CPD IN THE NEWS

The Women’s March and the Center for Popular Democracy spearheaded a mass arrest action to kick off a week of protests in support of Dr. Ford, whose allegations against the Supreme Court nominee have sparked turmoil.

Read the full article here.

Reproduced with permission from Daily Labor Report, 97 DLR C-1 (May 20, 2014). Copyright 2014 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) <https://www.bna.com/>

Bloomberg BNA - May 19, 2014, by Rhonda Smith — Although employee scheduling software is helping employers control labor costs and boost productivity, its impact on retail and restaurant workers is far more bleak, advocates for employees told Bloomberg BNA May 8-19.

“In New York, we're interviewing workers at all big retail chains—Gap, Banana Republic and others,” said Stephanie Luce, an associate professor of labor studies at City University of New York. The interviews are part of an ongoing research project focused on scheduling challenges facing retail workers in New York City.

“What is prevalent in our interviews is just huge frustration with scheduling,” she said. “It's arbitrary. It feels like it's unpredictable. And it can change from week to week or season to season. So this concern about who gets to set the schedule, and do employees have any voice or protections in that, is very prevalent.”

‘On Call' Scheduling Has Drawbacks

The Retail Action Project, a New York-based campaign sponsored by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, released a video May 1 highlighting the conundrum retail employees face daily over their work schedules. RWDSU is an affiliate of the United Food and Commercial Workers.

“Even though the technology enables [employers] to predict 80 percent of their labor costs well in advance, they are scheduling workers according to the smaller percentage of hours that they can't predict,” Carrie Gleason at the Center for Popular Democracy said.

“Workers are unable to get sufficient hours, and are forced to endure ‘on call' scheduling, where they must wait by the phone to see if they'll be called upon to work,” RAP organizers said on the union's website. “They can't take other jobs, or do anything else that would interfere with their unstable, unpredictable work hours.”

The video is part of an effort to educate workers and policy makers about the need for “fair, stable and predictable schedules for millions of underemployed low wage workers in one of America's biggest job creating industries,” RAP said.

Employment of retail sales workers is projected to grow 10 percent from 2012 to 2022, according to the Labor Department. That growth is about as fast as the average for all occupations, the agency said, but because many workers leave retail there will be a large number of job openings in that sector.

There were 4.6 million retail jobs in 2012, the agency said. It projected that 450,200 will be added in that sector by 2022.

Wanted: ‘Family-Sustaining' Practices

Carrie Gleason, director of a new initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy that focuses on work scheduling issues, told Bloomberg BNA May 16 that new policy protections are needed to ensure “family-sustaining practices” in low-wage sectors.

The technology currently available could be used to actually improve scheduling practices for workers, she said.

“Burgeoning low-wage industries are now relying heavily on a part-time workforce and increasingly using scheduling technology according to fluctuating market demand,” she said. The ultimate result for workers is “very little say in how they work and when they work.”

Gleason also said, “Even though the technology enables [employers] to predict 80 percent of their labor costs well in advance, they are scheduling workers according to the smaller percentage of hours that they can't predict.”

Giving workers more access to the technology would allow them to self-schedule, she said, adding that this would really elevate the quality of workers' jobs. “But, unfortunately, companies like Macy's are not using the technology to the workers' potential,” she said.

Unions have criticized Macy's for not considering employee seniority when using scheduling software to decide who works and when.

Some Retailers Address Scheduling Concerns

Retailers and restaurants in some cities have taken steps to address workers' scheduling concerns, either because they made a business decision to do so or union members pushed for changes during negotiations over collective bargaining agreements.

Employers cited as trailblazers include United Parcel Service of North America Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp., Lord & Taylor, In-N-Out Burgers Inc., and, after new contracts were negotiated, Macy's and Bloomingdale's Inc. in New York City.

All part-time workers at Costco receive their schedules at least two weeks in advance and are guaranteed a minimum of 24 core hours each week, according to a policy brief the Center for Law and Social Policy and two other groups released in March (49 DLR A-6, 3/13/14).

“We want people to work for us who consider us a career,” Mike Brosius, the company's assistant vice president of human resources, said in the brief. “Long-term employees are more productive and serve the needs of our customers better. So we give our employees what's fair and what they need to make a living.”

In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Why ‘Good Jobs' Are Good for Retailers,” Zeynep Ton, an adjunct associate professor of operations management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, highlighted Costco, Trader Joe's, QuikTrip and Mercadona, a supermarket chain in Spain. She said these retailers invest in their employees and, in return, reap healthy profits.

