Time for an accountable Fed
Time for an accountable Fed
Andrew Levin, professor at Dartmouth College and former special adviser to former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke...
Andrew Levin, professor at Dartmouth College and former special adviser to former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke and then-Vice Chair Janet Yellen, released a proposal for reform of the Federal Reserve Board's governing structure in a press call sponsored by the Fed Up campaign. The proposal has a number of important features, but the main point is to make the Fed more accountable to democratically elected officials and to reduce the power of the banking industry in monetary policy.
Under its current structure, the banks largely control the 12 Federal Reserve district banks. This matters because the presidents of these banks are part of the Federal Reserve Board's Open Market Committee (FOMC) which determines monetary policy. At any point in time, five of 12 district bank presidents will be voting members of the FOMC, but all 12 take part in the discussion. The voting presidents will typically be outnumbered by the seven Federal Reserve Board governors, who are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate, although there have been just five sitting governors for the last two years, as the Senate has refused to consider President Obama's nominees.
There is no obvious reason why the banking industry should have special input into the country's monetary policy. This would be comparable to reserving seats on the Federal Communications Commission's board for the cable television industry. While there is no way to prevent an industry group from trying to influence a government regulatory body, in all other cases, they at least must do so from the outside. It is only the Fed where we allow the most directly affected industry group to actually have a direct voice in the policies determined by its regulatory agency.
This is an especially important issue because the Fed's policies are so central to the health of the economy. If the Fed's fears over inflation lead it to raise interest rates to slow the economy and reduce the rate of job creation, there is little that Congress will be able to do to counteract the Fed's actions. For example, if the Fed wants to prevent the unemployment rate from getting below 4.5 percent unemployment, there will be little that Congress and the president can do to get unemployment lower. In that case, the Fed may have needlessly be keeping millions of people out work — disproportionately affecting minorities and less-educated workers — because of a possibly mistaken view of the economy's limits. Furthermore, by deliberately weakening the labor market, the Fed will be keeping tens of millions of workers from having the bargaining power they need to secure wage gains.
While governors who are appointed by democratically elected officials are likely to recognize the importance of reducing unemployment and balance it against the risk of inflation, the district bank presidents are likely to be less concerned about unemployment. It is worth noting that all the dissenting votes calling for more a hawkish stance since the start of the Great Recession have been cast by bank presidents. It is likely that the need to maintain the support of the bank presidents on the FOMC has prevented the Fed from being more aggressive in trying to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment.
It would be good to see the presidential candidates address the proposal put forward by Levin and the Fed Up campaign. There are very few areas of government that are more important in people's daily lives than the Fed's monetary policy. It literally determines how many people will hold jobs and has a huge effect on workers' wages.
While it would not be appropriate for the president or other politicians to try to micromanage monetary policy, they certainly should be setting its general course. This is analogous to the relationship with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). No one expects Congress or the president to decide which drugs get approved; however, if the FDA were to allow two years to pass in which it approved no new drugs, it would be entirely appropriate for Congress and the president to question its conduct. The same would apply if the FDA were found to regularly approve drugs that turned out to be harmful.
In the case of the Fed, it is appropriate for the presidential candidates to be telling voters what sort of people they would appoint to the Fed. It is also appropriate for them to comment on its governance structure, which can only be changed by an Act of Congress, which would have to be signed by the president.
Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
By Dean Baker, contributor
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Man with ALS confronts Flake on plane over tax bill vote
Man with ALS confronts Flake on plane over tax bill vote
A progressive activist who identified himself as diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) confronted Sen. Jeff Flake (...
A progressive activist who identified himself as diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease (ALS) confronted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) on an airplane this week over Flake's vote on the GOP tax-reform bill.
Activist Ady Barkan, a staffer at the Center for Popular Democracy, questioned Flake on Thursday after the Arizona Republican voted in favor of the GOP tax-reform bill that passed the Senate in a late-night session last week. Videos of the 11-minute conversation were posted on Twitter.
Read the full article here.
Five takeaways from Colorado's campaign finance reports
Five takeaways from Colorado's campaign finance reports
KUSA - Candidates and campaigns had to file their latest round of finance reports to the Secretary of State’s office...
KUSA - Candidates and campaigns had to file their latest round of finance reports to the Secretary of State’s office Monday.
Here’s what we learned from reading those reports.
1) Tobacco companies have deep pockets.
The No Blank Checks in the Constitution committee has raised about $5 million to keep the tobacco tax in Amendment 72 from passing.
That’s more money than any other campaign has raised so far this cycle, and it all comes from one source: Altria Client Services.
The company is a subsidiary of Altria (formerly Phillip Morris) -- one of the world’s largest tobacco companies.
2) ColoradoCareYES is struggling.
The group pushing universal health care through Amendment 69 raised just $10,000 during the last filing period.
That brings their total to about $320,000. In contrast, Coloradans for Coloradans, has raised nearly $4 million this cycle.
In addition to its fundraising woes, the campaign has also suffered from some surprising opposition. Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper and Sen. Michael Bennet both oppose the amendment. And so does the liberal group Progress Now.
3) Most of the minimum wage money is coming from out of state.
The group Colorado Families for a Fair Wage wants you to vote to raise the state’s minimum wage to $12 an hour.
But the majority of the $2.3 million it's raised comes from groups in New York and California.
The campaigns biggest donors are Civic Participation Action Fund, The Fairness Project and The Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund.
