Texas Cities Exploring Creative Ways to Protect Residents from Deportation
Texas Cities Exploring Creative Ways to Protect Residents from Deportation
Sarah Johnson, director for Local Progress — a national network of elected officials — says she is seeing momentum for these kind of policies. “There is an interest from all of our members in...
Sarah Johnson, director for Local Progress — a national network of elected officials — says she is seeing momentum for these kind of policies. “There is an interest from all of our members in Texas and in other states across the country in really pursuing the strongest possible policies to protect immigrants at this time,” Johnson says.
Read the full article here.
J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, and More Just Stopped Using ‘On-Call’ Scheduling
J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, and More Just Stopped Using ‘On-Call’ Scheduling
Several major retailers have in recent weeks relieved their workers from having to spend their mornings waiting for their boss to tell them if and when to show up for work.
...
Several major retailers have in recent weeks relieved their workers from having to spend their mornings waiting for their boss to tell them if and when to show up for work.
J. Crew recently joined a group of several other top retail chains in dropping on-call scheduling—the system that requires workers to make themselves available for a shift with no guarantee of actually getting any clocked hours. Under on-call scheduling, workers generally must be ready to be called in for a shift just a few hours beforehand, and often that meant wasting valuable time by not being called in at all. In addition to J. Crew, Urban Outfitters, Gap, Bath & Body Works, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Victoria’s Secret, and various affiliated brands, have announced that they’re phasing out on-call nationwide.
The abandonment of on-call at these high-profile chains—affecting roughly 239,000 retail sales workers, according to the Fair Workweek Initiative (FWI)—represents growing backlash against the erosion of workers’ autonomy in low-wage service sectors. The pressure for reform has been stoked by media scrutiny, labor protests, and litigation, and an investigation into on-call scheduling in New York retail stores by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
But the fight for fair labor practices isn’t over in retail. Carrie Gleason, director of the FWI, a project of the advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy, says nominally phasing out on-call at a workplace may simply lead to a “whack-a-mole situation,” pushing managers to find other ways to drive workers into erratic and unstable schedules. Your supervisor might not call you in two hours before a shift starts, but might still abruptly cancel your pre-scheduled shift, or text on an “off” day to pressure you to sub for a coworker. Some workplaces might have a set start time for shifts, but then pile on on-call extended hours, so the workday expands unexpectedly. Across the service sectors, Gleason says, “there’s not a real commitment around standards around what workers experience as a predictable schedule.”
Nationwide two-thirds of food service workers and over half of retail workers have at most a week’s notice of their schedules. Part-timers and black and Latino workers disproportionately work irregular schedules.
According to National Women’s Law Center, over half of workers surveyed
“work nonstandard schedules involuntarily because they could not find another job or ‘it is the nature of the job.’” The “nature of the job” reflects the nature of our current economy, which has redefined labor as a seller’s market for employers, while union power and labor protections have disintegrated.
FWI campaigns both for stronger regulation and industry-led reforms. It presses for “high-road workweeks,” under which workers and employersnegotiate equitable scheduling systems, which can streamline operations and reduce turnover, while giving workers more predictable hours, along with flexibility to change schedules on a fair, voluntary basis. (Yet there’s good reason for skepticism about voluntary corporate “social responsibility”: in a recent study of Starbucks’s scheduling reforms, workers nationwide reported irregular and unpredictable shifts, despite the company’s promises of more humane schedules.)
On the regulatory front, as reported previously, some state laws and San Francisco’s new Retail Workers Bill of Rights provide reporting time pay(compensation for unplanned shift changes), and safeguards for stable hours.
California, New York, and other states have recentlyintroduced fair-scheduling legislation, including reforms that provide workers with negotiating mechanisms at work to make scheduling procedures more democratic, and limits on consecutive hourly work shifts.
Nationally, the proposed Schedules That Work Act would provide similar protections for advanced notice, reporting time pay and the right to bargain schedule changes.
The basic principle that drives labor advocates is predictability in both time and earnings, which counterbalances the service industry trend toward precarious low-wage jobs, pushing workers into part-time, temporary, or unstable contract work.
