NYC’s Indian-American Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs strives for inclusive city
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NYC’s Indian-American Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs strives for inclusive city
The seeds of social activism were planted early in Nisha Agarwal’s bloodstream. The current Commissioner of Immigrant...
The seeds of social activism were planted early in Nisha Agarwal’s bloodstream. The current Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office took up causes and showing her community organizing skills since she was a little girl.
Her parents, psychologist mother Rita Agarwal, and father, Suresh Agarwal, a nuclear engineer, encouraged her to speak her mind and back it with action, she recalls. Agarwal is among numerous Indian-Americans of this generation who have brought their social activism into public office and policy reform from inside, after banging on doors from the outside.
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CFPB says Education is obstructing access to Navient records
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CFPB says Education is obstructing access to Navient records
YOUTH ‘LOBBY DAY’ LOOKS TO DISCIPLINE GUIDELINES: More than 100 young activists are expected to gather in front of the...
YOUTH ‘LOBBY DAY’ LOOKS TO DISCIPLINE GUIDELINES: More than 100 young activists are expected to gather in front of the Education Department today and call on Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to maintain Obama-era guidelines aimed at addressing racial bias in school discipline policies. DeVos is chairing a White House school safety commission that’s considering whether to rescind the guidelines over concerns that they burden school districts and potentially keep violent students in the classroom. The activists are also expected to visit the offices of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), urging them to sign a pledge and “prohibit federal funding for any school policing or criminalization of schools and invest in restorative justice, and mental health supports and resources for schools, students, and families,” according to a release. The “youth-led lobby day” is being organized by left-leaning groups including the Center for Popular Democracy, Make the Road New York and the Urban Youth Collaborative.
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Lax Pa. Oversight of Charters Robs Taxpayers of $30M, Groups Say
Philadelphia Inquirer - October 1, 2014, by Martha Woodall - A new report from a trio of activist groups says...
Philadelphia Inquirer - October 1, 2014, by Martha Woodall - A new report from a trio of activist groups says Pennsylvania charter schools have defrauded taxpayers of more than $30 million because oversight is so lax.
The researchers call for a temporary moratorium on new charter schools, contending agencies are not able to adequately monitor the 186 charters that already exist.
The study by the Center for Popular Democracy; Integrity in Education; and Action United of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh was to be released Wednesday.
The report urges the state Attorney General's Office to review all Pennsylvania charters for potential fraud. It asks the legislature to require charters to undergo regular fraud-risk assessments and fraud audits. And it suggests that until the law is changed to require such actions, charters should voluntarily undergo them and make the findings public.
Researchers said most of the $30 million in fraud that has been detected since the state's charter law was passed in 1997 was not uncovered by charter-oversight offices but by whistle-blowers and the media, including The Inquirer. They said the total amount of misspent funds was likely far larger.
"The current oversight system in Pennsylvania falls miserably short when it comes to detecting, preventing, and eliminating fraud," said Kyle Serrette, education director at the Center for Popular Democracy in Washington.
The center receives funding from foundations, including $990,000 this year from the Ford Foundation. It also receives a small amount of support from teachers' unions, and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, is on the organization's board.
Robert Fayfich, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, said that while his group supports accountability, the report makes "sweeping conclusions about the entire charter sector based on only 11 cited incidents in the course of almost 20 years."
". . . Fraud and fiscal mismanagement are wrong and cannot be tolerated, but to highlight them in one sector and ignore them in another indicates a motivation to target one type of public school for a political agenda," he said in a statement.
Pennsylvania school districts paid $1.5 million to charters that enrolled 128,712 students in 2012-13. More than 67,000 Philadelphia students attend 86 city charters.
Sabrina Stevens, executive director of Washington-based Integrity in Education, said: "With over $1 billion going to charter schools in Pennsylvania, it's time for charter schools to be held to the same standards of transparency and oversight that public schools are held to."
State Auditor General Eugene DePasquale said it's "good that they put this together," adding that Serrette's group had testified at a charter-oversight hearing his office held in March. "To me, the more voices on this, the better. I think in the next term in the legislature, there is going to be a charter-reform bill move forward."
City Controller Alan Butkovitz said the report echoed concerns he raised in 2010, when his office released its own oversight study that highlighted several problems his office found at city charters.
"We certainly agree with the need for greater oversight and auditing," Butkovitz said. "That's been one of our constant themes."
The instances of fraud cited in the new report include cases where charter officials were indicted or pleaded guilty and instances uncovered in state audits.
Examples include Nicholas Trombetta, founder and former CEO of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School in Midland, who is awaiting federal trial in Pittsburgh on charges that he diverted $8 million in school funds for personal use.
The tally also includes $6.3 million that federal prosecutors allege Dorothy June Brown defrauded from the four Philadelphia-area charters she founded.