The campaign against raising the minimum wage is called Keep Colorado Working.
Most of its money comes from industry groups like the Hospitality Issue PAC, which had a Denver address.
That might make you think it’s local money fighting the minimum wage campaign, but the PAC’s funded by national companies like McDonald’s and the National Restaurant Association.
4) The physician assisted suicide campaign is raising and spending some serious cash
Yes on Colorado End of Life Options has raised about $4.8 million to pass Proposition 106, which would let terminally ill patients purchase medications to end their lives.
The campaign’s biggest expenditure is $2.9 million to Blue West Media for advertising. That means we’re likely to see a lot of ads about the proposition between now and Nov. 8.
5) Democrats are outraising Republicans in three key Colorado Senate races.
The winners of Colorado Senate districts 19, 25 and 26 will determine whether Republicans retain control of the chamber.
If Republicans lose all three races, the Democrats will likely gain control of the entire legislature.
All the Democratic candidates are ahead of their opponents when it comes to dollars raised so far.
The biggest gap is in Senate District 19. Incumbent Republican Sen. Laura Woods is $70,000 behind her challenger, Rachel Zenzinger.
We will have to wait and see whether more money translates into more votes
By 2016 KUSA
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The Fed’s Main Job Is Jobs, And A Coalition Plans To Keep It On Task
Campaign for America's Future - September 4, 2014, by Isaiah Poole - A lot of eyes will be on the Federal Reserve...
Campaign for America's Future - September 4, 2014, by Isaiah Poole - A lot of eyes will be on the Federal Reserve Friday when the Labor Department releases its August unemployment statistics. But where will the Fed’s eyes be focused? A group of activists are planning the next steps of their effort to keep the Fed focused on the continuing unemployment crisis, and keep the Fed from taking actions that will make things worse for millions still seeking work.
“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” said Shawn Sebastian of the Center for Popular Democracy, who was part of a group of activists and unemployed people who confronted members of the Fed at last month’s economic summit in Jackson Hole, Wyo. That includes following up on a promise by Fed chair Janet Yellen to meet with the group in Washington and pressing a more detailed plan for how the Fed should proceed to help the Main Street economy grow.
“We are going to be looking at the full range of policy options,” Sebastian said.
The “inflation hawks” were poised to seize the narrative when the members of the Fed attended the Jackson Hole summit. These Fed members, egged on by conservative academics and policymakers, want the Fed to put the brakes on economic growth and turn its attention to fighting inflation, even though there are no signs that inflation is an imminent threat. On the contrary, wages as a percentage of economic output are at their lowest level since the late 1940s (while corporate profits as a share of the economy are at record highs), one sign that there are far more people looking for work than there are jobs for them.
What the hawks did not count on was the Center for Popular Democracy’s ragtag group of 10 unemployed people and activist supporters. They trekked to Jackson Hole to confront Fed members with their stories of struggling to find decent jobs, along with a demand that the Fed not abandon its unfinished role in rebuilding the middle-class economy, in the form of a letter endorsed by more than 70 organizations. Their biggest success, Sebastian said, was a two-hour meeting with Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Esther George, who just before Jackson Hole said in an interview with CNBC that it was time for the Fed to begin thinking about raising interest rates “when you see the economy getting as close as we are to full employment.”
But Sebastian and his group told George that the economy was nowhere near full employment and that the analysis of the inflation hawks was “lacking in relevance, substance and rigor.” One member of the group told of how she went from being an MBA who had risen to a management job over 15 years to being laid off and unable to find work for months, finally settling for a job that paid half as much as the job she lost.
It’s not clear what substantive effect hearing these stories had on George and other inflation hawks on the Fed, Sebastian said. “But I do hope we contributed to her thinking and we also started an engagement” with the Fed, he said. Fed members now know that when they discuss economic policy, “you can’t make decisions without public scrutiny anymore, because we’re paying attention now.”
One of the ideas that the group will refine and attempt to build consensus around would have the Fed invest directly in infrastructure bonds and similar government instruments, in much the same way that it purchased billions in bonds to prop up the financial sector in the years following the 2008 financial crash. The bond-purchasing program, known as quantitative easing, helped boost Wall Street share prices, according to most experts, but had no direct effect on job-creation or on bringing the economic recovery to communities around the country hardest hit by the crash – as the nation has now vividly seen in Ferguson, Mo.
Having the Fed directly buy bonds that would enable federal, state or local governments to fund transportation projects, school construction or other public facilities would put the Fed’s power to work in ways that directly creates jobs in the short run and assets that enhance the nation’s competitiveness and well-being in the long run.
The Fed could also better use its regulatory authority to prod the banks to pour into the economy the close to $2 trillion that is now sitting in its vaults. That hoarded cash could be put to work creating jobs and lifting the wages of working-class people.
Whatever policies take shape during the next phase of the Center for Popular Democracy’s campaign to keep the Fed focused on full employment, Sebastian says that the opening round has been a success in sending the message that “we’re not in an inflation crisis … we are in an unemployment crisis. You can’t ignore an ongoing crisis for the sake of a ghost of inflation that may or may not appear.”
Quit Your Job and Go to Work
This spring, Michanne was striding out of a San Francisco apartment lobby in her Google Express jacket, fresh off...
