Industry Attacks on ‘Scaffold Law’ Put Construction Workers on Shaky Ground
In These Times - March 12, 2014, by Michelle Chen - New York City’s tens of thousands of construction workers face a precarious landscape at work. Teetering at the edge of rooftops, sidestepping...
In These Times - March 12, 2014, by Michelle Chen - New York City’s tens of thousands of construction workers face a precarious landscape at work. Teetering at the edge of rooftops, sidestepping mammoth cranes and noisy bulldozers, and navigating through half-collapsed walls and chemical-laden debris, they’re surrounded by hazards day in and day out. Yet many workers remain silent about unsafe conditions. For them, the risk of retaliation outweighs the risk to life and limb.
Given these hazards, one might assume that demanding employers take responsibility for worker safety is about as basic a precautionary measure as a hard hat. Yet, construction industry lobbyists are working hard to gut the Scaffold Law, a keystone piece of occupational safety legislation that has for more than a century added an extra layer of accountability for firms that fail to protect workers from harm. Complaining that the law cuts into their bottom line, opponents have in recent months pushed for reform legislation in Albany that could prove disastrous for the workers most at risk: non-union Asian and Latino workers doing small-scale and informal building jobs already off the regulatory radar of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
The Scaffold Law, a state law on the books since 1885, states that worksites above the ground “shall be constructed, placed and operated as to give proper protection to a person so employed.” The law holds owners and contractors liable for injuries that result as a violation of those standards, and allows employees to sue for damages if they can demonstrate that such a violation occurred and caused the injury in question. Advocates say that the law thereby promotes safety standards such as provision of appropriate training and protective equipment, as well as checks to ensure that worksites are structurally sound.
Opponents say New York’s law is a frivolous measure unique to a notoriously litigious city. But in reality, lawmakers passed the Scaffold Law in response to alarming reports of injuries and deaths caused by unsafe conditions at building sites, including faulty scaffolds. And in fact, other states have passed similar safety laws over the years.
Illinois’ occupational safety record worsened after the state repealed the law in 1995. According to one analysis by a trial lawyers' group, “In 2004, the incidence rate of falls from scaffolding/staging in the construction industry in Illinois was more than triple the national rate.”
The firms and business groups, including the Associated Builders and Contractors, American Insurance Association and, in a nod to diversity, Association of Minority Enterprises NY, mobilizing against the law blame it for excessive litigation and insurance costs, saying that it puts undue emphasis on the employer rather than the “personal responsibility” of the worker. They say the law should be rewritten to allow for consideration of “comparative negligence,” to take into account workers’ alleged carelessness. Proposed changes to the law would explicitly direct juries to consider the degree to which the worker caused the accident. The idea is to create more legal wriggle room to limit the company's legal and financial liability toward victims.
Critics point out that under the current law, the courts are already tasked with adjudicating these factors in civil suits when determining whether the employer is legally at fault for a safety failure, since the law addresses only proven violations of safety codes. But more importantly, critics argue that the concept of “comparative” responsibility is absurd in light of the outsized power imbalance between construction workers and bosses.
Of course, the Scaffold Law provides just a thin layer of protection against an endemically oppressive labor market.
But the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a New York City-based advocacy group, argues that the Scaffold Law helps “protect workers from dangers at work that lead to disparate outcomes based on race, ethnicity, or language.”
Occupational hazards, as well as labor abuse, are rife across the construction industry, particularly for more casual, unregulated work, such as the day laborer jobs that proliferated in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy and the small-scale contractor projects on private suburban homes. Falls from heights made up over one-third of construction worker deaths in 2012, and construction workers suffer injuries that are more frequent and severe than workers in many other private-sector industries, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to an analysis by CPD, in New York City between 2003 and 2011, a stunning 74 percent of fatal construction-site falls investigated by OSHA involved Latino or immigrant workers, exceeding their representation in the general population and the construction workforce. Most occurred on smaller, non-union worksites, where undocumented labor is typically concentrated.
Other research from advocacy groups and occupational-safety authorities suggests Latino immigrant workers are deterred from speaking out about unsafe conditions, in part due to limited English ability or fear of exposing their immigration status. That compounds the oppression of economic precarity and discrimination; it’s hard to feel empowered to challenge your working conditions when you’re “off the books.”