But the authors give special attention to another recent case involving a city charter: New Media Technology Charter School in the city's Stenton section. The former CEO and founding board president went to federal prison in 2012 after admitting they stole $522,000 in taxpayer money to prop up a restaurant, a health-food store, and a private school they controlled, and for defrauding a bank.
From 2005 to 2009, when the crimes were occurring, third-party auditors hired by New Media failed to spot the fraudulent payments.
"Fraud detection in Pennsylvania charter schools should not be dependent upon parent complaints, media exposés, and whistle-blowers," the authors wrote. Rather, they urged, the system should be proactive and use forensic accounting methods.
According to the report, Pennsylvania's charters are vulnerable to fraud and financial mismanagement because school districts and state offices charged with overseeing them lack resources and staff.
For example, although the cash-strapped Philadelphia district has about half of the state's charters, it has only two auditors and a small office to monitor 86 schools, the report said.
"We agree in the need of greater oversight and a deeper look into the health of charter schools," district spokesman Fernando Gallard said, "and we have taken steps to do so."
Although the district's charter office at times had only two or three staffers, Gallard said, it now has six and is seeking an executive director.
Researchers also said that charters lack strong internal fiscal controls and that their boards have not adopted strict management policies.
And even though the charters are required to have annual audits performed by outside firms, researchers said, those audits rely on general accounting techniques and are not designed to detect fraud.
"The current system of oversight relies heavily on information provided by charter schools themselves and traditional audits that are designed to check accuracy rather than detect and prevent fraud," the report said.
The report said taxpayers cannot afford to lose another $30 million in misspent charter funds. "While the reforms proposed will require additional resources," the authors said, "they represent a smart investment in our communities and in our future."
Researchers said the study was the first in what would be a state-by-state investigation of oversight of charters in the 42 states that have them.
Serrette said researchers decided to begin with Pennsylvania because the timing seemed right. He pointed out that both DePasquale in Harrisburg and Butkovitz in Philadelphia have highlighted the fraud risks in charter schools. And State Rep. James R. Roebuck Jr. (D., Phila.), minority chairman of the House Education Committee, introduced a bill last year to tighten charter controls.
Said Serrette: "The stars are aligning."
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Hillary Clinton lays out sweeping voting fights vision
In a major speech on voting rights Thursday, Hillary Clinton ...
In a major speech on voting rights Thursday, Hillary Clinton laid out a far-reaching vision for expanding access to the ballot box, and denounced Republican efforts to make voting harder.
Speaking at Texas Southern University in Houston, Clinton called for every American to be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18 unless they choose not to be. She backed a nationwide standard of at least 20 days of early voting. She urged Congress to pass legislation strengthening the Voting Rights Act, which was gravely weakened by a 2013 Supreme Court ruling. And she slammed restrictive voting laws imposed by the GOP in Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin, which she said affect minorities and students in particular.
“We have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what’s really going on in our country,” Clinton said, “because what is happening is a sweeping effort to dis-empower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other.”
“We should be clearing the way for more people to vote, not putting up every road-block anyone can imagine,” Clinton added.
From a political perspective, forthrightly calling out Republican voting restrictions and advocating greater access to voting will likely help Clinton shore up key sections of her base – minorities and students in particular. And it could put the GOP on notice that further efforts to make voting harder may backfire by giving Democrats a tool to motivate their supporters.
Clinton, the prohibitive front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, called out by name several of her potential 2016 rivals – Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie – for supporting restrictive voting policies. She said Republicans should stop “fearmongering about a phantom epidemic of voter fraud.”
“Finally, a presidential candidate is acknowledging the rampant voting discrimination that has surged since the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013,” Wade Henderson, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told msnbc. “Voting is a cornerstone of our nation’s commitment to democracy, and Clinton’s acknowledgment of its importance is noteworthy.”
Clinton said relatively little about the most hot-button voting issue, voter ID – an approach that also appears politically savvy. Despite evidence that as many as 10% of eligible voters, disproportionately minorities, don’t have the ID required by strict versions of the law, polls show voter ID is generally popular.
Instead, Clinton sought to move the voting rights debate for 2016 toward more advantageous terrain for Democrats and voting rights supporters: expanding access to voting and voter registration, to make it easier to cast a ballot and bring more Americans into the process.
Noting that between one quarter and one third of all Americans aren’t registered to vote, Clinton called for an across-the-board modernization of the registration process. The centerpiece: universal automatic voter registration, in which every citizen is automatically registered when they turn 18 unless they affirmatively choose not to be, effectively changing the system’s default status from non-registered to registered. Oregon passed such a law earlier this year, and several other states, including California, are considering the idea.
“I think this would have a profound impact on our elections and our democracy,” Clinton said.
Clinton also said registration should be updated automatically when a voter moves, and called for making voter rolls more accurate secure. And she said Republican efforts to restrict voter registration, seen in Texas, Florida, and other states, disproportionately affect marginalized communities, and students.