This spring, Michanne was striding out of a San Francisco apartment lobby in her Google Express jacket, fresh off delivering a mirror. Her van beckoned at the curb. It was branded in Google’s playful primary colors and logo, and on the side was the image of a package getting dropped from a parachute, easy-peasy. Michanne’s job was to make same-day, seamless deliveries of bottled water and kitty litter for Google Express, but she doesn’t actually work for Google Express — not directly, anyway. If you looked carefully, just below the van door, a few small, gray letters spelled out something most people didn’t realize: this vehicle wasn’t Google’s after all. It belonged to a company called 1–800Courier.
That day had actually been a good one. Michanne, who is 27, had worked the full eight hour shift that she’d been scheduled by 1–800Courier — one of several companies that delivers for Google Express in the Bay Area, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York City. But full days like that were becoming rare. (She didn’t want to use her last name for privacy reasons.)
When I called her back a month later and asked her to rate her job from 1 to 10, she was more upfront about her level of annoyance: “If 1 is a nightmare, I’m like a 1.5.” In fact, she’d quit.
Her complaint came down to this: she says 1–800Courier had verbally assured her full-time work when she started with the company back in October. It was a paycheck the new mother was counting on, one that didn’t leave her time to work another job. And in the company’s scheduling app she was technically scheduled for 40 hours a week for weeks in advance.
Yet, increasingly, her actual hours were decided the day of work. Michanne had to check her email an hour and a half before her first shift started to see if she would actually get to work the hours she’d been allotted. Many times she did not. She was a supposedly full-time employee who was, effectively, on-call. She’d put aside the day so she could work, but when it turned out they didn’t need her, that meant no work — and no pay.
In April, an email plunked into Michanne’s inbox, describing what she says was business as usual:
Even when she got the go-ahead to turn up for the day, Michanne’s shifts would often be cut once she was already at work. Around 5 p.m., as she ate in her van during an hour-long meal break, she would frequently get a call from the dispatcher, telling her to go home early without working her scheduled second shift. She’d still get paid something— California law mandates payment of between two hour and four hours of “reporting time” depending on the length of a cancelled shift. But it was still a huge issue: Although she was expected to be on-call for 40 hours a week, shift changes meant she was regularly dipping down to 25 hours of paid work, and even once as low as 17 hours, she recalls. At $13 an hour, she was hoping for $520 of work each week — but 17 hours is just $221.
Google pointed questions towards its contractor, which manages all scheduling for its deliveries. 1–800Courier’s California Director of Operations David Finney said that across the industry, the delivery business slows down after the holidays. “I personally empathize with that,” he said about employees whose hours get cut. “But at the same time, look at any industry in the state of California — especially in the service industry — and some days it’s just like ‘Hey, we’re sorry, we don’t need you to come in.’”
Another employee of 1–800Courier, who asked to remain anonymous so as to not irk the company, says the scheduling problems were sometimes bad for the company, too. Back in January and February, when business seemed especially slow, this worker would clock in and sit in the delivery car near the hub for hours, waiting to be dispatched. “I’d have movies picked out to watch, I got a pillow and took naps, and had stuff I wanted to read and write. I’m getting paid to do nothing. But I wouldn’t call
[dispatch] and say, ‘I need a route.’ It didn’t bother me at all.”
What did bother the Netflix-watching worker was this: more than 10 times during seven months on the job, their first shift was cut while it was already happening. But the worker was booked on to a second shift, and was made to wait around until that started. Since driving the vehicle back to the parking lot in Silicon Valley from the San Francisco dispatch hub would eat up most of the time, the worker would often drive to the movies or the mall in the city to kill time until the second shift. (The worker once got written up for taking the vehicle to Safeway during that time — saying they expected employees to just wait in the vehicle for the next shift, or drive it back to the Silicon Valley lot.)
The complaint is echoed by another former 1–800Courier worker who recently quit: “I was really getting irritated. They said ‘it’s not as high demand right now, we don’t have a lot of orders coming through, so we’re cutting the hours.’” A couple times, while the worker was in a carpool on the way to work, the dispatcher would call and say, “Oh, we removed you from the 12–5 window, you can just work for 5:30 to 10. I’d just go home and say ‘Remove me from the last window.’” The current driver says things have picked up lately, especially after a major lay-off of drivers in March that has given those who remain more work to do. 1-800's David Finney wouldn’t confirm a layoff, but said drivers are now regularly working overtime hours.
The whole idea behind the on-demand economy — touch-of-a-button delivery, often guaranteed within minutes — creates the potential for a sudden rush or dearth of customers at any moment. So how does a company make sure that the right amount of workers are around at the moment it needs them to be?
You’d think that this is something that Google, the emperor of analytics, might be able to figure out. But the company it had chosen to organize the deliveries, 1–800Courier, had not. Sometimes workers lucked out and watched movies in their cars, but more often they suffered for their employer’s failure. There may have been an abundance of employees scheduled for shifts, but ultimately the people were just as on-demand as the Costco kitty litter they delivered.
Outside of Silicon Valley, American labor is looking a lot like this already. The old, sanctified status of “employee” is getting egged in the face. The days of blue-collar job, suburban tract home, Disney vacay, and pension awaiting at the end of the 9–5 rainbow looks like a curious blip on the way to a more profit-maximized, capitalist future. It’s the age of the precariat: unions are nearly kaput, many will only know pensions from history books, and most “at will” workers can be fired as easily as Uber can kick its drivers off the app. Now many old titans of industry have latched onto this idea of on-call shift work — which many call “just-in-time scheduling,” — a grayish labor abuse tailored for the age of the text message that has lawmakers hustling to curb it.