The opportunity cost of abusive schedules drives financial insecurity, impedes career advancement, and hurts families. Erratic hours can interfere with childcare arrangements and medical care, and are linked to increased marital strain and long-term problems with children’s behavioral development.
Sometimes, it’s just humiliating. Like when Mary Colemangot sent home from a shift at Popeyes and ended up effectively paying not to work. As a campaigner with FWI, the grandmother described the experience as a theft of precious time and wages: “When I get to work only to be sent home again, I lose money because I have to pay for my bus fare and hours of time traveling without any pay for the day.” Under a reporting time pay system, however, she might instead have been reimbursed for showing up, instead of bearing the cost of her boss’s arbitrary decisions.
“The idea is that if you need this level of flexibility for your workforce, that’s something that has value, being able to have a nimble workforce that’s ready when you need them,” Gleason says. In fact, honoring the workers’ overall role in an organization, not just hours clocked, is akin to the salary system. White-collar professionals often voluntarily exceed a 40-hour workweek and feel duly rewarded with their annual compensation package.
A fairer schedule system isn’t difficult to imagine if we start with the premise of honoring workers’ time in terms commensurate with the value of what they’re expected to produce—whether it’s impeccable service at peak-demand time, or a good cappuccino. And that’s why unions and other worker-led organizations, which understand a job’s real meaning in the context of workers’ lives, have historically been instrumental in shaping wage structures through collective bargaining. Though unions have withered, smart policy changes and grassroots organizing networks are carving out more autonomy and control for labor over the course of a workday.
The byzantine, unstable scheduling systems that dominate low-wage industries aren’t really “the nature” of today’s jobs so much as the result of a society that deeply undervalues workers’ lives, whether that’s the value of a parent’s time with her children, or the time invested in a college degree. In a “just in time” economy, employers put a premium on consumer convenience and business logistics. But as boundaries blur between work and home, the “new economy” challenges workers to finally reclaim their stolen time.
Source: The Nation
Protesters Swarm The Capitol Days After Obamacare Repeal Falls Again
Protesters Swarm The Capitol Days After Obamacare Repeal Falls Again
Although Obamacare repeal appears to be down for the count, Democratic leaders encouraged activists to keep up the pressure at a rally outside the Capitol on Wednesday.
And judging by the...
Although Obamacare repeal appears to be down for the count, Democratic leaders encouraged activists to keep up the pressure at a rally outside the Capitol on Wednesday.
And judging by the protests at individual Senate offices shortly afterward, champions of universal coverage do not need much convincing.
Read the full article here.
Pilot Program to Represent Detainees Facing Deportation
New York Law Journal – September 30, 2013, by Mark Hamblett and Jeff Storey -
Aiming to foster the rights of immigrants and to keep their families together, two legal services...
New York Law Journal – September 30, 2013, by Mark Hamblett and Jeff Storey -
Aiming to foster the rights of immigrants and to keep their families together, two legal services organizations, the Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services, have been picked for a unique pilot project to represent indigent detainees facing deportation.
The two organizations will form the New York Immigrant Defenders, which will take on 166 cases in the next year at the Varick Street Immigration Court.
The program will be funded by a $500,000 grant made available by the New York City Council in June.
Robin Steinberg, executive director of the Bronx Defenders, said that her organization created an in-house immigration practice more than a decade ago when it realized that nearly one-third of its clients were facing adverse immigration consequences from even minor brushes with the law.
“The Bronx Defenders joining forces with the Brooklyn Defender Services to create NYID is a natural and necessary step in ensuring that all residents of New York City—no matter where they were born—have their day in court with lawyers who will fight for their right to stay here, with their families and in the communities they now call home,” she said in a statement.
Lisa Schreibersdorf, executive director of Brooklyn Legal Services, agreed that working with immigrants was “very much in line with our mission.”
Schreibersdorf said that she had told her daughter after the group’s selection Thursday that the new program was part of the most groundbreaking public defense development of her generation—the extension of the right to counsel to immigrants.
“This is a groundbreaking program. There is no program of this sort anywhere else in the country. It’s a program that aligns American values with the reality on the ground when it comes to immigrants and due progress,” said Angela Fernandez, executive director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, one of the groups that advocated for creation of the program.