“Not surprisingly, I found that unpredictable schedules, short shifts, and dead-end jobs take a toll on employees' morale,” Ton wrote. “When morale is low, absenteeism, tardiness, and turnover rise, increasing the variability of the labor supply, which, of course, makes matching labor with customer traffic more difficult.”

Unions have pushed to shape employers' scheduling policies in collective bargaining agreements.

Union Turns to NLRB for Help

UFCW Local 888, in East Rutherford, N.J., filed an unfair labor practices charge April 28 with the National Labor Relations Board against Century 21 Department Stores LLC. The family-owned, discount retail clothing company operates eight stores in New York and New Jersey and plans to open another one in Philadelphia, a company spokeswoman said May 20.

In its charge, the union alleged that Century 21 refused to bargain “over the implementation and effects of a change in the work schedule system at its Manhattan facility, in violation of the National Labor Relations Act.”

“Until two years ago, we had no issue with scheduling,” Max Bruny, president of UFCW Local 888, told Bloomberg BNA May 16. “Everyone had a fixed schedule. The model was full-time employment. We had members there for 40 years. They had a good schedule [and] good predictability.”

Now, workers are being assigned fewer hours or shifts that require them to work later than they traditionally have—regardless of seniority.

The new scheduling system is “hard on the workers' life—a nightmare,” Bruny said.

Employees who have worked for Century 21 for decades are now being scheduled to work erratic hours, sometimes at night, he said.

“Grievances we're filing relate to workers not being able to schedule for school or take care of sick family members,” Bruny said.

ACA Could Lead to Drop in Workers' Hours

Neil Trautwein, vice president and employee benefits counsel at the National Retail Federation, told Bloomberg BNA May 19 that the Affordable Care Act could be a factor in employer decisions about how many hours employees are scheduled to work. The NRF represents retailers, chain restaurants and grocery stores.

ACA rules mandate that employers with 50 or more full-time workers provide health care coverage. Anyone who works at least 30 hours a week is considered a full-time employee. A tax penalty of as much as $3,000 per employee is levied for noncompliance.

“The 30-hour definition under the ACA is unnecessary and distorts how we manage employees,” Trautwein said.

The NRF supports the Save American Workers Act (H.R. 2575), proposed legislation that calls for raising the threshold from 30 hours per week to 40 hours per week. The bill's backers say this would preserve employee wages and working hours.

“There will be an [employer] incentive, particularly for less well-performing employees, to be held below 30 hours,” Trautwein said. “That's a natural consequence of the ACA structure.”

He added that employee scheduling software also helps employers move high-performing workers into certain positions at certain times.

“Broadly speaking, part-time jobs have been valued in retail and chain restaurants, particularly over the years because of flexibility they allow to wrap work around school or other family responsibilities,” Trautwein said. “A lot of part-time workers aren't interested in working a large number of hours.”

Union Wants More Input About Schedules

UFCW Local 888, which represents more than 2,500 workers at Century 21, would like more input about the new scheduling system and its impact on workers, Bruny said.

“[Century 21] says we should negotiate for all the stores at one time in two years,” when the union's five-year contract with the stores expires, he said.

“Our argument is, ‘This is a drastic change in the workers' lives,' ” Bruny said. “Workers are becoming part-timers overnight. I think that should trigger negotiations. That has to be bargained collectively before a change can be made.”

Bruny also would like to negotiate with Century 21 over whether hourly employees can be cross-trained so they are prepared to work in different store departments should they agree to do so based on the scheduling system. “That would make it easier on the workers,” he said.

Without negotiating over such matters, Bruny added, “we are losing quite a few longtime, full-time workers.”

A Century 21 spokeswoman declined to discuss the NLRB charge, but said to ask “Kronos directly for a statement.”

Kronos Inc. is a workforce management company in Chelmsford, Mass., that sells electronic scheduling systems to organizations. The company did not respond to a Bloomberg BNA request for comment on the NLRB charge UFCW filed against Century 21.

Macy's West Scheduling Proposal

During recent contract negotiations in California, leaders of UFCW Local 5 in San Jose described as “problematic” a Macy's West proposal to implement an electronic scheduling system the company calls “My Schedule Plus.”

“While the computer-based program would create greater scheduling flexibility and an opportunity for more hours for those that want them,” the union said May 5 in an online post, “without modification it would eliminate base schedules and ignore seniority around shift selection.”

Mike Henneberry, a spokesman for UFCW Local 5, told Bloomberg BNA May 8: “At first the company said, ‘We can't change it.' But it turned out they could.”

