the U.S. Department of Education and Health and Human Services combined.
A Policy Agenda for Good Jobs and Shared Prosperity
Fortunately, this situation can be fixed. In previous periods of American history when we faced an economic and moral crisis -- the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, the Depression of the 1930s, and the explosive racial divide of the 1960s -- reform movements mobilized new constituencies to promote bold solutions that changed public opinion and pushed elected officials to adopt new policies. Ideas that were once considered radical -- the minimum wage, Social Security, women's suffrage, the Voting Rights Act, consumer and environment protection laws and many others -- became viewed as common sense.
In response to our current crisis, a new wave of advocacy groups and policy experts has emerged to put new ideas on the table.
With the support of local advocacy groups, a growing wave of progressive mayors and other local officials in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Newark, Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles and elsewhere have sought to address the widening economic divide and persistent poverty in order to build an economy that works for all families. The growing number of cities with municipal minimum wage laws is only one aspects of this crescendo of conscience in favor of shared prosperity.
Think tanks like the Center for American Progress, the Roosevelt Institute, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and the Economic Policy Institute have released reports that provide bold prescriptions to the problems of inequality, poverty and joblessness.
A growing number of enlightened business leaders now recognize that we need policies that invest in good jobs, rather than our current short-term focus on enriching the already rich, especially those in the financial sector that caused the economic crash in the first place. Many now recognize that we cannot put most of our hopes simply in improving skills and education. Over the past generation, overall skills and educational levels have increased, but wages (even for those with college degrees) have stagnated.
Earlier this month, in the wake of the Baltimore uprising, and in anticipation of the next election cycle, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz released a 115-page report, Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy, that offered proposals to address income inequality and poverty. The "trickle-down" economics that has prevailed since 1980 has "decimated America's middle class," according to the report. "It's time to try something new," Stiglitz said, taking aim at excessive executive compensation, declining wages and labor standards, weak regulation of the financial industry and generous tax rates for the wealthy. They also called for universal pre-kindergarten, a federal paid family leave policy and a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage.
Also, last month, a coalition of advocacy groups -- including the Center for Community Change, Center for Popular Democracy, Jobs With Justice, Working Families Organization and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights -- launched a national campaign to advance the idea that every American should and can have access to a good job. Their plan, called Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All, is both audacious and simple: Everyone who wants a job should have assured access to a good job that provides dignity, a voice on the job, fair wages and good benefits.
A good job means one that pays enough to allow a family to buy or rent a decent home, put food on the table and clothes on their backs, afford health insurance and child care, send the kids to college, take a yearly vacation and retire with dignity. A good job means that parents don't have to juggle two or three jobs to stay afloat, and that they still have time to spend with their kids.
As a society, we have to make sure that people who work can support their families and assure that everyone can retire in dignity.
During this election cycle, and over the next few years, this coalition of conscience hopes to inject the goal of a good job for all into the political debate and the national conversation. It is proposing solutions commensurate with the scale of the challenge -- rather than tinkering at the margins. The Putting Families First agenda has five key elements:
Guaranteeing Good Wages and Benefits. Requiring every job in the United States to meet a minimum standard of quality -- in wages, benefits, and working conditions -- and offer unhindered access to collective representation and a real voice for workers. Unlocking Opportunity in the Poorest Communities. Investing resources on a large scale to restart the economy in places where racial bias and sustained disinvestment have produced communities of concentrated poverty. Taxing concentrated wealth. Funding new investments in job creation, care, and economic renewal by taxing those who benefit most from the current economic model - investors, financiers, wealth managers, and individuals in the highest income brackets. Building a Clean Energy Economy. Using the large-scale investments required for transition to a clean energy future to create millions of good jobs that are accessible to all Americans, especially those hardest hit by hard times -- workers of color, women, and economically distressed communities. Valuing Families. Ending the systematic devaluation of care work, which disproportionately keeps women in poverty, by making high quality child care available to all working parents, raising the quality of jobs in the early childhood education and care fields, transforming homecare and providing financial support to unpaid caregivers.These are not pie-in-the-sky ideas. Many of them have already been adopted in cities and states, such as municipal minimum wage laws, paid family leave policies, green jobs ordinances, and state laws to improve conditions for nannies, maids, and other domestic workers. In many other countries, including the social democracies of Europe, Australia and Canada, most of these ideas are taken for granted.