Around 50 million eligible voters aren’t registered, according to a recent study by the Center for Popular Democracy, based on Census Bureau data. That’s three times as many as the number who are registered but stay home.
Clinton said the nationwide early voting standard of at least 20 days should also include evening and weekend voting, to accommodate those with work or family commitments.
“If families coming out of church on Sunday are inspired to go vote, they should be free to do just that,” Clinton said, in a reference to the Souls to the Polls drives that are popular in Africa-American communities, in which people vote en masse after church.
Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina — all Republican-controlled states — have cut their early voting periods in recent years, with the latter two states also eliminating same-day voter registration. And a third of all states offer no early voting at all. Democratic efforts to create or expand early voting have been killed, or allowed to languish in committee, by Republicans in at least 15 states, eight of them in the south, according to a tally compiled by the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
In addition, Clinton called for Congress to fully implement the recommendations of a bipartisan presidential panel on voting released last year, which included online voter registration and establishing the principle that voters shouldn’t wait more than 30 minutes. And she suggested that laws barring ex-felons from voting should be liberalized, adding her voice to a growing push against felon disenfranchisement laws.
And Clinton lamented the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act.
“We need a Supreme Court that cares more about protecting the right to vote of a person to vote than the right of a corporation to buy an election,” she said.
Asked by msnbc on a call with reporters whether it was realistic to propose legislation, given the record of the Republican-controlled Congress, a senior official with the Clinton campaign pointed to ”encouraging signs” in the states, arguing that such changes could be implemented at the state level with federal support.
On voter ID, Clinton’s criticism of Texas’s law was centered on a provision that allows concealed gun permits but not student IDs, suggesting partisan bias. She didn’t offer the kind of broader condemnation of ID laws per se often voiced by voting and civil rights groups. And in criticizing Wisconsin and North Carolina’s slew of voting restrictions, she focused on cuts to early voting rather than those states’ ID laws.
Hours before Clinton spoke, a de facto arm of her campaign that provides pro-Clinton information to the media sent out an email documenting the GOP 2016 hopefuls’ records of supporting restrictive voting policies, which it contrasted with Clinton’s expansive approach.
Clinton’s speech comes less than a week after her campaign’s top lawyer, Marc Elias, filed suit to challenge Wisconsin’s voting restrictions. Last month, Elias filed a similar lawsuit challenging Ohio’s early voting cuts.
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted called the lawsuit “frivolous” in a statement to msnbc and said Elias is wasting Ohioans’ tax dollars. “Hillary Clinton is calling for a national standard for early voting that is less than what Ohio currently offers,” Husted said. “Given this fact, I call on her to tell her attorneys to drop her elections lawsuit against Ohio.”
The Clinton campaign has said it’s not officially involved in the lawsuits but supports them.
In choosing to give the speech in Texas, Clinton was going into the belly of the beast. In addition to the ID law, which has been struck down as racially discriminatory and is currently being appealed, Texas also has the strictest voter registration rules in the country. And last week, a voting group alleged that the state is systematically failing to process registration applications, msnbc reported.
Clinton has long had a strong record on voting issues. As a volunteer for the 1972 George McGovern presidential campaign, Clinton worked to register Latino voters in Texas. And in 2005 as a senator, she introduced an expansive voting bill that would have made Election Day a national holiday and set standards for early voting.
At Texas Southern, Clinton received the Barbara Jordan Leadership Award, named for the crusading civil rights leader who was the first southern black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Source: MSNBC
Nationwide #DisneyLetHimGo Protests Call on Disney CEO to Leave Trump Council
NATIONWIDE - Today the Center for Popular Democracy and its affiliates including Organize Florida and ACCE, together...
NATIONWIDE - Today the Center for Popular Democracy and its affiliates including Organize Florida and ACCE, together with national allies Color of Change, CREDO, Free Press, MoveOn.org, People’s Action, SumOfUs.org and Working Families Party protested Disney locations around the country. Following the lead of Orlando Disney workers and Orlando community groups, the social justice groups called on Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger to step down from his role as a member of Trump’s Business Advisory Council. The coalition collected over 390,000 petitions to Disney on behalf of people from across the country who demand Iger leave the council.
“Disney has the power to take a stand against Trump and support a happy ending for all families. They must follow in Uber’s footsteps and quit the economic advisory council instead of collaborating with Trump and his authoritarian, hateful, anti-immigrant regime,” said Jennifer Epps-Addison, Network President and Co-Executive Director for the Center for Popular Democracy.
Racial and social justice activists say this is only the first step in what will be a continuous fight to protect the health and well-being of all people — including immigrants, people of color, minimum wage workers, and the LGBT community during the Trump administration. Disney is one of more than a dozen other corporations still on Trump’s economic advisory council. CPD aims to hold each and every one of them accountable.
