Puerto Rican Families Displaced in Florida by Hurricane María Recruited as Potential Voters
Puerto Rican Families Displaced in Florida by Hurricane María Recruited as Potential Voters
The Summer for Puerto Rico campaign is spearheaded by Julio López Varona, the Director of Puerto Rico Diaspora...
The Summer for Puerto Rico campaign is spearheaded by Julio López Varona, the Director of Puerto Rico Diaspora Campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy. He emphasized that the focus of the campaign is on promoting political empowerment and literacy, by providing context on who are the lawmakers, and teaching communities about the effects of colonialism.
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Elevated Level of Part-Time Employment: Post-Recession Norm?
Wall Street Journal - November 12, 2014, by Nick Timiraos - Nearly 7 million Americans are stuck in part-time jobs that...
Wall Street Journal - November 12, 2014, by Nick Timiraos - Nearly 7 million Americans are stuck in part-time jobs that they don’t want.
The unemployment rate has fallen sharply over the past year, but that improvement is masking a still-bleak picture for millions of workers who say they can’t find full-time jobs.
Martina Morgan is deciding which bills to skip after her hours fell at Ikea in Renton, Wash. Sandra Sok says she’s been unable to consistently get full-time hours after she transferred to a Wal-Mart in Arizona from one in Colorado.
In Chicago, Jessica Davis is frustrated by her schedule dwindling to 23 hours a week at a McDonald’s even though her location has been hiring. “How can you not get people more hours but you hire more employees?” the 26-year-old Ms. Davis said.
The situation of these so-called involuntary part-time workers—those who would prefer to work more than 34 hours a week—has economists puzzling over whether a higher level of part-time employment might be a permanent legacy of the great recession. If so, it could force more workers to choose between underemployment or working multiple jobs to make ends meet, leading to less income growth and weaker discretionary spending.
Employers added some 3.3 million full-time workers over the past year, but the number of full-time workers in the U.S. is still around 2 million shy of the level before the recession began in 2007. Meanwhile, the ranks of workers who are part time for economic reasons has fallen by 740,000 this year to around 4.5% of the civilian workforce. That is down from a high of 5.9% in 2010 but remains well above the 2.7% average in the decade preceding the recession.
“There’s just less full-time jobs available than there used to be,” said Michelle Girard, chief economist at RBS Securities Inc.
The slow decline in part-time work is particularly acute when broken out by industries. For the retail and hospitality sectors, the number of involuntary part-time workers in October was nearly double its prerecession level. For construction, mining and manufacturing work, by contrast, the share of such part-time labor was just 9% above its pre-recession level.
Other data show that the ability of part-time service workers to find full-time work has been much slower during the current recovery. In goods-producing industries, around two-thirds of involuntary part-time workers in July 2013 had found full-time employment by July 2014, up from 60% in 2009, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. But for service-sector workers, the rate has seen little improvement. Around 48% of involuntary part-time workers in July 2013 had found full-time work one year later, up from around 46% in 2009.
An important question for policy makers now is whether the elevated level of involuntary part-time work is due to cyclical factors, meaning it will fall as the economy heals, or to structural changes that have made employers more inclined to rely on a larger contingent workforce and avoid converting part-time workers to full-time positions.
On one side are economists like Ms. Girard, who say greater economic uncertainty and rising labor costs—from increases in the minimum wage, regulations or health-care expenses stemming from the Affordable Care Act—explain higher levels of part-time work. “There is a structural element to this at the very least,” she said.
The health-care law requires employers with 50 or more full-time equivalent workers to offer affordable insurance to employees working 30 or more hours a week or face fines. “Companies are just more inclined to hire part-time workers, not necessarily because of the health-care law, but for business reasons that make it a more attractive option,” Ms. Girard said.
Anecdotal reports have suggested employers have cut hours to prepare for the implementation of the health-care law, but that hasn’t been borne out by economic data.
An analysis by Bowen Garrett of the Urban Institute and Robert Kaestner at the University of Illinois at Chicago found a small increase in part-time work this year, but the increase occurred for part-time jobs with between 30 and 34 hours—above the 30-hour threshold that would be affected by the health-care law.