It may appear paradoxical to propose a bold agenda for change at a time when Congress is paralyzed and the immediate prospect of bold federal action appears dim. But the moment is ripe. America seems to be holding its breath, trying to decide what kind of country it wants to be. We seem to be at one of those crossroad moments when attitudes are rapidly shifting, and significant reform is possible.
Americans are upset with widening inequality, the political influence of big business and declining living standards. Public opinion is generally favorable toward greater government activism to address poverty, inequality and opportunity. A national survey by the Pew Research Center last year found that 60 percent of Americans -- including 75 percent of Democrats, 60 percent of independents, and even 42 percent of Republicans -- think that the economic system unfairly favors the wealthy. The poll discovered that 69 percent of Americans believe that the government should do "a lot" or "some" to reduce the gap between the rich and everyone else. Nearly all Democrats (93 percent) and large majorities of independents (83 percent) and Republicans (64 percent) said they favor government action to reduce poverty.
Over half (54 percent) of Americans support raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations in order to expand programs for the poor, compared with one third (35 percent) who believe that lowering taxes on the wealthy to encourage investment and economic growth would be the more effective approach. A new national poll found that 63 percent of Americans support raising the federal wage threshold to that level. These are clear signs of a tectonic shift in our national thinking. But public opinion, on its own, doesn't translate into public policy. It has to be mobilized. As Cong. Keith Ellison of Minnesota has said: "Being right is not enough! We've got to organize."
The coalition behind the Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All plan intends to engage millions of Americans in multiple layers of civic action -- organizing, demonstrating, voting and advocating for legislation. They also want to encourage opinion leaders -- faith leaders, enlightened businesspersons, academics and policy analysts, columnists and editorial writers, and others -- to participate in a broad and deep national conversation about shifting our country's priorities toward full employment, clean energy and the other components of their agenda.
No time is better to do this than during a national election season, when the country is focusing on what candidates for president and Congress have to say about America's problems and potential.
If the voices and concerns of ordinary Americans aren't at the center of this debate, we can expect the ticking time bomb of urban unrest to explode in more and more communities. Without major reforms, the recent upheavals in Ferguson and Baltimore may simply be a precursor to a wave of 21st century riots.
To avoid more turmoil in our streets, and to address the growing frustration of a large segment of our society, we must focus the nation's attention on bold policy prescriptions to address the roots causes of poverty, inequality, joblessness and economic insecurity.
This isn't just an insurance policy against future riots. It is also a blueprint for a more livable, prosperous, and healthier society.
Source: Huffington Post
Activists Protest Universities Over Investments In Puerto Rico Bondholders
Activists Protest Universities Over Investments In Puerto Rico Bondholders
A coalition of social and economic justice groups has launched a one-week campaign to end what they view as problematic...
A coalition of social and economic justice groups has launched a one-week campaign to end what they view as problematic university investments. The New York-based Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) and partner organizations including three Make the Road branches will hold six protests along the East Coast, calling on Columbia, Harvard and Yale to pull their investments out of hedge funds that hold Puerto Rican debt and have advocated austerity measures in the U.S. territory, leading to mass school closings and higher tuition costs.
Read the full article here.
Data on immigrants won't be safe from Trump, unless the data doesn't exist
Data on immigrants won't be safe from Trump, unless the data doesn't exist
When New York City implemented its IDNYC municipal ID system, it was meant to give undocumented immigrants a way to...
When New York City implemented its IDNYC municipal ID system, it was meant to give undocumented immigrants a way to access crucial services that require government identification. But as Donald Trump’s inauguration looms, a new lawsuit will test the wisdom of keeping sensitive data for the program.
A NEW LAWSUIT WILL TEST THE WISDOM OF HOLDING THE DATA
Two Republican state assembly members have sued to stop the destruction of records on hundreds of thousands of cardholders, and a court has decided that the records must remain, pending a hearing later this month. Soon after, Trump will take office, as advocates worry whether he’ll target the information to identify undocumented immigrants.
There is no guarantee the lawsuit will succeed, or that Trump will be able to use the records — which contain information on many people besides immigrants — for deportation purposes. But what looked like a clever bureaucratic gambit is unexpectedly something very different, and to immigrants, possibly more dangerous.