“Donald Trump has built his brand and presidency by disparaging Latino, Muslim, and Black communities as well as women and people with disabilities. As a corporation that has touted itself as valuing diversity, inclusion and family I would think that CEO Bob Iger would seek to distance himself, not embrace or enable Trump and Steve Bannon’s bigoted agenda. But instead, Iger and other CEOs continue to place access to power over people’s lives under the false pretense of influencing positive change. To be clear- any CEO who thinks they can disrupt Trump and Bannon’s agenda is either disingenuous or fooling themselves” said Rashad Robinson, Executive Director of Color Of Change.
"By standing with Trump, Iger has mistaken his role as the CEO of the Walt Disney Company. He cannot just represent the business concerns of the company for trade and tax regulations, but must also represent the ethics and values that the Disney brand sells to families around the world. It’s time that our corporations put immigrants, workers and refugees first" said Yulissa Arce, Central Florida Director, Organize Florida.
"It is appalling that any leader would be willing to advance company interests on the backs of the people most threatened by Trump’s hate,” said Heidi Hess, Senior Campaign Manager at CREDO. "CEOs like Disney’s Bob Iger who serve on Trump’s advisory councils have to make a choice: Stand up for morality and human dignity or side with Trump’s racist, misogynistic and xenophobic hate."
The announcement comes after successful protests around the country led to the resignation of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick from the Trump business council. Last week, drivers and other community organizations organized #UberRidesWithHate protests at Uber offices in New York City, San Francisco, and New Orleans, among other nationwide locations, demanding that the ride-sharing company stop collaborating with the Trump administration.
"Disney is known for it's fun-loving family movies. But there's nothing fun about what the Trump Administration is doing to immigrant families. Disney can sing 'It's a Small World' all they want, but until Bob Iger steps down from Trump's economic advisory council, they'll be singing out of tune, “ said Liz Ryan Murray, Policy Director at People's Action.
"Disney CEO Bob Iger is validating Trump’s violent agenda by serving on his advisory council.” explained Nicole Carty, Campaign Manager for SumOfUs.org. “We know Iger supports immigration, and has employees that will be impacted by the ban. By remaining on Trump’s advisory board Iger is signaling his own interests and profits are more important than the basic human rights of his employees, customers and vulnerable refugees. There is no neutral,” added Carty. “Either Iger steps off the advisory committee, or he is complicit in the violence and chaos that Trump’s administration is creating.”
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www.populardemocracy.org
Center for Popular Democracy promotes equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with innovative base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD builds the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial justice agenda
Schedule Rules Prove Difficult to Implement
San Francisco — San Francisco, the country’s premier laboratory for new Internet services, is also used to innovating...
San Francisco — San Francisco, the country’s premier laboratory for new Internet services, is also used to innovating in municipal regulation.
But in its latest experiment, it’s starting to find that legislating good corporate behavior isn’t as easy as pressing a button on your smartphone.
In July, the city started implementing a first-in-the-nation law aimed at curtailing the trend toward “just-in-time” scheduling, where managers call in employees to work on short notice. The new measure requires large-chain retailers — such as Safeway and Walgreens — to publish schedules at least two weeks in advance and to compensate employees with “predictability pay” if they make changes less than a week ahead of time. It also mandates that additional hours be offered to existing employees first before new hires are made, and that part-time workers be paid at the same rate as people who work full-time.
So far, it’s been easier to publish schedules than live up to the spirit of the law.
“The two-week notice seemed to be instituted right away, but the other stuff is lagging,” said Gordon Mar, director of San Francisco Jobs With Justice, a labor-backed group that pushed for the “Retail Workers Bill of Rights” and has been monitoring its implementation.
The sluggish response may be because fines don’t kick in until Oct. 3; the city is still hashing out the rules. But the spotty compliance so far highlights the difficulty of attempts to mandate worker-friendly practices — especially the kind that touch the most fundamental aspects of business operations, rather than those that simply require higher pay and better benefits.
San Francisco employers fought the new ordinance, but couldn’t prevent its passage. Now, they complain it’s affecting service.
“We’re hearing from members in San Francisco that it really is not working well at all,” said Ronald Fong, president of the California Grocers Association. Stores can’t always predict surges in foot traffic, which might be brought on by a sunny day, leaving managers without the option to bring in more staff. That was a problem during the heat wave that swept over San Francisco this summer.
“Supplies weren’t able to get out to the shelves,” Fong said. “It just kind of snowballed, and our customers have a bad experience, or the stores lose sales.”
Some businesses don’t mind the rules in principle, but object to the red tape. “Everybody pretty much operates on a predictive schedule,” said Bill Dombrowski, president of the California Retailers Association. “But the process of implementing this, with offering the employees hours in writing and waiting three days for a response, it’s a lot of government intrusion into very minute detail.”