According to Brittny Saunders, senior staff attorney for the Center for Popular Democracy, another leading advocate for the effort, potential clients will be screened only for economic need, with anyone making under 200 percent of the poverty limit making the cut.
The poverty limit currently is $11,400 for a single person and $23,550 for a family of four.
Other factors, such as the strength of immigrant cases, will not be considered.
Oren Root of the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit and nonpartisan center for justice issues, said the program will stress the importance of keeping families together. In many cases, the detainee has lived in the country for years, is the family’s principal wage earner, serves as the caretaker for family members and has children born and raised in the United States.
The one-year pilot project will be administered by Vera, which will coordinate the delivery of legal services and analyze the data that emerges from the effort.
Root said that Vera is “thrilled” to be working with “such high-caliber, innovative organizations as Brooklyn Defender Services and the Bronx Defenders.”
Providing support for the effort to represent immigrant families has been the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Center at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.
Most immigrants cannot afford representation, and attorneys and bar groups have become increasingly concerned about the dire consequences they face
Schreibersdorf said studies show that detainees with a lawyer are “more likely to identify valid immigration remedies.”
She cited one case of a 17-year-old on a minor offense handled by her agency. His attorney dug into the defendant’s family background and discovered that his parents had been naturalized, and thus he was a citizen himself.
“Without a lawyer, that kid would have been deported,” she said.
Source
Alaska NEA votes to oppose arming teachers
Alaska NEA votes to oppose arming teachers
Wuerth, who describes himself as an educator, activist, and writer, was among the teachers who marched with students during the “March for Our Lives” student walkout in March. The notice that was...
Wuerth, who describes himself as an educator, activist, and writer, was among the teachers who marched with students during the “March for Our Lives” student walkout in March. The notice that was sent about the civil disobedience training that he will teach said that Jennifer Flynn Walker a trainer from Center for Popular Democracy -Director of Mobilization and Advocacy for CPD will also be a trainer and that actions they plan include congressional and senatorial offices.
Read the full article here.
AFT’S $2.6 Million Bayou State Pay
AFT’S $2.6 Million Bayou State Pay
Tuesday’s Dropout Nation analysis of American Federation of Teachers’ 2014-2015 financial disclosure to the U.S. Department...
Tuesday’s Dropout Nation analysis of American Federation of Teachers’ 2014-2015 financial disclosure to the U.S. Department of Labor certainly offered plenty of insight on how it is buying influence on the national level. But the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union’s applies its influence-buying most-fervently on behalf of its locals, especially in big cities that are the battlegrounds in the battle over the reform of American public education. This is especially clear in Louisiana, where the union has spent $2.6 million to oppose the reforms in New Orleans and the rest of the state that run counter to the union’s very mission.
Since the damage from Hurricane Katrina (and the longstanding failures of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to ensure that levies surrounding the city could stand up to potential disaster) a decade ago, the Crescent City has become the epicenter of one of the nation’s most-important systemic reform efforts. Thanks to the Louisiana state government’s takeover of failing schools run by the Orleans Parish district, and the move to transform them into charter schools (as well as open new ones), New Orleans has now become the model of sorts for expanding school choice. Charter schools serve 79 percent of the city’s children (as of 2012-2013), according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
The transformation hasn’t been perfect by any means. There is still lingering anger among residents over how the state essentially implemented the reforms without their input. The quality of public education, though improved, is still nowhere near it should be, especially in Orleans Parish-run schools. As the Center for Reinventing Public Education also points out, the need for building out the infrastructure for families to exercise choice in informed ways also remains; this includes addressing transportation issues that result in kids traveling for as long as two hours from one part of town to another just to go to school.
All that said, the results for kids have been amazing. As Tulane University Professor Doug Harris determined in his assessment of public school performance in New Orleans, the improvements in student achievement were greater than those made by traditional districts in other cities and even better than those that could be achieved by tactics traditionalists tend to tout such as class-size reduction schemes. This is good for kids in the Crescent City and for their families, who have been subjected to the abuse of both the educational and criminal justice systems of the Bayou State for far too long.