When it designed the IDNYC program, New York retained information on cardholders, but with a caveat: at the end of this year, the city would have the power to change how it holds the data. In an act of partisan gamesmanship, the clause in the local law amounted to a kill switch — one that was put in place, as one Councilman almost presciently put it, “in case a Tea Party Republican comes into office.”
THE CLEVER GAMBIT SUDDENLY LOOKS VERY DIFFERENT
The suit filed this week rests on New York’s state transparency law, known as the Freedom of Information Law, or FOIL. According to the suit, since there are no provisions in the law that allow for the destruction of government records, the city would be overstepping its bounds by destroying the IDNYC data, especially based on who is in office.
The dispute isn’t without precedent. In New Haven, Connecticut, a similar legal battle unfolded over the city’s municipal ID program. There, an anti-immigration group also sued the city under the state’s freedom of information law, with plans to turn the information over to ICE. In that case, the city beat back the lawsuit, but that won’t ensure the same outcome in New York.
“The city is violating state law,” Nicole Malliotakis, one of the Assembly members involved in the suit, told The Verge. “They are not doing what’s in the best interest of the citizens that they are representing.”
In many ways, the database debate parallels other stories of unintended consequences unfolding as the government prepares to transition from Obama to Trump. How will Trump use the surveillance apparatus created by Obama? What does this mean for the undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children, who are staying through an Obama executive order?
THE DATABASE DEBATE PARALLELS STORIES UNFOLDING ACROSS GOVERNMENT
As the Center for Popular Democracy, which advocates for immigrants’ rights, pointed out in a report last year, there are two generally accepted ways to safeguard sensitive data: explicitly prevent its release in the legislation, or never provide the data in the first place. Cities have already proven that not retaining underlying personal information is viable — San Francisco operates a program without using underlying application documents, for one example.
Win or lose, if there’s any lesson for privacy advocates and local governments to carry from the unexpected battle over its data, it may be that even planned self-destruction is no impenetrable barrier against misuse. The best way to keep sensitive data private may still be to never hold the data at all.
By Colin Lecher
Source
Starbucks Employees Treated Badly
While Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) CEO and founder Howard Schultz barnstorms America with one new program to help...
While Starbucks Corp. (NASDAQ: SBUX) CEO and founder Howard Schultz barnstorms America with one new program to help Americans after another, a new report shows his company continues to treat many of its employees badly.
According to research released by experts at the Center for Popular Democracy:
A 2015 nationwide survey of Starbucks workers reveals that the company is not living up to its commitment to provide predictable, sustainable schedules to its workforce. Starbucks’ frontline employees bear the brunt of the management imperative to minimize store labor costs, which takes precedence over attempts to stabilize work hours, provide healthy schedules, and to ensure employees have real input into their working conditions.
Also:
Many Starbucks scheduling policies fail to reflect the company’s human-focused values, while other policies designed to promote sustainable schedules have been implemented inconsistently.
According to a recent report from 24/7 Wall St. titled Companies Paying Americans the Least:
Coffee giant Starbucks employs roughly 141,000 people in the United States at more than 7,300 locations. Because the coffee chain offers some benefits not commonly offered in low-paying jobs, it has long been considered the ideal job for young students supporting themselves or even single parents. However, an increasing number of reports suggest the famous Seattle company makes life difficult for its employees. Of particular note is the company’s increasing use of complicated and inconsistent scheduling, a practice also used by many other major retailers. This practice means that baristas’ hours may be posted with little notice, preventing them from making other plans, and therefore nearly denying them the ability to earn extra income from other sources.
The work hours, benefit problems and low pay challenges face many employees at large food chains and major retailers, but none of those places has a chief executive who publicly advocates the right of many of America’s most economically challenged people. Among the most recent was Schultz’s effort to support hiring the underprivileged in Phoenix:
“Chicago marked an important milestone in our efforts to put America’s underserved youth on a pathway to employment,” said Howard Schultz, chairman and chief executive officer of Starbucks and co-founder of the Schultz Family Foundation. “As we look ahead to Phoenix, where one in five youth is not in school or employed, we have a critical opportunity to accelerate our collective hiring efforts and create meaningful lifelong opportunities for all. I truly believe that these young men and women represent the most significant untapped source of productivity and talent for our economy, and America’s leading companies are ready to hire them.”