Also, not all industries schedule their workers in the same way. Milton Moritz is president of the National Association of Theatre Owners’ California and Nevada chapter, and said the theater business is by nature unpredictable, making the new law particularly difficult to comply with.
“We might not know until the Monday before the Friday a film shows, and even then we’re hiring, firing, scheduling people based on the business that film’s going to do,” Moritz said. “This ordinance flies in the face of all that. It really complicates the issue tremendously.”
The San Francisco ordinance hasn’t just been irritating for big companies. Some workers grumble the law discourages employers from offering extra shifts on short notice, because they would have to pay the last-minute schedule change penalty — even if workers would be happy for the chance to pick up more hours.
Rachel Deutsch, a senior staff attorney with the Center for Popular Democracy who has been helping local jurisdictions across the country craft fair-scheduling legislation, said that’s something that might change in future iterations.
“I think that’s the thing with any policy where it’s the first attempt to solve a complicated economic problem,” Deutsch said. “It’s been a learning process.”
So far, fair scheduling laws aren’t spreading as quickly as minimum wage and paid sick leave laws. A statewide bill in California failed a couple weeks ago, and no other local ordinances have passed besides San Francisco’s, though there are active campaigns in several cities including Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.
Meanwhile, several companies have acted on their own to curb some of the practices that workers have found most disruptive, like on-call shifts, where workers have to be available even if they aren’t ultimately asked to work. But in some cases — like that of Starbucks, which committed to eliminating many of those practices — those voluntary changes haven’t been any more effective than government mandates.
Erin Hurley worked at Bath & Body Works and campaigned for an end to on-call shifts. After she left the job, parent company L Brands said it would stop the practice at Bath & Body Works as well as another of its chains, Victoria’s Secret. But Hurley said she’s heard from current workers that managers are still doing effectively the same thing, by asking employees to stay a little longer.
“On-call shifts were replaced with shift extensions,” said Hurley. “Basically what L Brands did was change the name of the practice.” Keeping people on-call is very convenient for employers, and letting it go can be easier said than done. L Brands did not respond to a request for comment.
Still, advocates in San Francisco think the Retail Workers Bill of Rights has already done some good, and will be more effective when the city’s enforcement kicks into high gear — just like overtime rules did, when companies got used to obeying them.
Take Michelle Flores, 21, who has worked part time at Safeway for two years to support herself while in going to college. Unpredictable schedules made that difficult: She would only know her shifts a few days beforehand, which sometimes didn’t leave her enough time to hit the books.
“I would study from midnight until 5, 6 a.m., sleep for two or three hours, and then go to the exam,” said Flores, 21, who attends San Francisco State. This year, she expects that to change. “If I know that I have a shift scheduled, I’ll just study another day,” Flores said.
Also, the law came with some funding for community organizations to make employees aware of what workers are entitled to. That has ancillary effects — like getting people interested in joining a union, which can be better equipped to make sure companies are following the rules.
“It just creates an opportunity to talk to more workers about their rights under the law, and that leads to conversations about other issues in the workplace,” said Gordon Mar, of Jobs with Justice. “And that could lead to getting organized.”
Source: Valley News
Coalition Calls for Fed Focus on Full Employment, Higher Wages
The Dallas Morning News - March 4, 2015, by Sheryl Jean - A coalition of community and labor groups in Texas is calling...
The Dallas Morning News - March 4, 2015, by Sheryl Jean - A coalition of community and labor groups in Texas is calling for the Federal Reserve to focus on full employment and higher wages for blacks and others in poor neighborhoods who have been left behind in the economic recovery.
The group also wants the board of the Fed’s regional bank in Dallas to keep that in mind as it searches for a replacement for Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher, who will retire March 19.
Liberal activists across the country on Thursday plan to protest outside seven Fed regional banks, including New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis, to highlight high unemployment among minority groups and to urge officials not to raise interest rates yet and instead focus on full employment and higher wages. A demonstration also was planned at the Dallas Fed’s office on the edge of downtown, but was canceled due to a forecast for bad weather.
Still, activists in Dallas plan to call attention to a new report showing that the nation’s economic recovery hasn’t reached many minority communities. Falling jobless rates maskhigh black and long-term unemployment and racial inequality in wages in Texas and across the country.
The 84-page report by the Center for Popular Democracy and the Economic Policy Institute shows that Texas’ average jobless rate was 5 percent in 2014, but it was 9.5 percent for blacks. In the Dallas metro area, the average rate was 5.1 percent last year, but it was 9.6 percent for blacks. Nationally, the black jobless rate was 10.3 percent, compared with a national average of 6.2 percent.
Wages also lagged. Texas’ median wage grew 3.9 percent from 2000 to 2014, but it rose 8 percent for whites and declined 0.8 percent for blacks, according to the report. Nationally, wages have been stagnant for most workers since 2000.