None of this is good news to the ears of AFT, its Crescent City local, United Teachers New Orleans, or the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, the union’s state affiliate. After all, if children in New Orleans are getting higher-quality education through a Hollywood Model style of delivering teaching and curricula, than there is no need to keep the obsolete traditional district model upon which AFT (along with National Education Association) derive its influence and ideology. As it is, charters have become the dominant players in cities such as Detroit, and Washington, D.C., in which AFT operates. Given that unlike NEA, AFT has little penetration in suburbia, propagandizing against growth of charters in New Orleans — along with stopping the expansion of choice — is critical to the union’s long-term survival.
It also about the cold hard cash and power of its local. Before Katrina, UTNO had a stranglehold over education policies and practices within Orleans Parish, and had the ability to forcibly collect dues from 7,500 teachers and other employees working for the district. But with all but a smattering of schools still operated by Orleans Parish — and charter schools having the ability to not bargain with the union if they so choose — UTNO no longer has the bodies or the money necessary to oppose systemic reform. Some 1,000 teachers and others now likely make up the union’s rank-and-file, 87 percent less than the numbers on the rolls a year before Katrina reached landfall. This, in turn, isn’t helpful to AFT, whose own revenue is derived from the per-capita tax collected from every teacher and school employee compelled to pay into its units.
But AFT isn’t just concerned about New Orleans alone. After all, the Bayou State has been among the foremost states in expanding school choice and advancing systemic reform. This includes outgoing Gov. Bobby Jindal’s successful expansion four years ago of the state’s school voucher program, which now serves 7,400 children attending 141 private and parochial schools. Eight seats on the Bayou State’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, which oversees the department run by Supt. John White, are also up for grabs. There’s also the possibility that the Recovery School District, which oversees systemic reform in New Orleans, could also end up taking over failure mills in Baton Rouge and other cities. Particularly in Louisiana’s capital city, just 50 percent of kids attending traditional public schools there met proficiency targets in 2013-2014.
Another hotbed, until recently, was Jefferson Parish, whose board was under the control of a reform-minded majority. Back in 2012, the board decided to ditch its contract with AFT’s Jefferson Federation of Teachers and negotiate for a deal that would give the district more flexibility in operation. This didn’t sit too well with the unit, which then sought national’s help in putting the district back under its thumb.
So AFT has put a lot of energy and money into demonizing Crescent City reform efforts — and stopping reform in the rest of the state.
The union subsidized UTNO to the tune of $134,593 in 2014-2015, four times levels given to the unit during the previous year. At the same time, the union kicked another $59,294 into the organizing project it controls along with the local; the union also paid teachers’ union-oriented law firm Rittenberg, Samuel & Phillips $57,654 to handle a variety of lawsuits, including one filed against Orleans Parish over the layoff of black teachers working in the district before Katrina reached shore. Over the past two years alone, AFT poured $754,878 into propping up UTNO and helping it rebuild its membership.
AFT’s work in New Orleans goes beyond subsidizing UTNO. The union has spent big on events and meetings. This includes dropping $80,490 on meeting space and “reimbursable expenses” at the swanky Loews New Orleans Hotel, $9,840 at the more-humble Homewood Suites, and $7,700 at one of the several Marriott hotels in town. Expect AFT to have dropped even more money this fiscal year for this week’s “Advancing Racial Justice” gathering, which will feature several of the union’s prime vassals, including the Schott Foundation for Public Education, Center for Popular Democracy and the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, all of whom are making the trip as condition of being beneficiaries of the largesse the union gets forcibly out of the pockets of teachers. AFT also spent $10,843 on materials printed by Simmons Press, a local outfit, for print materials, paid $7,500 to Lamar Media for billboards, and dropped $17,921 on ads in the Times-Picayune.
But never forget that AFT will play all the political angles. This includes going so far as to attempt to unionize the very Crescent City charters it opposes. The union subsidized its New Orleans Charter Organizing Project to the tune of $244,070 in 2014-2015. As with a similar effort in Los Angeles, AFT hopes that it can get teachers working in charters to forget all the bad things the union says about them and let it collect dues out of their precious paychecks. Lovely.