Since the recession, millions of workers have taken part-time gigs when they’d prefer to have full-time ones — especially in hospitality and retail. And those part-time jobs increasingly jerk the workers around: In a University of Chicago study of young workers in hourly jobs, 41 percent said they got their shifts a week or less in advance. It gets worse from there: as a recent story in Harper’s Magazine laid out, companies use software to track customer flow down to the minute; resulting in managers who ask workers to be on call for work shifts, or clock out while on the job and hang around without pay during slow times to see if the workflow will pick up. Sarah Leberstein is a senior staff attorney from the National Employment Law Project, which has been monitoring the hellish scheduling practices. “The companies want to unload all the flexibility onto the workers, but workers can’t afford to live in such a state of flux.”
This spring, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sent letters to 13 national retailers including Urban Outfitters to Target to Gap to Sears, questioning them about using software tracking systems and whether they made employees get the go-ahead for work less than a day before a shift:
Re: Request for Information Regarding “on call shifts”
Our office has received reports that a growing number of employers, particularly in the retail industry, require their hourly workers to work what are sometimes known as “on call shifts” — that is, requiring their employees to call in to work just a few hours in advance, or the night before, to determine whether the worker needs to appear for work that day or the next. If the employee is told that his or her services are not needed, the employee will receive no pay for that day, despite being required to be available to appear on the job site the next day or even just a few hours later on the same day. For many workers, that is too little time to make arrangements for family needs, let alone to find an alternative source of income to compensate for the lost pay.
If “just-in-time scheduling” sounds a whole lot like on-demand work, that’s because it is.
It’s not just in America that this practice is increasing. In Europe, it’s called the “zero hour” job — you’re promised work, but guaranteed nothing. And these contracts have been causing controversy in Britain ever since the financial crisis, which saw a dramatic rise in the number of just-in-time jobs as employers offloaded their risks onto the workforce. Today, almost 2 million jobs in the U.K. are now on-call. In some cases, workers are denied the benefits of full-time employees, or are prevented from finding other paying gigs without the permission of their employer — even if that employer cancels all of their shifts.
And it’s not just service industry jobs: zero hours have spread into other areas of the British economy, too. Recent figures suggest 13 percent of all healthcare workers and 10 percent of all education jobs are now in the same kind of hole that Michanne found herself in. (Finney from 1–800 said he does not consider the company’s scheduling to fall into the “just-in-time” trend.)
“The writing on the wall is we’re going to see more of an Uber and Lyft approach to workforce management in more industries,” says Carrie Gleason from the Center for Popular Democracy, a Brooklyn-based labor and social justice nonprofit. “You can see that in the just-in-time scheduling — you only want to pay for people when they’re doing the most productive work. The cost of doing business is put on the worker, so any time they’re not producing a car fare or a retail sale, it’s the worker paying for that time, not the company.”
On-demand companies pitch themselves as ultimate disrupters, breaking free of stuffy, old-world straitjackets of work. For many companies in this exploding area, there are no zero hour jobs — because the jobs have no set hours at all. The workers are independent contractors, not employees, and, at many companies, can log into work when they choose. In fact, Silicon Valley’s Chief Optimism Officer, Marc Andreessen — the venture capitalist who is funding Lyft and Instacart to build our app-based freelancer future —recently waved away a reporter’s comment about the precarious app workers in the New Yorker:“Maybe there’s an alternate way of living,” he said. “A free-form life where you press the button and get work when you want to.”
It also saves companies payroll taxes, wages, benefits — and the headache of scheduling workers. (“What other job out there can you just turn it on when you want to start and off when you want to stop — whenever you feel like it?” asked Uber CEO Travis Kalanick in his five-year company anniversaryspeech last week.)
“Uber doesn’t care if 100 or 200 are reporting to work because Uber will get the same percentage of the fare” says Leberstein, the National Employment Law Project attorney. “They’re shifting the burden of deciding whether there’s enough work onto the workers.” Many companies go so far as to give drivers a weekly breakdown on the most high-earning hours — in fact, there are entire apps dedicated to helping workers track that for themselves.
Companies claim these freedom-loving toilers will flee the moment they’re pinned down by shifts or bureaucracy. Their own internal studies suggest this is true: one Uber-commissioned poll of drivers showed more than 70 percent preferred to be their own boss rather than work a 9-to-5. About 50 percent of Lyft’s drivers drive five hours a week or less. A survey by the Freelancer’s Union found 42 percent went freelance to have more flexibility in their schedule.
“If everybody has to work a certain amount of hours, then it would put the model at risk because then it would be a very rigid model,” says Pascal Levy-Garboua, the head of business at Checkr, and organizer of a conference about the on-demand economy held in San Francisco last month. He has driven for Lyft in the past anywhere from 10 to 20 hours a week to see how it works for himself — then goes months without driving at all. “That would be the opposite of on-demand. Demand and supply are elastic, and the model works because there’s an equilibrium. If supply” — the industry’s term for what the rest of the world usually calls “workers” — “is not elastic, the model breaks.”
Yet a survey of more than 1,000 workers released last month by Requests for Startups, a tech-booster newsletter, popped a hole in what had been the great selling point of contract work in the new economy:
Work hours are demand-dependent despite the touted schedule flexibility. Although schedule flexibility is the #1 stated reason for joining a company as a contractor, ‘Peak hours / demand’ ranked highest amongst influencers of their work schedules, with nearly 50% selecting it as a very important influencer (‘My Family’ was the 2nd highest at 35%). This influence is particularly glaring when comparing current vs. ideal hours of ridesharing respondents, whose responses suggest that their ideal working hours aren’t too far off from the traditional 9–5.