Macy's did not respond to a Bloomberg BNA request for comment.

Henneberry said Kronos created the Macy's scheduling system.

Charles DeWitt, vice president of business development for Kronos, said such software can be adapted to suit employers' unique needs.

“If the employer wants to maintain a base schedule or respect seniority, it can,” he told Bloomberg BNA May 12. “Various employers have different policies. With the Kronos system, we've tried to capture all that in a system and let retailers, hospitals, and manufacturers put their policies in place.”

Respecting Employee Seniority

Members of RWDSU Local 3 in New York in 2012 ratified a five-year collective bargaining agreement with Bloomingdale's that gave some 2,000 employees at the company's flagship store in New York City more control over hours and scheduling, the union said (86 DLR A-8, 5/3/12).

RWDSU said at the time that scheduling flexibility in the Bloomingdale's contract went further than any other union contract with a large retail company. Under the contract, senior employees have first choice of their preferred hours, and all workers are able to choose one weekend off a month and the late nights they want to work.

A 2011 contract settlement covering some 4,000 workers at Macy's in New York City also improved employees' control over their scheduling, the union said (121 DLR A-13, 6/23/11).

Allen Mayne, RWDSU's director of collective bargaining, told Bloomberg BNA May 9: “The main problem with the Macy's system is it did not recognize an employee's seniority. It lumps all employees together in the same pool and hours are divided up depending on your availability.”

This has a detrimental impact on long-term employees, especially in retail, Mayne said. “In a union environment, where benefits are even better, many employees have many years of seniority,” he said.

RWDSU was able to negotiate in the contract a work rule that allows employees with seniority to have priority access to the scheduling system, Mayne said.

“But there's not enough oversight,” he said. “This is done kind of on the honor system, but people can get in there and input out of seniority order.”

Luce at CUNY said there's a “disconnect” between how sophisticated and helpful to employers the scheduling software has become in the past 15 years and how rudimentary it remains for most retail employees.

“Employees are still submitting their scheduling requests on paper or going into the store to look at their schedules,” she said. “Clearly, the software could allow for employees to be at home and swap shifts. But they are not given access to those systems.”

Source

CBS Philly - December 15, 2014, by Steve Tawa - Just as the Federal Reserve is about to hold a key policy meeting in Washington, DC, a group of activists is calling for a more transparent process to replace Charles Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

The group, which staged a march this morning from Independence Hall to the Federal Reserve at Sixth and Arch Streets, says the Fed’s replacement process is dominated by major financial firms and corporations.

Members of Action United, the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, and Pennsylvania Working Families say there are no community, labor, or consumer representatives on the board of directors of the Philadelphia Fed, so working folks are shut out of the process.

They are part of a grass-roots coalition across the country that met last month with Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, demanding that the central bank hear the concerns of ordinary Americans as it prepares to raise interest rates.

Who are those ordinary Americans?

“The unemployed, the underemployed, the working and barely-working working class,” says Kendra Brooks of Action United.

“We just need some people at the Fed to step up and pay attention to us,” adds Chris Campbell (far right in photo), a graduate of Orleans Technical Institute who has been doing multiple odd jobs to scrape together income.

Dawn Walton, who had been one day away from becoming a permanent worker with benefits at a local auto dealership when she was laid off after 89 days, said, “And now (we’re) out here pounding the pavement with millions of other people.  It looks like there’s no way out.”

While the unemployment rate has declined to a six-year low, the activists challenge the Fed to visit poorer neighborhoods in Philadelphia and elsewhere before raising rates, because many are not experiencing a recovery.

Plosser, the Philadelphia Fed president since 2006, was among those known as a “hawk” for casting dissenting votes against the Fed’s prolonged low-rates policies.

The Philadelphia Fed says it is following a process for the selection of the bank’s next president outlined by Congress, and its senior executives have met with representatives of groups who have expressed interest in the process.

Source

As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban centers. From Atlanta to Seattle and points in between, cities have begun seizing the initiative, transforming themselves into laboratories for progressive change. Cities Rising is The Nation’s chronicle of those urban experiments.

Cities are where the action is these days. Progressive action, political action. From paid sick days to universal pre-K, fossil-fuel divestment to anti-fracking ordinances, police reform to immigrant rights, the country’s urban centers are leading the way, far outpacing the federal government in vision and action. Just look at the growing movement for a $15 minimum wage. While Bernie Sanders has been raising minimum-wage consciousness on the campaign trail—introducing a bill in July to raise the federal minimum to $15 and calling for the same during the first Democratic presidential debate—it was local politicians, with names barely known beyond their districts, who first heeded the call of struggling workers and made $15 a reality. Before Bernie, in other words, there was Nick Licata and Kshama Sawant, Ruth Atkins, and the Emeryville City Council.