Meanwhile AFT put plenty of dough into efforts in the rest of the Bayou State. It subsidized Louisiana Federation of Teachers and its various political action funds to the tune of $462,965. While 13 percent less than in 2013-2014, it still means that AFT has sunk $995,790 into the state affiliate over the past two years. The union also paid $20,000 to lobbyist Haynie & Associates for its work at the statehouse. AFT also backed the East Baton Rouge Federation of Teachers and its organizing project to the tune of $222,420, while spending another $10,501 on so-called “Member-related costs” at a Doubletree hotel in the city. In the state’s northeast sector, AFT subsidized an organizing project focused on helping an affiliate in Monroe at a cost of $104,363. In Caddo Parish, where the AFT got involved in stopping an effort to create a new school district, the union put $224,002 into an organizing project there.
AFT’s biggest spend –and best bang for the buck — came in Jefferson Parish, where its local had lined up a slate of candidates to take out the reform-minded majority. The union put down $669,135 to fund a so-called “Committee for School Board Accountability”, which ran adds backing the local’s favored candidates. It also subsidized an organizing project there (which, as you would expect, was partially tied to rallying members to vote on Election Day) to the tune of $186,837. The union also sent paid $23,911 for hotel and meeting space at a Sheraton Hotel in Metairie, where the district’s offices are located, as well as $5,553 for room-and-board at an Extended Stay hotel.
It was money well-spent. By last December, three of the four candidates AFT and Jefferson Federation of Teachers backed won seats, giving the union a five-to-six-seat majority on the nine-member board. AFT President Rhonda (Randi) Weingarten celebrated the victory with a press release as well as two tweets on Twitter. Eight months later, the district struck a new contract with the AFT local, albeit one that is a mere seven pages long (versus 100 pages for the previous deal), and requires teachers to resolve differences with school leaders before going to the union for help. At the end of the day, a contract with the district means dollars that continue to flow into AFT’s coffers. And for the union and its 229 staffers earning six-figure salaries, that’s always a good thing.
You can check out the data yourself by checking out the HTML and PDF versions of the AFT’s latest financial report, or by visiting the Department of Labor’s Web site. Also check outDropout Nation‘s new collection, Teachers Union Money Report, as well as for the collection,How Teachers’ Unions Preserve Influence, for this and previous reports on AFT and NEA spending.
Source: Dropout Nation
DACA activists protest at the Capitol: "We shall not be moved"
DACA activists protest at the Capitol: "We shall not be moved"
Demonstrators gathered on Capitol Hill on Feb. 7 to demand a budget deal that includes an alternative for DACA, an Obama-era program that protects roughly 690,000 undocumented immigrants.
...
Demonstrators gathered on Capitol Hill on Feb. 7 to demand a budget deal that includes an alternative for DACA, an Obama-era program that protects roughly 690,000 undocumented immigrants.
Watch the video here.
Communities Lose When HUD Sells Loans to Wall Street
The Hill - October 2, 2014, Rachel Laforest & Keven Whelan -James Cheeseman and his mother, Constance, have lived in their Rosedale, New York home for the past five years. Like many Americans...
The Hill - October 2, 2014, Rachel Laforest & Keven Whelan -James Cheeseman and his mother, Constance, have lived in their Rosedale, New York home for the past five years. Like many Americans, they struggled during the recent economic downturn and have been trying to get a modification on their mortgage.
The bank that held their mortgage JPMorgan Chase, agreed to provide borrowers like them relief under a multi-billion dollar settlement with the Justice Department last year. But the Cheesemans' mortgage was insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), part of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). And before they could work out a deal with Chase, the bank had the FHA sell their loan to a new investor as part of a program, called the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program or DASP.
The program is supposed to have a dual purpose. First, the federal agency hopes to be able to use the funds received by DASP to right the balance sheet of the Federal Housing Authority’s mortgage insurance program. Second, the program is intended to “encourage public/private partnership to stabilize neighborhoods and home values in critical markets.”
According to HUD’s own data and reports, DASP is meeting the first objective and failing miserably at the second. Almost all loans sold through the DASP program went to for-profit firms and only a tiny handful (around 3 percent) of families whose loans were sold ended up with deals that kept them in their homes.