CPD’s analysis highlights the perilous tightrope these workers traverse each day. In one case narrative in the report, two men were working at a height of 16 feet, and “They were moving and adjusting the scaffold when employee #1 fell. Employee #1 was not tied off to his lifeline. Employee #1 was pronounced dead at the hospital.”
Those who survive such workplace accidents may never fully heal. In an interview with WNYC last year, Pedro Corchado recalled an accident while working on a ladder in the Bronx in 2008. “The ladder collapsed on me,” he said. “I fell about 11 feet or so to the concrete floor. I suffered neck and lower back injuries that will be with me the rest of my life.”
Under the proposed reform, these workers might come under scrutiny for being “negligent”—Why did he get on a shaky ladder in the first place? Why wasn’t his lifeline securely tied? Advocates counter that question’s about the employer’s negligence—Who was charged with overseeing the worksite? Did inadequate equipment or poor management place workers in harm’s way?— ultimately hold more weight.
“The fact of the matter is, you could be doing everything right,” CPD Director of Strategic Research Connie Raza tells Working in These Times. “If you don't have the right equipment, you're not going to be able to keep yourself safe in every circumstance that comes up. And it is the owners' and the contractors' responsibility to make as safe a workplace as possible, but certainly as safe a workplace as legally required."
As for the business case against the law's cost, it is true that some of this uniquely litigious city’s largest civil settlements in recent years came from suits involving construction-related scaffold and ladder injuries.
But this is offset by the permissiveness of the federal regulatory environment. According to the AFL-CIO, the average penalty assessed for a “serious” violation of an OSHA standard, such as failing to provide appropriate mechanical safeguards or protective gear—in New York in 2012 was $2,164. (Criminal prosecutions are virtually unheard of, and the agency's inspection and enforcement capacity is severely hampered by chronic understaffing).
While the contractors at the top of the construction industry complain of lawsuits and insurance costs, Razza says the suggested reforms “would shift responsibility away from owners and contractors who control the work site, to workers who don't, and who are often really in a relationship where they feel threatened if they come forward with complaints ... The construction and insurance industries are trying to push back and save money, and the reason that the law is so important is that it saves lives."
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Another Victory for Workers in Seattle—This Time It’s Their Schedules

Another Victory for Workers in Seattle—This Time It’s Their Schedules
Although she was hired on as a full-time employee at Domino’s Pizza, Crystal Thompson had a schedule that became erratic and unreliable shortly after she began working there in 2009. One day she’d...
Although she was hired on as a full-time employee at Domino’s Pizza, Crystal Thompson had a schedule that became erratic and unreliable shortly after she began working there in 2009. One day she’d start at 9 a.m. and work until 9 p.m.; and then she’d get a call asking her to work the morning shift the next day.
“It’s so hard trying to plan your life.”
The single mother of three relied on the job to pay over $1,200 a month in rent, utilities, food, and child care, but during the most volatile weeks, she was lucky if she got even 20 hours in shifts. Moreover, it was difficult to find a babysitter or make doctor’s appointments when she sometimes received her schedule only a day in advance. At a loss, Thompson moved one of her children into the living room and found a roommate to shoulder the part of the rent that she couldn’t afford.
“It’s crazy,” Thompson says about her schedule. “It’s so hard trying to plan your life.”
But thanks to an ordinance passed in Seattle last month, Thompson and other workers in the service and retail industries will finally have the freedom to think more than one day ahead. The new law, known as “secure scheduling,” will take effect in July 2017 and will impact large retail, service, and drinking establishments with a minimum of 500 workers globally, as well as full-service restaurants with more than 500 workers and 40 or more locations.
The measure requires that employers post work schedules at least two weeks in advance, offer additional hours to existing workers before hiring new employees, and provide at least a 10-hour break between closing and opening shifts. Thompson says that anything less than that doesn’t leave enough time to rest, shower, care for her children, and be alert enough to work another shift.
The Seattle measure comes on the heels of similar legislation passed in San Francisco in 2014, which labor activists call a game changer for the labor movement. It provides that hourly workers have the ability to better budget their expenses, take on second jobs, and plan for education and family time.