In recognition of this moment, progressive politicians from cities around the country—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Denver, Philadelphia, and beyond—have joined forces to begin sharing their strategies for creative progressive change. Calling themselves Local Progress, they swap policy solutions to urgent, ongoing injustices like income inequality and police brutality, share model legislation and provide strategic support for legislative campaigns. Kind of like an urban anti-ALEC. Today, just three years after it was formed, more than 400 elected officials from 40 states are part of the effort. And the victories are beginning to add up—from paid parental leave in Boston to paid sick leave in New York City, socially responsible investing in Seattle to the use of eminent domain in Richmond, California, to slash homeowner debt.

This week, Local Progress members from all over the country are meeting in Los Angeles for the group’s fourth national gathering. From October 26 through 28, they aretrading their best ideas and strategies for building progressive local power—and combatting police violence, spreading the Fight for $15, expanding affordable housing, boosting civic engagement, and pushing the fight for LGBTQ rights beyond marriage equality.

Chuy Garcia, who gave Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel a run for his millions in this year’s election, will be on the scene, as will Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre, and dozens of council members, alderman, and supervisors from around the country. If cities are the incubators of promising progressive ideas, this gathering is a bit like the annual science expo.

The Nation has asked four Local Progress stalwarts to share some of the policy solutions they’ll be discussing at the gathering. New York City Council members Brad Lander and Antonio Reynoso, San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos, and Chicago Alderman Scott Waguespack all weighed in, offering thoughts on everything from humanizing the sharing economy to organizing for police reform, protecting sanctuary cities, and pushing back against privatization and regressive tax policy. Here’s what they said.

 —Lizzy Ratner

PROTECTING WORKERS IN THE ON-DEMAND ECONOMY

By Brad Lander

Rides from Uber. Home cleaning from Handy. Meals from Seamless. Web design from Upwork. Even doctors from Medicast.

There’s no doubt the on-demand economy is convenient. Consumers can arrange for services at the tap of a touchscreen. Workers can choose their hours and earn a little extra cash.

But there’s a very dark side to the “sharing” economy: The benefits aren’t usually shared with the workers.

Working “by-the-gig” rarely provides job security, health insurance, paid sick days or family leave, on-the-job training, or retirement contributions. Workers lack the right to organize a union. And eight in 10 freelance workers report having been cheated out of wages they were owed.

President Obama and Democratic presidential candidates are finally talking about the issue. But the Republican Congress will likely block any progress. Marco Rubio recently called for even further deregulation, leaving workers at the mercy of multibillion-dollar corporations.

So cities are taking the lead in writing new rules, working with Local Progress, the National Employment Law Project, forward-thinking unions, and worker organizations to level the on-demand playing field.

In Seattle, City Council member Mike O’Brien is fighting for a bill that would allow drivers for Uber, Lyft, and other “ridesharing” companies to organize and bargain collectively so that workers have some voice in the terms and conditions of their work.

In New York City, we are working with the Freelancers Union to combat wage theft and late payment. When conventional employees are cheated out of wages, the state labor department can enforce and win double damages. The #FreelanceIsntFree campaign (which recently brought its message to the White House) would provide freelancers with similar protection.

Council Member Corey Johnson and I are working with the New York City Taxi Workers Alliance to mandate a “driver benefits fund” (funded by a small fare surcharge) to provide for-hire drivers with healthcare benefits—a first step toward the “Shared Security Account” that Nick Hanauer and David Rolf called for in a Democracy Journal article this summer. And we’re amending New York City’s human-rights laws to make clear they apply to independent workers. There is no reason Uber should be able to discriminate against drivers based on race or religion.

Meanwhile, from San Francisco to Burlington, cities are establishing offices of labor standards and adopting other innovative approaches (like partnering with community-based organizations) to enforce the laws that protect workers. One task: making sure conventional employees aren’t illegally misclassified as independent workers by employers trying to cheat them out of benefits and protections (a big problem for day laborers and domestic workers). These offices can also make sure that companies who need licenses from the city get and keep them only if they respect local, state, and federal laws.

Ultimately, we’ll need national regulation to match the growing on-demand economy. But for now, progressive cities are bringing worker protections into the 21st century—and some real sharing into the sharing economy.