Among the top reasons for leaving the job were insufficient pay (43 percent) and — spoiler alert for industry cheerleaders — insufficient flexibility (26 percent). In short, while the apps may be good for people who have another job and merely want to pad their income, if workers want to make a living on these apps, they actually have little flexibility — they need to work full-time or more, and they better be signed into work during the peak times.
The on-demand workplace is not one-size-fits-all: while complete flexibility works well for driving services with a 24-hour demand and a ready stable of drivers, companies dependent on burritos and Thai take-out reaching hungry customers have to be a bit more organized about who is on hand at meal times.
To get around this problem, many companies have started doing to their independent contractors exactly what 1-800Courier does to its employees: schedule them onto shifts.
At Postmates, an on-demand food delivery company, contractors sign up the week before for shifts in down-to-the-hour increments — those who confirm their availability are offered potential jobs first, meaning they can end up making substantially more than those hopping on the app to work spontaneously. As further motivation, Postmates also guarantees couriers who sign up for shifts a minimum of $15 an hour on weekends — if their jobs don’t add up to that, Postmates will pay them directly.
Scheduling contractors is a legally gray thing to do — since shifts are one of the IRS’ criteria in determining that a worker is an employee. (Indeed, Postmates, like many companies, is currently facing a lawsuit over classifying the couriers as contractors.)
Postmates says they aren’t shifts, exactly: workers aren’t bound to the hours they pre-select — they could just not sign into the app during the shift. Yet there are consequences. If they miss five of their allotted hours in a week, they’ll be suspended from work for 48 hours, as this email forwarded by one courier warns:
In order to avoid banishment, Postmates contractors ask for swaps on the app, much like employees have to do when they can’t make a shift.
And, like ridesharing companies, Postmates has another mechanism to get unscheduled contractors out on the road during peak times: its own surge-pricing model called “blitzes.” While the courier’s take of the delivery fee always stays the same —80 percent — blitzes increase that fee two or even three times the usual amount.
Postmates also polices the workers once signed in: one courier in New York City who asked not to be named (he didn’t want to get kicked off the app) showed me texts from the company: sometimes Postmates asks him why he’s not accepting more jobs, sometimes it commands him to stop only accepting jobs that he determines will be worth his time, and sometimes it suspends him temporarily from the app entirely. A Postmates spokeswoman says the real-time texts are aimed at getting feedback on why certain jobs aren’t attractive to couriers.
The take-away: as traditional jobs are looking more on-demand, on-demand contractor ones aren’t looking as flexible as they claim.
So where does that leave us? Employment and contractor labor models already seem to be converging at some sort of semi-flexible purgatory.
In the eyes of those who cry that companies like Uber or Lyft or Postmates are getting rich off exploiting a labor loophole — blithely skipping out of paying wages, benefits, and expenses like gas because they classify workers as freelancers—companies like 1–800Courier are actually playing the good guy. (Or at least the less evil guy.) The company has official employees which it pays $12.50 to $13 an hour, plus worker’s comp, overtime, and expenses, including gas and the occasional parking ticket.
“I do want to go on the record to say we try really hard to do right by our employees,” Finney from 1–800Courier says. “We’re not going to pass that cost onto someone else so we can save a buck… We’re practically one of the only companies in the state of California that uses the employee model. It’s the right thing to do, and, in the long run, it will be the best solution because we’ll be able to provide the best service because we have employees. With independent contractors, there’s a lot of control you give up because you can’t tell independent contractors what to do.”
Still, 1–800Courier's own problems show that employers in the on-demand economy have to be adept at managing their workflow. Otherwise they’ll lose money on wasted labor when there’s low demand, or be caught short when there’s a sudden surge.
This is not impossible. Already some on-demand companies claim to have figured it out.
One vocal proponent of employees in the industry is Managed by Q’s CEO Dan Teran, who has written about the decision to employ its workers to clean and manage offices in New York City. Their workers get to choose their work days and receive a steady schedule, and the company books them at worksites that are on convenient subway routes from their home or other job sites. Still, the company gets off easy since most of the workflow is pre-determined and consistent week to week.
The San Francisco food service Munchery has been also held up as one of the good guys in the new push-button delivery business — one of a short list that employs its couriers. One San Francisco bike messenger named Jennifer told me Munchery pays $18-an-hour plus tips from a collective tip pool — much higher than minimum wage. Still, Munchery experienced its own trip-ups. Jennifer told me that after she started working for them at the beginning of the year, there were too many messengers working the four-and-a-half hour dinner delivery window. “They were just sitting around waiting. I was told that it had been really slow for many months,” she says.
Around the end of January, Jennifer says Munchery laid off 11 bike messengers. (CEO Tri Tran would not give details of the company’s staffing, but says the layoffs were not a huge correction considering the size of his payroll: “Ten people we need to shift around — that’s a very small number for the workforce we have.”) Munchery also gets out ahead of its demand by putting parameters on how instantaneously “on-demand” it can be: outside of San Francisco’s city limits, you have to have ordered dinner by 2:00 in the afternoon, and choose an hour-long delivery window.
The workflow problems seem to be resolved for now. Since the layoffs, Jennifer says she’s delivered a steady flow of meals with little loafing.