For homeowners like the Cheesemans, that failure has real-life consequences. When HUD, through DASP, sold their mortgage to another servicer, the Cheesemans lost their protections under the FHA program mandating an effort to modify the mortgage. Their new servicer, BSI Financial, was under no requirement to consider a mortgage modification. BSI doesn’t even participate in HAMP, a post-bailout program for major banks that facilitates loan modifications to keep families in their homes. The result? The Cheesemans and thousands of other homeowners throughout the country are at serious risk of losing their home.
A recent report, Vulture Capital Hits Home: How HUD is Helping Wall Street and Hurting Our Communities, published by the Right to the City Alliance and Center for Popular Democracy cited serious problems with DASP. First, the current structure of most DASP auctions considers only the highest bid without weighting the bidder’s track record of good outcomes for homeowners and communities. Secondly, the groups found that the current outcome requirements and reporting structure fail to hold purchasers accountable. Third, the current pre-sale certification phase does not ensure that the FHA modification process has been followed.
Organizations called “Community Development Financial Institutions” with a track record of helping consumers stay in their homes stand ready to be a part of an improved version of this program. If a reformed DASP program incentivized it, investors with a social purpose could also make money by negotiating win-win, sustainable mortgage modifications with homeowners.
But community-friendly organizations can’t even get to the table with the auction overheated by well-heeled Wall Street firms and private equity “vulture capital” firms.
When the highest bidder places profits first, homeowners and neighborhoods come last. The result: more and more American homeowners losing their homes to unnecessary foreclosures and more and more corporate landlords leasing homes at rates few of these former homeowners, let alone anyone else, can afford.
All of this is the consequence of a program developed and managed by HUD, a federal agency with a stated mission to advance affordable housing and sustainable communities.
This week, HUD plans to sell off another 15,000 American homes to Wall Street investors. These are 15,000 families, 15,000 neighbors and 15,000 futures. Many if not all of these homeowners will lose their share of the American dream as a result of these auctions.
HUD can and should halt this week’s sale and must implement the necessary reforms that have been proposed by a range of community and advocacy groups.
As we consider the results of the economic collapse and what has been called by some a recovery, it is important to note once again that many neighborhoods, especially in communities of color, haven’t bounced back.
Too often our government has put the interests of Wall Street above the needs of struggling families. HUD can do better by fixing the “Distressed Assets” program now.
Laforest is executive director of the Right To The City Alliance, based in New York City. Whelan is National Campaign director of the Home Defenders League. He lives in Minneapolis.
Source
US jobless claims at 40-year low: Is the labor market getting better?
The number of Americans applying for new unemployment benefits last week dropped to its lowest point in more than 40 years, signaling that the labor market may be stronger than many economists had...
The number of Americans applying for new unemployment benefits last week dropped to its lowest point in more than 40 years, signaling that the labor market may be stronger than many economists had predicted. But the positive labor numbers do not mean that wage stagnation for those workers who do have a job is likely to end anytime soon.
Initial jobless claims fell last week to a seasonally adjusted 255,000, which is the lowest level since November 1973, the Labor Department reported on Thursday.
Summer is a volatile time for reliable unemployment numbers because it is generally the season that some large car assembly plants close for annual retooling. Because such stoppages don't affect all companies, it's more difficult for the Labor Department to accurately adjust its numbers.
Even with that caveat, Thursday's report points to a growing downward trend of unemployment that indicates a strengthening labor market.
The four-week moving average, which is less subject to weekly fluctuations and a better measure of labor market trends, fell 4,000 to 278,500 last week. The average level of claims has been near that mark since early April.
The numbers are being released as the movement for raising the minimum wage gains ground nationally. With the federal minimum wage at $7.25 an hour, American cities including Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in the past year have moved to raise their minimum wages to $15 an hour.
On Wednesday, the District of Columbia authorized a petition drive that could put the $15-an-hour minimum wage on the ballot in November 2016 elections. At the same time, a New York panel recommended that fast-food workers at chain restaurants statewide have their wages raised to $15, a move widely expected to be approved by the state's acting labor commissioner.
But that doesn't mean you should immediately march into your bosses' office and demand a raise.
While job growth has picked up and unemployment is continuing its seven-year downward trend, it has not been matched by corresponding wage increases, indicating that the labor market is still predominantly skewed to employers and not workers. Wages have only risen about 2 percent during the past 12 months.