If one of these young people gets a job at Starbucks, the “meaningful lifelong opportunities” may not be much of an opportunity at all.
Source: 247WallSt.com
Snowy Protest at Philly Fed
The Inquirer - March 5, 2015, by Joseph DiStefano - Ten cold protesters from a national group called Fed Up gathered at...
The Inquirer - March 5, 2015, by Joseph DiStefano - Ten cold protesters from a national group called Fed Up gathered at the Federal Reserve of Philadelphia in the storm this afternoon to urge the Fed to pay more attention to boosting employment and listening to groups representing wage workers and poor people.
The group, which includes labor union and church groups as well as local affilates such as North Philadelphia-based Action United, says its national leaders met with Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen in Washington last year, but they have had a tough time getting Fed officials who oversee regional banks and regulatory teams, such as Charles Plosser, the free-market economist who retired in January as the Philly Fed President, to take them seriously. Other Fed Up affilates held protests in New York, Charlotte, St. Louis, and other Fed cities today. More are planned, said Shawn Sebastian of the liberal, Brooklyn-based Center for Popular Democracy, one of the groups supporting Fed Up.
"Plosser never gave us a meeting," said Action United leader Kendra Brooks, who said she's been organziing poor people to press for improved government job, education and housing programs since she was laid off from her management job at an Easter Seals affiliate in 2012. Herb Taylor, a veteran community-development manager for the Philly Fed, and other local Fed officials did meet with a Fed Up delegation last fall, and Philly Fed leaders have also held meetings with labor unions and community groups, Fed spokesman Jim Ely reminded the group.
"But they gave us crumbs," said Brooks, noting that labor and community-group leaders were not part of the inner circle who selected Plosser's replacement, University of Delaware President Patrick Harker, a Philly Fed board member who will take the top Philly Fed job in July.
Under Ed Boehne, Philadelphia Fed President from the 1970s into the 1990s, the Philly Fed forced banks to expand their inner-city direct-lending programs and ensured labor representation on the Fed board.
Brooks questioned whether Boehne's successors share that committment to listening to and serving all sectors. She said corporate executives like Comcast chief financial officer Michael Angelakis and investor James Nevels, who led the committee that chose Harker, don't represent a wide range of residents of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve district, which covers eastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey and Delaware.
"Comcast does not represent our community, the universities do not represent the community. We need our voices to be heard, also," she said.
Group leaders said they are frustrated the Fed has not pushed banks to be more flexible in setting payment terms for stressed homeowners, or show the forebearance banks often show to troubled corporate borrowers.
Action United member Lionel Rice said he's running out of time. He said he hadn't been able to find a job paying more than fast-food wages since he was laid off after 20 years at the Penn Maid dairy plant in Northeast Philadelphia three years ago. He said a housing finance agency is preparing to foreclose on his home in Olney.
Ely said he would bring the group's petition to Fed officials' attention.
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Commentary: Emeryville action could change working world
Commentary: Emeryville action could change working world
Like many people, when the alarm goes off, I hit snooze a few times and wish for more sleep. But what gets me out of...
Like many people, when the alarm goes off, I hit snooze a few times and wish for more sleep. But what gets me out of bed is that precious hour I have with my young son. We eat breakfast together, we race to see who can get dressed first, and then I walk him to school.
I’m lucky– as a salaried employee at an organization that values flexibility and family, I can arrange my schedule around my son if need be. But for people working low-wage hourly jobs, that kind of control over their scheduling is virtually unheard of.
Today, corporations that pay low wages rarely provide their employees with full-time work or reliable hours. Take Manuel, who works at one of Emeryville’s many retail chains. He had his hours cut from 20 a week down to four, and then nothing for two weeks — throwing his family into massive debt.
Emeryville may be the first city in the East Bay to change that, where the City Council is voting on a Fair Workweek policy on Oct. 18. This is part of a simple set of standards needed to ensure that working people can afford to stay in the East Bay region.
What is a Fair Workweek? It means employers must provide reliable, predictable hours so their employees can budget. Workers get schedules two weeks in advance so they can plan childcare, second jobs, family time, and even rest. And when more hours are available, current employees get priority so they can get closer to full-time work.