Other economists say higher levels of involuntary part-time work are mostly cyclical. Businesses don’t appear to be paying part-time workers more than full-time workers; that would be one clear sign of a shift in hiring preferences.
Elevated levels of involuntary part-time work in service jobs may reflect how low-wage employers ramped up hiring earlier in the recovery. More recently, the sector has absorbed those returning to work after long unemployment spells.
Part-time work in service jobs is “a stepping stone for the unemployed and for people out of the labor force,” said Adam Ozimek, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. Labor markets are “improving in just the way you would expect.”
Labor advocates, meanwhile, say technological changes in how businesses schedule employees are at fault. Software allows employers to schedule and cancel shifts rapidly based on business conditions.
Carrie Gleason, the director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, a labor advocacy group, said that could explain why more part-time workers say they want full-time work. “There’s now this persistent uncertainty in the jobs that hourly workers have today,” she said.
“I need to spend some time with my kids,” said Ms. Morgan, 32. “Two jobs? It’s too much.”
Ikea employees are guaranteed a minimum amount of hours every week. Those that can work “during peak times when our customers are in our stores have the opportunity to obtain more hours,” said Mona Liss, a company spokeswoman. The company in June also announced it would raise the average minimum hourly wage in its U.S. stores next year by 17%.
Meanwhile, the structural-cyclical debate has important implications for the Federal Reserve. If the changes are structural, wages might begin to rise sooner than expected, putting more pressure on the Fed to raise interest rates. If they’re cyclical, it would suggest that Fed policy can remain accommodative.
Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen routinely highlights the elevated level of part-time work as a key measure of labor slack. “There are still ... too many who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work,” she said at a press conference in September.
Business surveys conducted by the Atlanta Fed have shown there are more part-time workers because “business conditions don’t justify converting them to full time,” said John Robertson, senior economist at the bank. But other businesses have said their reliance on a larger part-time workforce stemmed from the higher costs of hiring full-time workers.
“It would be wrong to say it’s all cyclical, and it would be wrong to say it’s all structural,” Mr. Robertson said. “We’re somewhere in the middle.”
Ulyses Coatl illustrates how any improvement might unfold. He worked for two years as a stylist at a Levi’s apparel store in lower Manhattan but quit his job in September because the hours had become too unpredictable. His schedule varied from as many as 34 hours a week to four hours, but had averaged around 18 hours in recent weeks, he said.
A Levi’s spokeswoman said the company is “always looking at ways to improve retail productivity, including store labor models and processes” that conform to “industry best practices.”
Wal-Mart says the majority of its workforce is full time, and the share of part-time workers has stayed about the same over the past decade. A spokeswoman said store employees can view all of the open shifts in their store, and that there are full-time positions available in the store at which Ms. Sok works.
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How Hillary Clinton can win in November
How Hillary Clinton can win in November
Hillary Clinton may be tempted to relax into her inevitable nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate given a...
Hillary Clinton may be tempted to relax into her inevitable nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate given a sizable delegate lead that looks likely to hold going into the Democratic convention — particularly if she wins the big prize of New York in April.
However, even after the convention, she will need to woo her opponent's supporters — many of whom claim they won't vote for her — to prevail in an unpredictable general election against an unconventional candidate like Donald Trump.
Bernie Sanders has been buoyed consistently by supporters disgusted with a political system awash in big money — and dismayed by Clinton's uncomfortably close relationship to Wall Street. There is a simple move Clinton can make to prove she is willing to take bold action against Wall Street: She can bring back the Glass-Steagall Act that put up a firewall between commercial and investment banking.
Over the course of recent Democratic debates, Clinton has remained opposed to reinstating Glass-Steagall even as Sanders used the rallying cry of breaking up the banks to help lock up several Midwest and Northeastern primaries.
The division between commercial and investment banking imposed by Glass-Steagall, enacted in 1933 amid the Great Depression, prevented banks from using customer deposits to take high-octane gambles in the market that could bring on another financial cataclysm.
Then, in 1999, under heavy pressure from the financial industry, Glass-Steagall was repealed by President Bill Clinton, unleashing the rise of a number of behemoth banks with combined commercial and investment arms. Less than a decade later, most of them nearly combusted in the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, requiring billions in taxpayer bailout funds to stay afloat.