THE MUNICIPAL BATTLE FOR EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW

By Antonio Reynoso

Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Sandra Bland. For more than a year, the senseless deaths of young black men and women by police officers or in police custody have dominated headlines and helped fuel a movement. Under the banner of Black Lives Matter, this movement has been gaining ground in cities, towns, and counties across the country, spreading the call to end racist policing and begin enacting serious police reform. Its powerful message has reached all the way to the presidential campaign trail and beyond. But as the public waits for progress at the national level, change is already happening at the local level, thanks to powerful alliances between community activists and hundreds of local politicians.

In New York City, where I am a City Council member representingneighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, there is a desperate need for sensible reforms of the New York City Police Department (NYPD). For all to many New Yorkers, the excessive use of police force is a daily reality. The excessive surveillance of the Muslim community and a racialized stop-and-frisk policy also take their toll.

In response, organizations and progressive politicians have been fighting to improve accountability and transparency after years of racial profiling by the NYPD. The work has been supported by a broad coalition called Communities United for Police Reform, which has driven a strategic, multi-year campaign to knock on doors, organize the public, influence the public discourse, and pass legislation to implement smart reforms.

 Communities want change, and they want to participate in the process of reforming the NYPD. So, working together, we’ve introduced the Right To Know Act as a way to meet their demands. These bills would require NYPD officers not only to identify themselves when stopping civilians but also to explain that the searches are voluntary and may be declined.

This is not the first time we have stood up for the people of our community. In 2013 and 2014, in partnership with Communities United for Police Reform, the City Council passed a series of bills known as the Community Safety Act, which together banned racial profiling by police and made it easier for New Yorkers who have experienced profiling to sue NYPD officers. The act also installed an independent inspector general to oversee the actions of the NYPD.

Of course, New York City is not the only city in our nation where racial profiling, unjust searches, and incidences of police brutality are common occurrences. Nor is it the only city where coalitions of community leaders and elected officials are working to improve the system. In the last year alone, communities have joined together with progressive local legislators to correct the imbalance of justice.

In Los Angeles County, the grassroots organization Dignity and Power Nowwon a transformative campaign, led by formerly incarcerated people and their families, to establish a strong civilian oversight commission for the sheriff’s department, which has an ugly history of violence against civilians on the streets and in county jails.

In Newark, community leaders partnered with Mayor Ras Baraka to create one of strongest civilian complaint review boards in the country, which has both a voice in disciplining police officers and a policy advisory role.

And in Minneapolis, a coalition led by Neighborhoods Organizing for Change succeeded in pressing the City Council to repeal spitting and loitering ordinances that were being disproportionately used to harass and harm black and Latino residents. They also won passage of a data-collection law that will begin to collect and publicize important evidence about the police department’s stop-and-frisk and use-of-force practices.

Members of Local Progress, partnering with community-based allies, have been central to these fights and many more, and we will continue combating such injustices across the United States, fighting for everyone to be treated equally under the law.

 CITIES MUST LEAD THE NATION ON IMMIGRANT JUSTICE

By John Avalos

In the last few years, hundreds of cities across America have disentangled their police departments and jails from the federal immigrant-deportation machine, refusing to honor the Feds’ requests that cities detain immigrants past their release date so they could be picked up and deported. These policies protect immigrant families from the devastation of deportation and from crime, because they foster better relationships between the police and immigrant communities. The movement has been a bright spot for our country’s immigrant-rights movement.

But during the last few months, the policies, and in some cases the very idea, of sanctuary cities has come under attack. The catalyst for these changes was an undocumented immigrant named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez who allegedly shot and killed a young white woman named Kate Steinle. He claims that the shooting was an accident, but her case has become a cause célèbre among opponents of immigrants because Lopez-Sanchez had been deported five times previously, and had recently been released from jail in San Francisco without being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

San Francisco’s Due Process for All Ordinance, the latest update to its Sanctuary City policy, bars the sheriff from detaining people past their release date on behalf of ICE’s Secure Communities, or S-Comm, program. The goal of Due Process for All is to protect immigrants and their families from S-Comm, which created an immigration dragnet, deporting tens of thousands of immigrants and tearing their families apart. Due Process for All also enables immigrants to be integrated into San Francisco’s local law-enforcement efforts by promoting relationships between immigrant communities and the police. San Francisco has been at the leading edge of a national movement: across the nation, over 350 other local governments have recently adopted policies limiting collaboration with federal immigration officials.