"As an economist watching the economy, we're somewhat surprised that wages pressures have been so muted to this point," IHS Economics senior director Jim Diffley told Reuters. "We do expect an acceleration and in fact think it necessary to continue the recovery."
According to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, the majority of Americans have faced wage stagnation for the past 35 years, and it is a major factor the rise of family income stagnation and income inequality. Furthermore, the failure of wages to grow highlights gender and racial wage gaps.
United States Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez said that shifting wages out of its stagnation is still a major part of the “unfinished business” of the nation’s economic recovery from the Great Recession.
“The rising tide of this economic wind at our back has to lift more boats,” he told The New York Times.
Optimistic signs of labor market growth have been tempered with a note of caution from the Federal Reserve, which is monitoring labor market conditions, including wage stagnation, to determine whether to raise short-term interest rates.
”While labor market conditions have improved substantially, they are ... not yet consistent with maximum employment,” Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen told members of Congress last week.
Labor groups are calling on the Fed to hold off on rate hikes and focus on pursuing full employment in order to boost both job and wage growth.
“Raising interest rates too soon will slow an already sluggish economy, stall progress on unemployment, and perpetuate wage stagnation for the vast majority of American workers. This harm will be disproportionately felt by women and people of color, who are concentrated in the most vulnerable strata of the workforce,” said a report released by the Center for Popular Democracy and a coalition of labor groups.
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Fatal Construction Accident Shows Higher Risks Faced by Latino Workers
Truthout - March 31. 2015, by Danica Jorden - Monday morning, March 23, 2015, in Raleigh, North Carolina, was a mild and slightly overcast day. The first signs of spring were beginning to emerge...
Truthout - March 31. 2015, by Danica Jorden - Monday morning, March 23, 2015, in Raleigh, North Carolina, was a mild and slightly overcast day. The first signs of spring were beginning to emerge after an uncharacteristically chilly winter for the capital of the Southern state. But the recent cold weather had hardly hampered the construction of several high-rise office and condo projects, unprecedented for the generally low-rise city.
The 12-story Charter Square was one such project, and on March 23, just before 11 am, workers were busy on its south wall, with two mast climbers attached to its all-glass surface. Mast climbers are a scaffolding device employing a thin, central steel column stuck to the side of a structure, along which a horizontal platform that ferries workers up and down, so that they can install the glass panels future occupants will gaze from when the building is finished. On this day, the mast climbers were to be dismantled, with the building scheduled for opening in May.
About halfway up, the mast suddenly peeled off the side of the building, sending José Erasmo Hernández, José Luis López Ramírez and Anderson Antones de Almeida to their deaths, and Elmer Guevara to the hospital in serious condition. The four men were working for a tangled web of contractors and subcontractors, and the Department of Labor's representative on the scene said that contractors themselves inspect mast climbers, which are not specifically regulated by the state.
North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health's Kevin Beauregard indicated that OSHA, the federal agency, also does not have specific guidelines regarding mast climbers. He added that he did not expect to find that the scaffolding had been previously inspected. "There's no possible way our inspectors can go to every site,"Beauregard said. "We have over 200,000 work sites in North Carolina. We have approximately 75 to 100 inspectors employed. So it's physically not possible to go to every single site."
(Photo: Danica Jorden)
2014 was the North Carolina construction industry's most deadly year, according todata from the state Department of Labor. Nineteen people lost their lives working in construction in 2014, or 43 percent of the 44 work-related deaths statewide. Falls accounted for 13 of those deaths. The death rate was nearly double that of 2013.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Latinos are overrepresented in the construction industry, holding 24 percent of all construction jobs. But visits to construction sites in North Carolina reveal that Latinos are far more present at the front lines: scaling walls, down in holes and operating dangerous equipment. A closer look at the statistics shows that Latinos make up only 14 percent of first-line supervisors and 9 percent of managerial positions. Furthermore, BLS statistics show that from 2010 to 2013, fatalities for Latino construction workers rose 20 percent, while during the same period, deaths for non-Latinos fell.