Still, Munchery has a strong advantage: people generally eat dinner at a predictable time. Consistency is a harder promise in truly in-the-moment businesses, like Uber and Lyft, Postmates, or Google Express. How can employees ever be scheduled with perfect accuracy in those businesses? Does an hourly employee have to work rigid shifts?
Shannon Liss-Riordan is a Boston-based labor attorney suing many on-demand companies over their attempts to classify workers as contractors. She says flexible shifts aren’t incompatible with employee status: “That’s total BS. Employees can have flexible work schedules, employers are doing that all the time. All of these arguments being made are real red herrings that they’re trying to throw out there. It’s part of the whole ‘Oh, the workers love this, because they love the flexibility.’ You can give them flexibility, andpay their worker’s comp. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.” She cites one precedent-setting California case about cucumber growers who were found in California Supreme Court to be employees, even though they could set their own hours.
Of course, salaried, white-collar workers — who can call their own shots and rarely earn overtime — often have a great deal in flexibility at work. That’s harder for employees getting paid by the hour. Could part-time employees log in and out of work willy nilly, paid by the hours they actually work? Highly unlikely. If companies have to pony up for the workers, there’s little benefit to them for allowing workers to come and go as they please. Shelby Clark, executive director of Peers, which helps on-demand workers find and manage their workload, has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the base cost of having employees. Companies only start recovering their employee costs if workers are putting in a baseline of hours, but not overtime, “so you’d probably have a floor and a cap [on hours], and then not more than eight hours a day. You’d start to see a lot of constraints that defeat why people work in the sharing economy.”
That’s exactly what the disgruntled New York City Postmates courier told me. Despite getting pestered by texts to accept more jobs and bad tips, he explained why he stayed: “The only thing I like about this job is the freedom and flexibility.” Take away that, and he’d do what companies fear the most, especially as the competition for these workers grows: he’d never sign in for work again.
Which was exactly what Michanne at 1-800Courier did, after being forced to be flexible when she wanted stable work. In late April, she quit. Ironically, even though she was an employee, her reasons for leaving were the same as all those on-demand workers who were surveyed: lack of flexibility and low pay. She now works at a car dealership, 9-to-6.
It appears 1–800, on the other hand, is only ramping up. In the last month, the company has blanketed Craigslist with job ads for Google Express drivers to deliver for a “new upscale concierge service,” “a really cool company” to deliver retail items to homes and businesses around Silicon Valley. “It makes me wonder why they fired all those people, if they’re just going turn around and hire more,” the current employee told me while sitting in her van waiting
for a second shift to begin last week. “Just so you can fire everyone again?”
Among the listed perks in the ad? “Stable schedules” and “multiple shift choices.”
Source: Mic
Neel Kashkari Named Next Minneapolis Fed President
Neel Kashkari, a former financier who managed the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion rescue of banks in the 2008 crisis, was...
Neel Kashkari, a former financier who managed the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion rescue of banks in the 2008 crisis, was named the next president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
Kashkari’s resume includes stops at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Pacific Investment Management Co., and a failed run for governor of California last year. At the Treasury, he was Secretary Henry Paulson’s key aide in overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Kashkari will take over from Narayana Kocherlakota on January 1, 2016, according to a statement Tuesday from the Minneapolis Fed.
“He has a little bit of all the pieces you’d want in a Fed president,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut.
As head of one of 12 regional Fed banks, Kashkari will join the Federal Open Market Committee, the central bank’s policy making panel. The Fed is weighing ending a seven-year era of near-zero interest rates, with investors betting it will move next month. Kashkari is not scheduled to vote on policy decisions until 2017. Kocherlakota, as is customary for outgoing FOMC members, will not attend the December meeting.
QE ‘Morphine’
Kocherlakota is one of the Fed’s most dovish policy makers who has argued it should keep rates on hold into next year. Kashkari has offered observations on monetary policy via his twitter feed, without spelling out whether he would favor raising rates or delaying liftoff in the current climate. In an April 2013 comment he likened the Bank of Japan’s asset purchase program to “morphine. makes u feel better but doesn’t cure.”
“I don’t think we know that much” about Kashkari’s views on monetary policy, said Angel Ubide, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “My experience with people who get appointed is whatever they thought before and what they do later doesn’t necessarily correlate.”
Kashkari, 42, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He began his career as an aerospace engineer at TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach, California.
Goldman Sachs
Kashkari’s appointment places another ex-Goldman Sachs banker at the helm of a regional Fed bank. Robert Steven Kaplan at the Dallas Fed and New York’s William C. Dudley are Goldman alums. Philadelphia Fed chief Patrick Harker previously served as a trustee at Goldman Sachs Trust and as a member of the board of managers of Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund Partners Registered Fund.
“We’re disappointed that yet another former Goldman Sachs insider has been elevated to a regional president position,” said Jordan Haedtler at the Center for Popular Democracy in Washington.
Such appointments need “more transparency and public input,” said Haedtler, who’s deputy campaign manager at Fed Up, a national coalition that’s calling for changes at the central bank and wants to keep rates low to boost employment.
Kashkari worked at Goldman in the early 2000s before accepting a post at the Treasury in 2006. He joined Pimco, then led by bond fund manager Bill Gross, in 2009 to help oversee an expansion into equities, an attempt to reduce the firm’s heavy dependence on the fixed-income market. When he left in 2013, the company’s equity unit had attracted $10 billion in assets, or less than 1 percent of the firm’s total assets at the time.