“If the Fed raises [interest] rates to banks, then our rates go up, but wages aren’t going up,” said Danny Cendejas, senior organizer in Dallas for the Texas Organizing Project, one of the groups in the coalition. “It’s something that is very concerning for most of our community. In the black and brown communities, where we know the unemployment rates are higher, how do we expect those people to pay their loans back?”
The Fed has kept interest rates near zero since 2008 to help spur business lending to create jobs and boost the economy.
Coalition members in Texas want a more open search process for Fisher’s replacement with more involvement by the community. Fisher, who was in El Paso on Wednesday, has been one of the most vocal advocates of raising interest rates sooner than later.
“Look around at all the construction cranes in Dallas,” said Becky Moeller, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. “I think the lower interest rates are spurring businesses to do work and then they’re hiring people. We just don’t want an interest rate policy that isn’t good for workers in the state.”
Moeller was among a group of 10 community leaders who met with three Fed representatives — general counsel John Buchanan; Alfreda Norman, head of community development and public affairs; and spokesman James Hoard — for about 90 minutes in January to discuss the search process for a new president, the timeline and the qualifications sought.
“We had a good conversation and thought we answered their questions,” Hoard said. The Dallas Fed put the name of the search firm and its email address on its website for anyone interested in nominating a candidate, he added.
Moeller has a different view of the meeting.
“We don’t have a candidate, but we felt like we had some input we wanted to share,” she said. “We don’t want it to be someone who wouldn’t be good for jobs in the future. We wanted to make sure they were looking at the economic factors that relate to real people in Texas, Louisiana and New Mexico. We have low-wage workers who can’t get their head above water. We have folks who are long-term unemployed.”
In addition to the Texas AFL-CIO, the groups that met with the Dallas Fed were the American Federation of Teachers, Communication Workers of America, Dallas Central Labor Council, Fort Worth Building Trades and Ironworkers, Harris County Central Labor Council, Jobs With Justice, Texas Organizing Project and Workers Defense Project.
Coalition members last summer protested the Kansas City Fed’s annual Jackson Hole, Wyo., forum and met with Fed chairwoman Janet Yellen in November.
Yellen and three other Fed officials met with about 30 workers and activists, including some from Texas, for an hour to hear their plights of being long-term unemployed and struggling to make a living. As a result, the Fed created the Community Advisory Council in January to provide different perspectives on the economy, especially the needs of low- to moderate-income families.
“She listened very carefully and was very engaged and was grateful to us for requesting the meeting,” said Ady Barkan, staff lawyer for the Center for Popular Democracy, who was at the meeting. “It’s the kind of response we would like to see from others.”
Source
Seattle’s Lessons for Bernie Sanders Activists After the Elections
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Seattle’s Lessons for Bernie Sanders Activists After the Elections
According to Licata, progressives must develop the ability to “see the small things that generate the big things,”...
According to Licata, progressives must develop the ability to “see the small things that generate the big things,” linking voter concerns about global threats like climate change to concrete and achievable steps that city government can take to address local manifestations of the larger problem.
As the 2016 primary season draws to an end and Bernie Sanders backers look beyond next month’s Democratic convention in Philadelphia, many who have “felt the Bern” have their eye on local politics.
Hundreds, if not thousands, will be heeding the call of Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, a Sanders’ endorser and convention delegate. “We need people running for school boards,” Ellison told the New York Times in May. “We need people running for City Council. We need people running for state legislatures. We need people running for zoning boards, for park boards, to really take this sort of message that Bernie carried and carry it in their own local communities.”
Fortunately for those seeking relevant political advice, former Seattle City Councilor Nick Licata has just published a handbook called Becoming A Citizen Activist: Stories, Strategies, & Advice For Changing Our World (Sasquatch Books, 2016). His book draws on 17 years of experience as a progressive elected official and varied campus and community organizing work before that.
Like Sanders, Licata was a sixties radical. He belonged to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Bowling Green State University and first learned retail politics at the dormitory level when he ran successfully for student government president.
Like some Sanders supporters who may become candidates in the near future, Licata had an unconventional resume when he first sought public office. He had lived in a well-known Seattle commune for 20 years and founded two alternative publishing ventures, the People’s Yellow Pages and the Seattle Sun. A Democrat with Green Party sympathies, he defeated a candidate who was backed by the mainstream media and out-spent him two to one.
“In the previous 128 city council elections, only two candidates had won when both daily newspapers endorsed their opponent,” Licata reports, so “the odds didn’t look good.” Fortunately, his message that the city should invest more resources “in all neighborhoods and not concentrate them in just a few” resonated with an electoral coalition of “young renters” and “older home-owners.” Licata’s own track record of neighborhood activism gave him the necessary name recognition and grassroots street cred to win.