In Emeryville, the policy would only apply to large companies with more than 12 locations worldwide. These simple improvements would cost employers almost nothing if they follow the law and have a huge impact on the lives of thousands of Emeryville workers. Hundreds of thousands more working people would benefit if other East Bay cities follow suit.
Emeryville’s own Economic Development Advisory Committee – the city’s business advisory group – said even they agree that increasing stability of schedules, reducing employee turnover, and decreasing underemployment in Emeryville is important. And that’s what a Fair Workweek policy would do.
Many companies are already doing the right thing. This policy would reinforce that good behavior and target companies that are bad actors. However, global, multi-billion dollar corporations and their lobbyists are coming out against this low-cost policy, claiming it will kill the economic climate. But I wonder: how exactly would reliable schedules hurt companies like IKEA, The Gap or Home Depot?
Before the recession, big business painted doomsday scenarios saying that raising wages would force them to close shop. During the Great Recession, working people bore the brunt of tough times in the form of reduced pay, slashed benefits, and a cutback to part-time hours. And now that big business has not only recovered but is booming, companies are back to the mantra that improving standards for their workers will hurt them.
Common sense tells us that business — especially big business — is doing fine. Look at quarterly earning reports of Emeryville’s global retail chains. Sales tax revenue in Emeryville was up 2.4 percent in 2015 compared to the previous year according to the city’s Finance Department. Retail vacancies in the region are at a post-recession low of 6 percent. And of course, there are growing lines of cars and customers coming in and out of Emeryville’s shopping centers.
While business is thriving, working people have waited long enough for something so very basic: a single job that pays enough with enough hours to allow folks to meet their basic needs.
Raising the minimum wage helped struggling workers. Now we must finish the job by providing reliable, predictable hours. This economic boom shouldn’t just be a boon for shareholders. It should also lift the working people who are the backbone of our economy.
By Jennifer Lin
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A Push to Give Steadier Shifts to Part-Timers
New York Times - July 15, 2014, by Steve Greenhouse - As more workers find their lives upended and their paychecks...
New York Times - July 15, 2014, by Steve Greenhouse - As more workers find their lives upended and their paychecks reduced by ever-changing, on-call schedules, government officials are trying to put limits on the harshest of those scheduling practices.
The actions reflect a growing national movement — fueled by women’s and labor groups — to curb practices that affect millions of families, like assigning just one or two days of work a week or requiring employees to work unpredictable hours that wreak havoc with everyday routines like college and child care.
The recent, rapid spread of on-call employment to retail and other sectors has prompted proposals that would require companies to pay employees extra for on-call work and to give two weeks’ notice of a work schedule.
Vermont and San Francisco have adopted laws giving workers the right to request flexible or predictable schedules to make it easier to take care of children or aging parents. Scott M. Stringer, the New York City comptroller, is pressing the City Council to take up such legislation. And last month, President Obama ordered federal agencies to give the “right to request” to two million federal workers.
The new laws and proposals generally require an employer to discuss a new employee’s situation and to consider scheduling requests, but they do not require companies to accommodate individual schedules. Many businesses have opposed these measures, arguing that they represent improper government intrusion into private operations.
In a referendum last year, voters in SeaTac, Wash. — the community near Seattle that also passed the nation’s highest minimum wage, $15 an hour for some workers — approved a measure that bars employers from hiring additional part-time workers if any of their existing part-timers want more hours. The move was a response to complaints from workers that they were not scheduled for enough hours to support their families. Some San Francisco lawmakers are seeking to enact a similar regulation.
Representative George Miller of California, the senior Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, plans to introduce legislation this summer that would require companies to pay their employees for an extra hour if they were summoned to work with less than 24 hours’ notice. He is also proposing a guarantee of four hours’ pay on days when employees are sent home after just a few hours — something that happens in many restaurants and retailers when customer traffic is slow.
That happened to Mary Coleman. After an hourlong bus commute, she arrived at her job at a Popeyes in Milwaukee only to have her boss order her to go home without clocking in — even though she was scheduled to work. She was not paid for the day.