Workers in the service and retail industries will finally have the freedom to think more than one day ahead.
Working Washington, a Seattle-based labor advocacy organization that led the efforts, attests that, much like legislation for a $15 minimum wage that passed in Seattle in 2014, predictable schedules will likely spread to other cities and states too. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced that he and other city officials plan on drafting legislation to ensure secure scheduling for fast-food workers.
Thompson’s plight is common for workers in the service and retail industry nationally, as shown in a report co-authored by associate professor Susan Lambert at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration. About 3 out of 4 early-career adults in hourly jobs report fluctuations in the number of hours they’ve worked in a month, and nearly half of part-time workers said that their employers gave them a week’s notice or less when their schedules changed.
Photo courtesy of Working Washington.
The problem is especially severe among African Americans and Latinos in Seattle. Another study, this one commissioned by the city itself in July, revealed that the two groups were the most likely to receive their schedules with less than a week’s notice, be required to be on-call, or to be sent home during slow shifts. They also reported higher rates of having difficulty attending classes and working second jobs because of their schedules.
Sejal Parikh, executive director of Working Washington, says that erratic scheduling has proliferated in the past two decades with the advent of scheduling software programs. After her group pushed for a $15 minimum wage and won, a campaign for secure scheduling seemed like a natural next step, she says. “The $15 minimum wage is about money, and the secure scheduling campaign is really about power.”
A stable schedule allows workers to spend time with their families, have hobbies, and further their careers.
But the measure is not immune to opposition. The advocacy group Washington Retail Association issued a press release in August stating that the measure undermines the fluctuating nature of business and would lead to layoffs. But Parikh counters that companies are already staffing leanly and that there’s usually not an excess of workers during one shift. A secure schedule simply allows a barista who lives an hour away from work to get eight hours of sleep at home instead of sleeping inside of the coffee shop, she contends.
It’s important that the more than 75 million people who work hourly jobs nationally have some say in their own schedule, says Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy. A stable schedule allows workers to spend time with their families, have hobbies, and further their careers. Gleason adds that the legislation “ensures that Seattle workers can have a voice” in determining how many hours they work, which is something she hopes catches on in other cities.
In Seattle, Thompson is already planning out the time she’ll enjoy once she has a more predictable schedule. She is now working part time because she’s caring for her 9-month-old baby, but Thompson says she plans on going back to school to get a degree in Spanish and to become an interpreter. The new ordinance will also allow her to figure out child care and to budget for the rent in her new Section 8 housing, which takes 30 percent of her income.
More than anything, Thompson says she’s looking forward “to more peace of mind.”
By Melissa Hellmann
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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 named the next president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
...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
Taking Selfies and Talking Inequality, has Janet Yellen Gone Too Far?
PBS - November 21, 2014, by Simone Pathe - One recent brisk morning in the nation’s capital, about 30 community leaders and workers from around the country, all clad in matching green T-shirts,...
PBS - November 21, 2014, by Simone Pathe - One recent brisk morning in the nation’s capital, about 30 community leaders and workers from around the country, all clad in matching green T-shirts, posed for a group photo on Constitution Ave. Ten guards huddled at the top of the walkway separating them from the Federal Reserve.
The workers weren’t protesting. They weren’t sightseeing. They were there to meet Janet Yellen.
“That’s a big deal,” said former Fed vice chair Alan Blinder.
Friday marked the third time in the past month that Yellen has been in the public eye for engaging with the public, or at least with economic issues much more on their minds than, say, quantitative easing.
First, it was her speech at a conference on inequality organized by the Boston Federal Reserve. On that same trip, she met with the jobless at a nearby community center. And then, she posed for selfies.
The string of incidents has raised questions about the public face of the Fed, and when it’s appropriate for Yellen, an unelected government official with enormous power, to inject herself into public debates that may have political overtones.
“I see no harm in her talking and listening to people,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “But those situations can magnify and invite off-the-cuff remarks.”