Becoming A Citizen Activist is full of useful tips about how activists and allied politicians can collaborate on issue-oriented campaigns. His book makes clear that “going local” is different from backing a presidential campaign focused on national and international questions. According to Licata, progressives must develop the ability to “see the small things that generate the big things,” linking voter concerns about global threats like climate change to concrete and achievable steps that city government can take to address local manifestations of the larger problem.
He describes how Seattle’s four years of skirmishing over plastic bag regulation originated in one neighborhood’s opposition to a new waste transfer station. What might have been just another exercise in NIMBYism evolved into a city-wide push for waste reduction at its source, plus much greater recycling. A plastic bag fee, imposed by the city council, was overturned after a plastic bag industry-funded referendum campaign, but the city’s ban on Styrofoam containers survived. In 2011, the city council passed a broad ban on single-use plastic bags, which the industry opted not to challenge either in court or at the polls.
Licata’s other examples of progressive policy initiatives include raising local labor standards, strengthening civilian oversight of the police, providing greater protection for undocumented immigrants, decriminalizing marijuana possession and using cultural programs to foster a sense of community.
Several of his most interesting case studies reveal the tendency of legislators—even liberal-minded ones—to be overly timid and skeptical about policy initiatives that push the envelope. In 2011, for example, Licata tried to lower the expectations of constituents who met with him about a paid sick leave mandate opposed by local employers.
“I cautioned that it was not likely that we’d see it anytime soon,” he admits in the book. Yet, less than nine months later, he was “shown to be wrong.” Not only was there sufficient public support, but “well-organized advocacy groups” marshaled “a wealth of data to prove that the sky wouldn’t fall if paid sick leave passed.”
Several years later, when some Seattle fast food workers staged union-backed job actions to highlight their minimum wage demand, it was the same story:
Politicians like me were sympathetic but also felt that fifteen dollars was way too big a lift. In my own case, I thought there were more readily achievable goals—like fighting wage theft. I found myself initially offering cautious verbal support and not much more.
What made Seattle’s “Fight for 15” winnable was grassroots organizing by local labor organizations and left-wing activists, who were able to inject the issue into the 2013 mayoral race between incumbent Mike McGinn and his challenger, state senator Ed Murray. Shortly before the election, Murray endorsed a minimum wage hike to $15 an hour while McGinn insisted that Washington state should take action instead of the city.
Key socialist presence
That year, it also made a big difference to have an energetic and charismatic socialist candidate running for city council under the “Fight for 15” banner. Kshama Sawant took on Richard Conlin, “a well-liked liberal politician” who cast the city council’s lone vote against paid sick leave and opposed raising the minimum wage without further study. According to Licata, Conlin, like McGinn, was defeated due to the votes of “many disaffected Democrats who wanted more aggressive council members willing to speak out on issues.”
Once elected, Sawant was quick to utilize what Licata calls “the unique means that public officials have to help mobilize the public”: holding public hearings, forming issue-oriented or constituency-based task forces and commissions and backing ballot measures like the threatened popular referendum on “15 Now” that kept Mayor Murray and his allies from weakening minimum wage legislation more than they did in 2014.
Yet when Sawant—a generation younger than Licata—first ran against his longtime colleague, Richard Conlin, the council’s most left-leaning member didn’t support her. In Becoming a Citizen Activist, Licata now acknowledges Sawant’s unusual strengths as a radical politician, including her social media savvy, “dedicated following” and ability to project “a message that resonated with the public.” Her tweets, blogging and website use “helped her obtain 80 percent citywide name recognition after a year on the council, far surpassing all the other council members,” Licata reports.
According to the author, local pollsters surveying the relative popularity of city councilors prior to Seattle’s 2015 election found that Sawant’s “numbers were higher than all the others but mine, and I beat her by only one point.” These results might explain why Mayor Murray and the Seattle business community failed to unseat their Socialist Alternative critic when she ran for re-election last year, with Licata’s backing this time. (Licata himself chose to retire from the city council.)
New Forms of Organization
Readers interested in further detail about their over-lapping council careers will have to wait for American Socialist, a political memoir by Sawant (to be published by Verso next year) or Jonathan Rosenblum’s forthcoming book for Beacon Press about labor and politics in Seattle. Rosenblum worked on Sawant’s re-election campaign which, in his view, demonstrated “the indispensability of organization” and an “independent political base.”
Unlike Licata’s own more typical electoral efforts in the past, Sawant’s “campaign strategies and tactics were not directed by a single candidate or campaign manager.” Instead, Rosenblum points out, they were “developed through collective, thoughtful discussions” among Socialist Alternative members who live in Seattle and “are connected to a broader base of union and community activists.”
One limitation of Licata’s book is the absence of any discussion about fielding slates of progressive candidates who are committed to a common platform that includes rejection of corporate contributions. To his credit, Licata did play a major role in creating the multi-city network of progressive elected officials known as Local Progress. In the Bay Area, this group includes Richmond, Calif., city councilor (and former mayor) Gayle McLaughlin, whose Richmond Progressive Alliance only runs candidates who spurn business donations.