“It’s becoming more and more common to put employees in a very uncertain and tenuous position with respect to their schedules, and that ricochets if workers have families or other commitments,” Mr. Miller said. “The employer community always says it abhors uncertainty and unpredictability, but they are creating an employment situation that has huge uncertainty and unpredictability for millions of Americans.”
While Mr. Miller acknowledges that his bill is unlikely to be enacted anytime soon — partly because of opposition from business (and a Republican-controlled House), he said the bill would bring attention to what he called often callous scheduling practices. His bill, similar to one in the Senate sponsored by Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, has a “right to request” provision that would bar employers from denying requests from workers with caregiving or school-related conflicts unless they had a “bona fide” business reason.
Corporate groups protest that such measures undercut efficiency and profits. “The hyper-regulation of the workplace by government isn’t conducive to a positive business climate,” said Scott DeFife, an executive vice president of the National Restaurant Association. “The more complications that government creates for operating a business, the less likely we’ll see a positive business environment that’s good for the economy and increasing jobs.”
Mr. DeFife pointed out that the daily ebb and flow of customers necessitated flexibility in scheduling.
David French, a senior vice president of the National Retail Federation, said many people chose careers in retail because of the flexible work hours.
“These proposals may sound reasonable, but if you unpack them, they could be very harmful,” Mr. French said. “Where employers and employees now work together to solve scheduling problems, you’ll have a very bureaucratic environment where rigid rules would be introduced.”
While many of these workers are not unionized, the labor movement has often battled against part-time work and ever-changing schedules. But as unions have grown weaker, employers have felt freer to employ part-timers and use more volatile scheduling. Unions still push for workers to get more hours — and those pressures are one reason Macy’s and Walmart have adopted programs letting employees claim additional, available shifts by going onto their employers’ websites.
In a climate where many retailers, restaurants and other businesses are still struggling after the recession, economists point to the increased uncertainty faced by employees. About 27.4 million Americans work part time. The number of those part-timers who would prefer to work full time has nearly doubled since 2007, to 7.5 million. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, 47 percent of part-time hourly workers ages 26 to 32 receive a week or less of advance notice for their schedule.
In a study of the data, two University of Chicago professors found that employers dictated the work schedules for about half of young adults, without their input. For part-time workers, schedules on average fluctuated from 17 to 28 hours a week.
“Frontline managers face pressure to keep costs down, but they really don’t have much control over wages or benefits,” said Susan J. Lambert, a University of Chicago professor who interpreted the data. “What they have control over is employee hours.”
Ms. Lambert said flexible, not rigid or unpredictable, hours would become as important an issue as paid family leave. “The issue of scheduling is going to be the next big effort on improving labor standards,” she said. “To reduce unpredictability is important to keep women engaged in the labor force.”
David Chiu, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, has created a business-labor group that is trying to find the middle ground.
“We’ve learned that predictability in hours is important not just to help workers juggle their lives, but for economic security — to help workers take a second job to live in expensive cities like San Francisco or New York,” Mr. Chiu said. “We’re confident that we can move forward with policies that work for workers as well as business’s bottom line.”
Sharlene Santos says her part-time schedule at a Zara clothing store in Manhattan — ranging from 16 to 24 hours a week — is not enough. “Making $220 a week, that’s not enough to live on — it’s not realistic,” she said.
After Ms. Santos and four other Zara workers recently wrote to the company, protesting that they were given too few hours and received just two days’ notice for their schedule, the company promised to start giving them two weeks’ advance notice.
Fatimah Muhammad said that at the Joe Fresh clothing store where she works in Manhattan, some weeks she was scheduled to work just one day but was on call for four days — meaning she had to call the store each morning to see whether it needed her to work that day.
“I felt kind of stuck. I couldn’t make plans,” said Ms. Muhammad, who said she was now assigned 25 hours a week.
A national campaign — the Fair Workweek Initiative — is pushing for legislation to restrict these practices in places including Milwaukee, New York and Santa Clara, Calif. The effort includes the National Women’s Law Center, the United Food and Commercial Workers union and the Retail Action Project, a New York workers’ group.
“Too many workers are working either too many or too few hours in an economy that expects us to be available 24/7,” said Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative and an organizer at the Center for Popular Democracy, a national advocacy group. “It’s gotten to the point where workers, especially women workers, are saying, ‘We need a voice in how much and when we work.' ”
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