Yellen certainly doesn’t want to be a politician, said Alan Blinder, vice chair of the Fed under Bill Clinton. But making those off-the-cuff remarks is an “occupational hazard” of the position, he added, especially when testifying in front of lawmakers. Some chairs have handled it better than others, and both Blinder and Strain agree that Yellen’s comments about inequality were slight as indiscretions come. Alan Greenspan was famous for weighing into policy debates too freely, as when he endorsed George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security in 2005. That behavior inspired Ben Bernanke to shy away from any incursions into the public dialogue unrelated to monetary policy.
A Rare Meeting
Bridging the gap between the public dialogue and what’s arguably the most powerful economic institution in the world is exactly what Yellen has been doing.
While her remarks about inequality have sparked the most controversy, her invitation to a coalition of community organizers, labor leaders, low-wage workers, faith leaders and liberal economists is the farthest step she’s taken toward involving the public in the Fed and its policies. She didn’t just meet the “Fed Up” campaign, as they call themselves, in a spare conference room. They sat in the inner sanctum of one of the most cloistered agency’s of the U.S. government — the board of governors meeting room, where the Federal Open Market Committee meets in private to decide monetary policy.
Fed Up’s tagline — “What recovery?” — illustrates the disconnect between the two-thirds of voters who told exit pollsters earlier this month that the economy is getting worse and headline economic figures that are growing stronger. Unemployment is now as low as it was before the recession. But wages are barely keeping pace with inflation, while unemployment for some demographics and geographic regions remains much higher than the average. Nationally, African Americans were unemployed at a rate of 10.9 percent in October. In Atlanta, the unemployment rate for blacks is nearly 14 percent, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, one of the parties to the Fed Up campaign.
Workers didn’t travel to Washington to protest Yellen, said Amador Rivas, of Harlem; they just wanted her to hear what’s happening on the ground. Jean Andre echoed those remarks. Andre, a member of New York Communities for Change, used to do locations support in the film industry. “You know, one of those names at the end of the movie that no one reads,” he said. He lived a middle-class lifestyle. But after the financial crash, he lost his home and struggled to find a full-time job to pay for a mortgage modification.
Jean Andre, a member of New York Communities for Change, speaks at an Oct. 14 press conference before Fed Up’s meeting with Yellen. Photo by Simone Pathe.
To some on the right, though, Yellen’s meeting looked like it was going beyond a simple meet-and-greet with the public. American Principles in Action blasted her for discussing monetary policy “with representatives of an extreme political view,” and requested a similar meeting for a chance to express their concerns with low interest rates.
Fed Up does have an agenda when it comes to monetary policy: they want the Fed to keep interest rates low to stimulate jobs and, they argue, higher wages. They’d also like the Fed to buy municipal bonds as a form of lending to cities and states.
Their campaign took off earlier this month with a call to democratize the very table at which they met Friday. In early 2015, the presidents of the regional Federal Reserve banks in Philadelphia and Dallas are stepping down, and Fed Up called on the board of governors and regional banks to release the names of possible successors and to give the public input, if not the opportunity to serve on the regional boards. (The Philadelphia Fed on Friday morning released the name of the search firm vetting candidates, which has established an email to receive public inquiries.)
“We had Wall Streeters in the building all the time,” Blinder said, reflecting on his time as vice chair. This “signals the Fed is as interested in these groups as the financial markets.”
“The Fed is too important of an institution to be insulated from the voices and perspectives of working families,” said Ady Barkan, an attorney at the Coalition for Popular Democracy, the group that organized the meeting.
That’s why Friday’s meeting with Yellen was so significant for them. “The people who are the true consumers who finance the economy finally have a chance to have input,” Andre said. The meeting was a significant event for the Fed, too. “We had Wall Streeters in the building all the time,” Blinder said, reflecting on his time as vice chair. This “signals the Fed is as interested in these groups as the financial markets.”
A Central Bank Can Only Do So Much
Even if their message resonates, though, the Fed, and Yellen as its public face, does not necessarily have authority to address every plight of working Americans. Yellen has herself said many times that wages are still too low in this recovery. “If they’re trying to elicit sympathy that wage earners aren’t making enough,” Blinder said about Fed Up, “they’re preaching to the converted.”
The “Fed Up” campaign gathers for an Oct. 14 press conference outside the Federal Reserve before meeting with Chair Janet Yellen. Photo by Simone Pathe.