Nationally, about 400 mayors, city councilors, county supervisors and school board members use Local Progress as a “think tank” and clearing house for alternative public policies. Assisted by the Center for Popular Democracy in New York, the group distributes a 60-page handbook for improving labor and environmental standards, housing and education programs, public safety, and municipal election practices. At annual conferences—like its national meeting in Pittsburgh on July 8-9—local victories of the sort Licata describes in his book are dissected and their lessons disseminated.
Local Progress leaders believe that neither street politics nor electoral victories alone will make a sufficient dent in the status quo. As Licata told his fellow “electeds” when they met in New York two years ago, municipal government changes for the better only when progressives have “an outside and inside game…people on the inside and people protesting on the outside to provide insiders with backbone.” Licata’s new book provides many useful examples of that necessary synergy.
By STEVE EARLY
Source
'Secure scheduling' rallies focus on giving hourly workers more stability
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'Secure scheduling' rallies focus on giving hourly workers more stability
Dive Brief: New York City Mayor DeBlasio and several advocate groups gathered recently to show support for the...
Dive Brief:
New York City Mayor DeBlasio and several advocate groups gathered recently to show support for the introduction of “Fair Workweek” legislation, designed to ensure that 65,000 hourly employees in the fast food industry receive fair notification on work hours.
Currently, employers nationwide aren’t required to provide their hourly employees with advance notice of upcoming shifts. As a result, too many families can't budget in advance, plan for education or family care, or secure a necessary second job, according to advocates.
The New York City event echoes the demands of coalition of New York-based advocates who launched a national campaign on Sept. 6. The groups — the Center for Popular Democracy, the Rockefeller Foundation and the online organization Purpose — are asking for scheduling at least two weeks in advance, eliminating on-call assignments that leave employees "scrambling for child care and unable to hold second jobs with uncertain paychecks."
Dive Insight:
Employers do realize that predictability and fairness are reasonable demands, but more often than not, labor cost (and in some cases, labor shortage) creates problems when trying to create better schedules. Frontline managers are expected to create the schedules while also trying to keep costs down, and balancing the two expectations isn't always successful.
What it will take is better workforce planning, with some technology solutions already available to help make that happen, say experts. Also, there are potential negative legal and compliance outcomes for employers who don't follow state and local laws that already require "reporting pay" time be allowed.
By Tom Starner
Source
Gap Says It Will Phase Out On-Call Scheduling of Employees
The move makes Gap the latest retailer to move away from “on-call scheduling,” which regulators, workers’ rights groups...
The move makes Gap the latest retailer to move away from “on-call scheduling,” which regulators, workers’ rights groups and some academics say is detrimental to employees and their families.
“At Gap Inc., we also believe that work-life integration enables all employees to reach their full potential and thrive both personally and professionally,” the company said in a statement on its blog announcing the change on Wednesday. “We recognize that flexibility, inclusive of consistent and reliable scheduling, is important to all of our employees.”
On-call scheduling requires employees to call ahead before a specific shift to see if they will be needed, a practice that gives workers little predictability in scheduling. Facing public and regulatory pressure, some retailers, including Abercrombie & Fitch, Starbucks and Victoria’s Secret, have already begun phasing out the practice.
Gap said its five brands — Athleta, Banana Republic, Gap, Intermix and Old Navy — had agreed to stop on-call scheduling by the end of next month and have committed to providing employees with at least 10 to 14 days’ notice, according to Wednesday’s announcement.
In April, the New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, sent a letter to more than a dozen retailers, including Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, J. C. Penney and Victoria’s Secret, requesting more information about on-call scheduling and questioning whether such practices were legal. In the months since, Abercrombie & Fitch and Victoria’s Secret both announced they would discontinue it.
Mr. Schneiderman praised Gap’s decision in a statement on Wednesday.
“Workers deserve stable and reliable work schedules, and I commend Gap for taking an important step to make their employees’ schedules fairer and more predictable,” he said.
Gap had already begun scaling back the use of on-call shifts after starting a pilot program last year to test alternative scheduling practices. Mr. Schneiderman’s office told Gap last week that it would consider legal action if the retailer did not take steps to end on-call scheduling, according to Eric Soufer, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office.
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal advocacy group, found that the children of parents who worked unpredictable schedules could have inferior cognitive abilities, in areas like verbal communication, and struggle with anxiety and depression.
“Parents’ variable schedules require irregular family mealtimes and child bedtimes that interfere with children’s healthy development,” the study said.
Correction: August 28, 2015
An article on Thursday about an agreement by five Gap apparel store brands to stop requiring employees to make themselves available for last-minute shifts misstated when the policy change will become effective. It is the end of next month, not the beginning of next year.
Source: New York Times
5 days ago
5 days ago