In 2013, the AFL-CIO published a report on Latinos in the construction industry in New York. "A disproportionate number of Latinos and immigrants are disproportionately killed in fall accidents in New York, according to a new study by the Center for Popular Democracy, because they work in construction in relatively high numbers; are concentrated in smaller, nonunion firms; and are over-represented in the contingent labor pool," according to the report.
In New York, skyscrapers have been around for more than a century, and laws were written to regulate the construction industry and protect workers high up in the sky. The longstanding Scaffold Law was enacted in 1885, but is recently under attack. Construction companies have been working hard to amend it, saying it is one-sided in not protecting the industry from workers' own negligence. According to a 2013New York Times article:
They argue that the law is antiquated and prejudicial against contractors and property owners, and essentially absolves employees of responsibility for their own accidents, leading to huge settlements. The payouts, they contend, have in turn led to skyrocketing insurance premiums that are hampering construction and the state's economic growth.
But also in 2013, industry publication Durability + Design conversely reported that the industry had just been successful in reducing its penalties regarding a significant 2009 mast climber accident that resulted in fatalities.
Nearly five years after three EIFS applicators fell to their deaths from a high-rise construction site in Austin, TX, a judge has ordered the scaffolding company in charge to pay $17,150 in fines. Mast Climber Manufacturing Inc. d/b/a American Mast Climbers, of Whitney, TX, contested the 2009 citations (eight serious, one willful) issued for safety hazards after the accident. The penalties originally totaled $86,800. In the Jan. 29 ruling, Administrative Law Judge Ken S. Welch affirmed the willful violation and two serious violations involving lift equipment set up at the site. The parties agreed to settle three serious violations, and the judge vacated the rest.
In right-to-work North Carolina, people in general have more limited recourse in the workplace and the courts, and immigrants may be at a distinct disadvantage when asserting their rights. A 2012 study entitled "Employer provision of personal protective equipment [PPE] to Latino workers in North Carolina residential construction" states its "results suggest that the residential construction subsector generally fails to provide [Latino] workers with PPE at no cost, as is required by regulation."
Working side by side on a narrow platform high above the street on March 23, the men who lost their lives and their injured companion worked for at least three different companies. Brazilian Anderson Almeida and Elmer Guevara from El Salvador worked for Associated Scaffolding and Equipment, while José Hernández of Honduras and José Luís López from Mexico worked for Juba Aluminum/ Janna Walls and Kea Contracting. These subcontractors were employed by the site's general contractor, Choate Construction. The property is owned by Dominion Realty.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), using multiple subcontractors is a way to hide worker abuse as well as shield companies from culpability.
[W]orkers who try to stand up for their rights often find themselves frustrated by multiple layers of subcontractors and middlemen - an arrangement that seems designed to insulate corporations at the top from accountability for the mistreatment of workers. The same phenomenon was seen repeatedly in New Orleans with contractors working to clean up the city after Hurricane Katrina.
In a federal ruling, the SPLC won a case against Del Monte on behalf of agricultural workers, successfully arguing that "... the labor contractor and the workers were really employees of the Del Monte subsidiary and that the company was indeed responsible for any wage abuses that could be proven. The federal ruling was an important milestone for workers, but the fact remains that most Latino farmworkers in the South have little or no access to legal representation."
Speaking to television news station Notícias 40 in Durham, Olvia López tearfully explained that her husband José Luís, father of their three children, had expressed fear about the conditions at his job, but felt he had no choice but to go to work. The station also indicated that José Hernández leaves behind a wife and two young children who depend upon him in Honduras, where he had intended to return in November, while Anderson Almeida had a partner, child and stepchild. The family of Elmer Guevara has instructed the hospital to withhold information about their loved one at this time.
In a growing memorial, a cardboard sign erected near the Charter Square buildingread, "While we run from a corrupt government, we put our lives on the line in the chase of the American dream. RIP fellow dreamers."
It may have been placed by the NC Dream Team, made up of Dreamers, like the brave Viridiana Martínez, Loida Silva and Rosario López, who held a hunger strike in 2010 not far from the site of the accident. After Viridiana qualified for the Dream Act, or DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), she went on to report from inside an immigration detention facility and helped identify and liberate women who were eligible for US residency. Dreamers are the children of immigrants who were born abroad but grew up in the United States and want to continue their education as Americans.
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