The central bank has no control over wages, except in the sense that wages typically rise in a tighter labor market, said Blinder. Holding short-term interest rates low is supposed to boost employment, and it has — unemployment has dropped from above 10 percent to below 6 percent — but so far, that’s done little for wages.
As for buying municipal bonds to lend to cities and states in need, Blinder doesn’t think that’s the Fed’s business, even if it does have the legal authority to do so. Its dual mandate to maintain full employment and stable prices is about national economic policy, he said, and there’s no way it would be able to choose which states’ bonds to buy.
The Fed and Inequality
Likewise, the Fed has no policy tools to directly address economic inequality. That’s why Yellen’s Oct. 17 speech, more than anything else, has left Blinder, a close friend, and Strain, who still thinks she’ll “make a great chair,” feeling uneasy.
Of course, the Fed isn’t totally removed from the debate over inequality. The central bank conducts research on the subject as an economic phenomenon, and the Boston Fed organized the entire October conference at which Yellen spoke around the topic.
In fact, plenty of the Fed’s critics accuse the central bank and its bond buying program of contributing to the divide between Wall Street and Main Street. “The fact that quantitative easing has driven up the stock market to what some would call dizzying heights does in fact exacerbate wealth inequality,” Blinder said. But to him, that’s just collateral damage. “If the instruments you have are limited and work through financial markets,” he added, “that’s going to be a side effect.”
But reduced income inequality can also be a side effect of the Fed fulfilling its mandate. Blinder pointed to the second Clinton Administration as a period when plentiful jobs — “if your breath showed in the mirror you could get a job” — slowed the growth in the gap between top and bottom earners. (Clinton’s economic legacy — including his administration’s impact on inequality — is a subject of continuous debate.)
The “Fed Up” campaign isn’t interested in side effects, though. Their mission statement singles out the Fed for its ability to make a difference in the lives of working Americans: “President Obama, Congress, and most state legislatures have failed to strengthen the economy — and have often made things worse. But the Federal Reserve has tremendous power over the economy.”
That power is precisely why Blinder and Strain agree that the Federal Reserve must be insulated from politics. Talking to labor, community leaders and Wall Street is important, said Blinder, but the transparency for which Bernanke, and now Yellen, has been lauded is about monetary policy, not taxes or inequality.
A Step Too Far?
For many conservatives, Yellen crossed the line with her Boston remarks, especially when she said, “The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me.”
To Strain and others on the right, Yellen sounded far too Democratic in her concerns about inequality, as she did when she alluded to universal pre-k, another policy priority often associated with the Democratic Party.
Did Yellen betray herself as too blue? Richard Reeves, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, doesn’t think so. The substance of Yellen’s speech offered more to conservatives, he wrote, particularly her acknowledgement of business ownership and inherited wealth as “building blocks” of opportunity in the United States.
Republicans in Congress may not see it that way, though, which is another reason Yellen’s remarks worried Strain. He’s afraid they’ll only fuel GOP efforts to rein in the central bank. There’s a reason Congress doesn’t have oversight over monetary policy: it doesn’t mix well with politics, said Blinder. “You’d get too high inflation because there’s the temptation, among all these politicians, to juice up the economy just before elections.”
For Fed Up organizers, though, Yellen’s meeting with them last Friday is not a sign she’s identifying with either party, but that the Fed can be, in the words of the Kansas City Rev. Stanley Runnels, of Communities Creating Opportunity, “an unconventional source of hope” for millions of Americans.
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Groups demand recovery money for Puerto Rico
The Center for Popular Democracy and Make the Road CT plan to deliver postcards at the Bridgeport office of U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4, demanding Congress "have a heart" and send an aid package to...
The Center for Popular Democracy and Make the Road CT plan to deliver postcards at the Bridgeport office of U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4, demanding Congress "have a heart" and send an aid package to Puerto Rico with no additional oversight or austerity measures.
"The efforts also preview a larger mobilization on the 6-month anniversary of Hurricane Maria, when hundreds of activists from across the country will travel to Washington, D.C. to demand a comprehensive aid package for Puerto Rico that does not impose more austerity, oversight or privatization," said Julio López Varona, a spokesman for the group.
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