Bank Bailout
TARP, approved by Congress in October 2008, remains one of the more controversial measures taken during the financial crisis. It authorized the government to purchase up to $700 billion in troubled assets from financial institutions, in an effort to bolster global credit markets. The government ultimately used $475 billion, including $250 billion to stabilize banks, $82 billion to bail out auto makers and $70 billion to save insurer American International Group Inc., according to the Treasury’s website.
“Mr. Kashkari is an influential leader whose combined experience in the public and private sectors makes him the ideal candidate to head the Minneapolis Fed,” said MayKao Hang, incoming chair of the Minneapolis Fed’s board of directors and co-chair of the search committee.
Kashkari, a Republican, was defeated by incumbent California Governor Jerry Brown in November 2014, getting 43 percent of the vote to Brown’s 57 percent.
Presidents of the 12 regional Fed banks are appointed by a portion of their respective boards of directors, subject to the approval of the Fed Board in Washington. Reserve bank boards typically consist of nine members, including three bankers. The banking members are excluded under Dodd-Frank from participating in the selection of presidents.
Source: Bloomberg Business
Democrats to introduce bills to challenge arbitration system
Democrats to introduce bills to challenge arbitration system
By Nick Niedzwiadek ALBANY — Democratic lawmakers are expected to introduce a pair of bills to counter how corporations...
By Nick Niedzwiadek
ALBANY — Democratic lawmakers are expected to introduce a pair of bills to counter how corporations use binding arbitration to limit their financial exposure in legal disputes.
Consumer advocates say corporations are increasingly requiring potential employees and consumers to agree to binding arbitration in the event of a dispute as a precondition for employment or use of a product. They say that such proceedings lack transparency, put people on an uneven playing field against well-heeled corporations and can leave people with little other legal recourse.
Assemblywoman Latoya Joyner of the Bronx and Sen. Brad Hoylman of Manhattan are expected to introduce a bill that would amend state labor law to allow employees or organized labor organizations the power to bring legal proceedings against an employer for potential violations as a stand-in for the Department of Labor — independent of any private employment agreement. The state would recover a portion of the fines assessed as part of such proceedings.
Senator Jose Serrano of the Bronx and Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh of Manhattan would establish a similar process for private citizens to seek civil penalties on behalf of the state for violations of consumer protection statutes if the applicable public agency fails to pursue them due to a lack of resources.
“Too often large companies take advantage of consumers by forcing them into signing 'take-it-or-leave-it' contracts that include hidden clauses requiring forced arbitration that heavily favor businesses,” Serrano said in a statement. “My legislation will create a level playing field and give the power back to the consumers in New York State by allowing them an opportunity to fight back when they are victims of fraud."
Several of the legislators are expected to announce the legislation at a protest in Manhattan on Thursday along with New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer and Public Advocate Tish James, according to organizers. Joining them will be a number of progressive groups, including the Center for Popular Democracy, Citizen Action, Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change. The event will coincide with the release of a report called: “Justice for Sale: How Corporations Use Forced Arbitration Agreements to Exploit Working Families.”
"Legal rights are worthless if there's no remedy when laws are broken,” Kate Hamaji, a research analyst at the Center for Popular Democracy who authored the report, said in a statement. “Forced arbitration essentially allows corporations to opt out of the justice system by creating a private parallel system that makes it prohibitively expensive to seek justice and creates incentives for arbitrators to rule in favor of companies."
The report can be found here.
Connecting The Dots Between Banks and Immigrant Detention
Connecting The Dots Between Banks and Immigrant Detention
July 26 was the deadline by which the government was ordered by a judge to reunite all immigrant children separated...
July 26 was the deadline by which the government was ordered by a judge to reunite all immigrant children separated from their parents in Trump's so-called zero-tolerance border policy earlier this year. But of the approximately 2,500 children that were separated 711 still remain without their parents after the deadline, lawyers for the government said. Of those, 431 cases remain where the parents were deported before getting their children back and the rest were "ineligible" to be returned as per the government. Meanwhile protesters across the country have continued confronting ICE offices and other institutions involved in the immigrant crackdown including banks that are financing private prisons for immigrants. JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and BlackRock, have been targeted by activists this week after the Center for Popular Democracy released a report called Bankrolling Oppression. Eight people were arrested while protesting outside the home of JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon.
Watch the video here.
El Centro de Democracia Popular crea fondo para afectados por María
El Centro de Democracia Popular crea fondo para afectados por María
The Center for Popular Democracy established the Community Hurricane Relief and Recovery Community Fund to assist...
The Center for Popular Democracy established the Community Hurricane Relief and Recovery Community Fund to assist Puerto Rico's most vulnerable communities.Tania Rosario Méndez, executive director of Taller Salud and affiliated with the Center for Popular Democracy, said the fund will support organizations working on the ground with communities on the island, mainly low-income communities.
Read the full article here.
Family Resource Centers celebrate 25 years of removing barriers to learning
Family Resource Centers celebrate 25 years of removing barriers to learning
No two days at school are the same for Geri Willis. One day she’s finding hats and gloves for students, the next she’s...
No two days at school are the same for Geri Willis. One day she’s finding hats and gloves for students, the next she’s helping a grandmother navigate the court system to gain guardianship.
Some of her days are spent searching Ashland’s hotels for a student who hasn’t come to school for several days, others are filled with calls to social service agencies to find a student’s family a place to stay.