Today, Wall Street continues to be riddled with systemic risks. The Dodd-Frank financial reforms enacted in 2010 in the wake of the financial crisis helped reduce some of the risk, but as the new president of the Minneapolis Fed recently acknowledged, they didn't go far enough. "I believe the biggest banks are still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to our economy," Neel Kashkari — a Republican – told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. last month.
An even more unlikely proponent of reining in big banks is Asher Edelman, the inspiration for Gordon Gekko in the movie "Wall Street." In a recent interview with CNBC, Edelman called for banks to return to lending, which stimulates middle class spending and the overall economy, rather than speculation, which pads the balance sheets of the big banks, not to mention the pockets of the top 1 percent.
While the Volcker Rule — the set piece of the Dodd-Frank reforms — bans commercial banks from using customer deposits for speculative trading on the bank's own accounts, numerous exceptions permit commercial banks to engage in risky investment banking activities they would be unable to carry out under Glass-Steagall. It's not difficult to conjure a scenario in which using customer deposits to bolster market bets causes a global financial contagion on the order of — or greater than — what we witnessed in 2008.
Some argue that Glass-Steagall is unnecessary because many of the financial institutions that triggered the financial crisis, such as Bear Stearns, were purely focused on trading and didn't have commercial banking arms. But those failed investment banks were able to take their risky gambles because they could easily borrow from hybrid entities such as Citigroup. And we should not forget that commercial-investment bank hybrids like Citigroup and Bank of America were ultimately some of the biggest recipients of bailout money.
The solution must be a stronger wall between commercial and investment banking. Senators Elizabeth Warren andJohn McCain have already proposed bipartisan legislation to bring back an updated, stronger version of the Glass-Steagall legislation specifically focused on banning publicly supported banks from engaging in the type of practices that created the financial crisis.
Afraid of Congressional gridlock? A President Clinton could even avoid a dysfunctional Congress altogether by working with bank regulators to create many of the same activity limitations through executive action — but only if she appoints strong regulators dedicated to reining in Wall Street.
With an increasingly likely path to the general election ahead of her, Hillary Clinton in the next few months must strive to shed her image of being beholden to wealthy, Wall Street interests. Reinstating Glass-Steagall is a good way to start.
By Anita Jain
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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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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
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Activists: US Justice Department Response to Baltimore Police Racism Falls Short
Activists: US Justice Department Response to Baltimore Police Racism Falls Short
The response by the US Department of Justice to exposing Baltimore Police Department (BPD) violations of citizens’...
The response by the US Department of Justice to exposing Baltimore Police Department (BPD) violations of citizens’ constitutional rights falls short of addressing the systemic problem of racism in US policing, activists said.
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Nina Tassler, Denise Di Novi Launch New Studio PatMa Productions
Nina Tassler, Denise Di Novi Launch New Studio PatMa Productions
The studio has already set up partnerships with a number of organizations promoting diversity, inclusion, and human...
The studio has already set up partnerships with a number of organizations promoting diversity, inclusion, and human rights, among them the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, the Center for Popular Democracy, and Planned Parenthood.
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Report: Starbucks falls short on vow to make workers' schedules more fair
Despite a public pledge last year to ease scheduling burdens for its baristas, Starbucks has fallen short of its...
Despite a public pledge last year to ease scheduling burdens for its baristas, Starbucks has fallen short of its commitment on a number of fronts, according to a new report released Wednesday based on interviews with the coffee chain’s workers across the country.
The report, titled “The Grind: Striving for Scheduling Fairness at Starbucks” (PDF), said Starbucks baristas across the country were still complaining that they often don’t receive their work schedules soon enough before shifts and that they are under pressure to avoid taking sick days.
The New York-based advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy produced the report, which cited survey data collected from more than 200 Starbucks baristas in 37 states and compiled by Coworker.org, an online platform that supports workplace rights.
“More than six months after Starbucks publicly recommitted to scheduling policies and mandated ten days’ notice, the scheduling issues they sought to address still persist in their frontline stores,” the report said.
After a New York Times investigation in August 2014 highlighted the scheduling travails of a Starbucks worker and single mother named Janette Navarro, the company announced that it would strive to improve work schedules for its employees, whom the company calls “partners.” The workers’ survey cited in Wednesday’s report was conducted in March this year.