But as a result of the widespread effort of local governments to limit coordination with the S-Comm, the federal government has tweaked and renamed its deportation effort the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), which calls on local law enforcement to notify Homeland Security of a detainee’s release rather than detaining the individual past his or her release date. Like S-Comm, PEP has the same effect of weakening trust between immigrants and local law enforcement because local law enforcement is seen as an arm of federal immigration efforts.

The politics of race, citizen entitlement, and immigration reform have put San Francisco and other cities’ sanctuary-city policies squarely in the cross hairs of conservative extremists and political opportunists. From the highly polarizing presidential campaign of Donald Trump to the calculated posturing of Hillary Clinton (who supports PEP) to the election-year pandering of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, eager to blame the policy for Steinle’s death, politicians are scapegoating immigrants and undermining the sanctuary city policies that immigrants rely on for their security. Just last week, the US Senate narrowly failed to pass a Republican-backed bill that threatened to withhold federal grants from sanctuary cities and increase penalties for undocumented immigrants who reenter the United States after deportation.

Some cities are already working to resist this pressure. On the same day that Senate Republicans sought to punish sanctuary cities, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution reaffirming our commitment to the Due Process for All Ordinance and urging our sheriff not to comply with the new PEP program.

 Cities around the country should follow suit and adopt a wide array of programs and policies to protect and empower immigrant communities. Like New Haven, they can establish Municipal ID cards to help immigrants navigate daily life; like Chicago, they can ensure that city services are available in multiple languages; like New York, they can provide quality free legal counsel to residents facing deportation; and like Los Angeles, they can conduct outreach programs and offer affordable citizenship preparation courses to help residents naturalize and gain the benefits of citizenship.

This moment is a pivotal one for our nation and the many cities that have sought to protect immigrants against deportation. We either succumb to the rightward push of the politics of race and citizen entitlement or we strengthen our efforts to protect and integrate immigrants and their families in recognition and honor of the contributions they make to our society. Local governments must lead our nation forward.

FIGHT FOR A PROGRESSIVE SOURCE OF REVENUE IN CHICAGO

By Scott Waguespack

The fiscal crisis that’s squeezing cities and towns across this country is perhaps at its most dramatic in Chicago.

Our municipal pension systems are woefully underfunded, the result of decades of failure by city and state governments to pay their share. Our schools are facing an enormous fiscal shortfall that could result in the firing of 5,000 teachers in the middle of the year. And we’re witnessing heartbreaking violence in our communities, the result of an overwhelmed police force and neighborhoods mired in economic hardship.

Simply put, our city has a cash problem.

To his credit, Mayor Rahm Emanuel acknowledged this problem in his recent budget address, railing against the budgeting tricks of previous years and vowing to end the city’s structural deficit. Unfortunately, Mayor Emanuel reached into the same tired bag of tricks in order to solve the problem: regressive tax increases on working families and privatization of public services.

These are tricks we’re all too familiar with here in Chicago. We’ve already been through some of the worst privatization deals in the country, and we know full well from our experiences with parking meters and school janitors that it’s been a fiscal boondoggle resulting in higher costs and worse services for taxpayers. And the mayor’s regressive property-tax proposal is just another way to balance budgets by raising taxes on working families who are already struggling to get by.

Here’s the good news, though: Chicago is one of the wealthiest cities on the planet. There’s an enormous amount of capital flowing through this city every day. Chicago’s City Council Progressive Caucus, which I chair, has been advocating for common-sense tax ideas to direct some of these dollars toward crucial programs and services, easing the burden on working families without selling off public assets.

We’ve advocated for creating a special property-taxing district that covers the skyscrapers in downtown Chicago. Too often, owners of these buildings hire politically connected firms to get enormous discounts on their assessments; a more fair valuation would generate substantial new revenue.

We support reforming the billion-dollar mayoral slush fund called “tax-increment financing.” We support fixing the problems in the infamous parking-meter privatization deal. We introduced an amendment that would tax big-box stores for the undue stress they put on our stormwater system, and have called for expanding the sales tax to include luxury services like pet grooming or portfolio management.

 In short, the Progressive Caucus has progressive revenue ideas that will work for all of Chicago.  We’ve convened a series of town hall meetings across the city, drawing crowds of hundreds of concerned neighbors, and have introduced a series of amendments to move this budget in the right direction.

As progressive leaders who love this city, our caucus knows we need new revenue to educate our children, care for those in need, and provide growth and opportunity in every community. For our city to prosper, those dollars must come from those who can most afford to pay, not from the pockets of working families.