No task is too big or too small for Willis, coordinator of the Ashland Family Resource Center, which serves two Ashland Independent elementary schools.
“We’ve even gone so far as to buy alarm clocks,” she said. “You do what you can to help your students.”
Geri Willis, coordinator of the Ashland Family Resource Center, reviews shapes with students at Hager Elementary in preparation for a math-based quilting project. The center serves Hager and Crabbe elementary schools in the Ashland Independent district. (Photo by Kerri Keener)
Geri Willis, coordinator of the Ashland Family Resource Center, reviews shapes with students at Hager Elementary in preparation for a math-based quilting project. The center serves Hager and Crabbe elementary schools in the Ashland Independent district. (Photo by Kerri Keener)
Kentucky’s system of school-based Family Resource and Youth Service Centers (FRYSCs), was created as part of the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 as a way to remove nonacademic barriers to learning. Now in its 25th year, there are 816 centers across the state serving 626,696 students and their families.
“When we first came on board, it was the whole selling of myself as a coordinator, just begging people to let us be involved,” said Mike Flynn, youth services center coordinator for Estill County Middle School. ”Parents didn’t know what we were, schools didn’t know what we were. We had to break those barriers down.”
But 25 years later the centers are an integral part of most schools, he said.
“It’s a complete cultural shift. People automatically expect us to be involved with things,” Flynn said. ”They bring issues and problems to us. We are now really ingrained into the schools as a whole.”
Though they are part of schools, FRYSCs are run by the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services.
Schools in which 20 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch are eligible for a center. The center is then funded based on the number of students who qualify for free lunch, said Flynn, who is also past president of the Family Resource and Youth Services Coalition of Kentucky a statewide professional organization.
“Even though we are based on the free lunch numbers, we serve every student regardless of financial status,” he said.
Though centers are most known for helping students and their families in difficult situations or supplying food or clothing, that service isn’t required under state law.
Many people don’t realize all the other services the centers provide, which are required under state law– such as referring families and students to mental health and substance abuse counseling, offering career training, summer job placement for high school students and promoting family literacy. The centers also serve as a bridge between school, homes and the community.
In July, coordinators at attended the annual Victory over Violence conference where they received training on helping children from families of substance abuse, bullying prevention and how to involve families in students’ success.
Many centers also provide programs to bolster the learning going on in the classroom. Flynn has worked with teachers to plan math nights for parents. In the summer, many centers provide programing based around the free summer meals program.
“We provide workshops and activities for the kids, so you’re not just getting food but a little be extra instruction,” Flynn said.
Several national education groups have recently taken notice of Kentucky’s system of support centers. Doug Jones, manager of FRYSC Region 7 – which covers northeastern Kentucky led a group of 15 educators from six states last fall as they visited Kentucky to see how FRYSCs work.
The group, which included representatives from National Education Association, the Center for Popular Democracy and Communities in Schools, visited three centers in eastern Kentucky and two centers in Lexington.
“They are looking at Kentucky as a template for trying to legislate FRYSC-model programs across the United States,” Jones said.
The group brought more educators in December and conducted 35 videotaped interviews with students, teachers, legislators and coordinators.
“We are planning educational and motivational materials, legislative pushes and more,” Evie Frankl, organizer of education justice campaigns for the Center for Popular Democracy said in a release. “We are thankful for the Kentucky program for leading the way for so many years and for generously sharing their knowledge with us.”
The idea of resource centers in schools was new to Kentucky 26 years ago as KERA was being drafted. Some opposed their creation, but Harry J. Cowherd, the secretary of the Cabinet for Human Resources in 1990, championed the creation the FRSYC network.
The annual center of excellence award is now named for Cowherd. In November, Wilis and her center received the award for their work with homeless students.
Willis applied for and received a McKinney-Vento grant, which allowed the elementary schools to hire three home/school liaisons to help families get immunizations, physicals and other screenings and provided tutoring for 43 students living in a domestic violence shelter.
“A lot of our student population is from hotels, motels, shelters and public housing,” she said. ”We also have a lot of kids being raised by relatives.”
In addition to the McKinney-Vento grant, she received a $58,000 grant from BBT Bank for homeless students. Part of the money will pay for a nine-passenger van that will let Willis pick up parents who don’t have transportation so they can attend parent/teacher conferences. It also will be used take homeless high school students to co-op sites. Part of the money will pay those co-op students’ equipment for medical classes, she said.
Willis’ center serves Hager Elementary, where more than half of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, Crabbe Elementary, where all students qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch and a preschool/Headstart program. She works closely with administrators, teachers and staff to make sure she her students’ needs are being met and that teachers know what’s going on with their students.
“This staff is probably the most compassionate group of people I’ve ever met in my life,” she said. “They know and understand the situations that our students come from.”
Crabbe Elementary Principal Jamie Campbell, estimates that about 60 percent of his students will go through some kind of change that requires the resource center’s assistance.
“I am firm believer in the fact we have to make sure that their basic needs are met,” he said. “Because if you’re hungry, if you’re freezing, if you’re worried about safety where you’re going to be at home, if you are worried about that, I cannot teach you reading, writing and math.
“Geri and her team take care of that need for the teachers, it translates into students being able to come here and learn.”
Brenna R. Kelly writes for Kentucky Teacher, a publication of the Kentucky Department of Education
By Brenna R. Kelly
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