“Taking care of our partners is a responsibility I take very personally,” Cliff Burrows, a high-level Starbucks executive, said in an internal company email at the time, according to the New York Times and other news outlets. Burrows was quoted as saying the company would work to aid “stability and consistency” in the schedules of its more than 130,000 baristas.
Burrows pledged then that the company would improve its scheduling software to make it easier on employees to plan their lives.
But the directive has only partially trickled down to the company's more than 12,000 U.S. locations, Wednesday's report says.
“They’ve made some improvements, but they’ve been minor,” said Carrie Gleason, co-author of the report. “A fair workweek at Starbucks exists in some stores,” she said, but “the issue is inconsistency.”
Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment on the report's findings before the time of publication.
The report said many baristas noted a high incidence of so-called “clopening” shifts, in which a person closes and opens in consecutive shifts, often leaving a span of only a few hours in which to return home before working again.
Last year Starbucks' Burrows pledged an end to the dreaded clopening shifts, saying “district managers must help store managers problem-solve issues specific to individual stores to make this happen.”
But the report indicated that such shifts were still widespread, with nearly a quarter of workers regularly getting them.
“I feel that baristas should have a minimum of 10 hours in between shifts. Everyone should have a fair chance to get home, settled, and be able to sleep for eight hours before having to get up for another shift," the survey report quoted an Illinois Starbucks worker as saying.
But the majority of workers who do clopening shifts are able to get fewer than seven hours of sleep, the report said.
“Because I was frequently scheduled for clopening shifts, I got just four or five hours of sleep a night. I was doing all I could to get ahead, but Starbucks’ scheduling practices made me question whether that was possible,” said Ciara Moran, a former Starbucks barista wrote in a petition she launched with Coworker.org, asking for further scheduling reforms.
The report released Wednesday said that 48 percent of surveyed Starbucks workers said they received their work schedules a week or less in advance, and that 40 percent reported they had experienced pressure to avoid taking sick days.
"Employees say that it can be extremely difficult to take sick days because they face pressure to work while sick, fear negative consequences or are forced to find their own replacement," the report said.
The report suggested that the experiences of individual workers varied considerably, depending on store locations and personnel.
“Many of us have different experiences at Starbucks, depending on our manager,” Moran said, asking others to support the cause “for consistent protections across the company, starting with healthy schedules across the board.”
“On a corporate level there isn’t that level of accountability. They’re not looking whether their polices are going far enough,” Gleason said. “For Starbucks, it can be a model for the industry for how to deliver a sustainable workweek.”
“I think they need to engage their workforce in a different way,” she said.
Source: Al Jazeera America
NYTimes Letter to the Editor: Deportations for Minor Offenses
New York Times - April 13, 2014 To the Editor: Re “...
New York Times - April 13, 2014
To the Editor:
Re “More Deportations Follow Minor Crimes, Data Shows” (front page, April 7):
It’s a mistake to focus the debate about immigration enforcement on the question of which immigrants are sufficiently “criminal” to deserve deportation. When the Obama administration talks about deporting people with convictions, they are talking about people who have already served their sentences for those convictions.
If you are a citizen who commits an offense, you pay the penalty issued by the criminal legal system, and then you are free to try to rebuild your life. If you are a noncitizen who commits that same offense and pays that same penalty, you can be subjected to the double punishment of permanent exile from your home and family.
This two-tiered system of justice is morally abhorrent regardless of how serious the underlying offense may have been. It’s an unfairness compounded by the well-documented unfairness of the criminal legal system itself, which disproportionately targets poor people and minorities.
Let’s not rely on our corrupt criminal justice system to justify the operations of our corrupt immigration system.
EMILY TUCKER Brooklyn, April 7, 2014
The writer is staff attorney for immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Popular Democracy.
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For Safer City Schools, More Counselors, Fewer Cops
Our city is facing a tough question: how do we make schools safer? New York City schools are on the precipice of...
Our city is facing a tough question: how do we make schools safer?
New York City schools are on the precipice of returning to ineffective policies and practices like more policing and metal detectors that have harmed the students who are most in need. The city could and should instead take this opportunity to move further towards school culture and climate priorities that are designed to meet the social, emotional, and mental health needs of young people.
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