Click here to download the full report

In good times and bad, workers at the front lines of many of today’s firms bear the brunt of fluctuations in demand for services and products through reductions in hours. Even before the current recession, today’s employers faced strong pressure to contain, if not minimize, labor costs, especially in industries, such as the service sector, where labor is a principal expenditure. Local communities suffer when residents’ jobs are unstable and their earnings unpredictable. In this report, Susan J. Lambert and Julia R. Henly of the University of Chicago highlight several targets for intervention—ranging from improving employer scheduling practices to enacting new legislation—which could enhance the quality of jobs for hourly workers and, in turn, the quality of life in local communities. 

Click here to download the full report

Friends,
This edition will be the final News Brief from The Mobility Agenda. We hope you have enjoyed reading them over the past several months. Please visit our website, www.mobilityagenda.org, for updates and news from us in the future. Thanks!

Give new fathers a year’s paternity leave, says Clegg
“‘If dads don’t get involved with their kids early on in a meaningful way, often they don’t remain engaged afterwards.’”
Screw the UK’s ideas for long-term planning! This country was founded on the basic ideals of short-term profit!

Poverty in Oklahoma: a ‘challenging’ forecast
Under the shadow of the poverty banner, the forecast isn’t looking any brighter.

Worsening poverty calls for united effort in region
“Will you add ”doing my part to reduce poverty“ as one of your resolutions for 2009?”
Sure! But since it appears that one of your resolutions is to keep talking about poverty, I’ll go ahead and write it in for 2010 as well.

The Dispossessed
“They have been made poor by a combination of impersonal economic forces and legal-political obstacles to equality.”
The joy of the endless argument that talking about poverty brings…(The “responsibility rebuttal” isn’t far behind.)

Low-wage economy ‘creates child poverty’
“The report predicts that, without changes in policy, there will be a similar number of low-paying jobs in 2020 as in 2004, due to an expansion of employment in low-paid sectors such as retail, catering and lower-level service posts.”
Moving workers out of bad jobs means little if that bad job is filled by someone else.

To stop poverty, it takes a village
it takes a village that stops talking about poverty…

Barack the ‘Magic Negro’
“America, like much of the world, faces a growing polarization of wealth that has made poverty the new and real racism. People of all colors are being left out of the opportunities for good educations, good jobs, good health and good housing.”
Unfortunately, they will continue to be left out as long as education, jobs, health, and housing are swept into the growing pile of poverty policy.

Mississippi has highest teen birth rate, CDC says
“A variety of factors influence teen birth rates, including culture, poverty and racial demographics. For those and other reasons, kids in mostly white New England likely would delay child birth…”
Poverty was long ago tied up into a neat little package with racial divisiveness and teenage pregnancy (not to mention drug use, individual responsibility, etc.) Did we not learn anything from Pandora’s Box?

 

 

 

 

 

NJ set to begin payroll deductions for paid family leave
“A drop in productivity when there’s somebody pinch-hitting for people who are out on leave…is a further obstacle for employers to keep and retain clients and to limit their costs.”
Luckily, this worker benefit comes at no cost to employers (though you wouldn’t know it, the way they fight it).

Lawsuit filed to block Milwaukee sick leave law
“The 20-page lawsuit claims the ordinance is unconstitutional, vague and unenforceable, and creates a new minimum wage ordinance contrary to state law.”
Working while sick is actually required by the MMAC constitution.


Media Undermines Minimum Wage Increase
“The reporters continue with this narrow frame by implying that certain employers and the state’s 300,000 minimum wage workers will be the only ones to feel the impact of the change.”
Narrow frames make for narrow minds.

Opinion: The minimum wage
“The minimum wage sets the wage floor. As Roosevelt and his advisers understood, we have to raise the floor to lift the economy.”


Editorial: The State of the Poor
“But too little attention is being paid to the poor in the current economic crisis.”
Clearly, too little attention is being paid to framing strategy when it comes to “the poor” as well.

Curing poverty is the key to improving education
“The answer to improving school achievement is simple: cure poverty.”
Why didn’t we think of that before? Problem: solved.

‘Reducing poverty’ is the wrong goal
“Unless we want to narrow the list of solutions at the outset, the new president should focus instead on how to establish goals that measure our progress toward an inclusive economy that works for all of us.”
Note to self: The Cure Poverty Caboose is derailed. Abandon ship.

In an op-ed published today in the Philadelphia Daily News, The Mobility Agenda’s Margy Waller recommends that Barack Obama focus on establishing goals that measure our progress toward an inclusive economy that works for all of us.

 Waller writes that the goal of an inclusive society is a multi-dimensional concept incorporating not only notions of adequate income, but also neighborhood quality, access to the arts, education, health care, participation in civic events, housing, pensions, and other factors.

 She concludes that it will take hard work and high-level attention to develop a framework and narrative for this concept; establishing a new cross-agency effort to develop and focus on such goals is worthy of Presidential attention and cabinet-member status. Moreover, she argues, in contrast a goal to cut poverty is too limited and doomed to failure in today’s society. 

Read the op-ed here. 

 

 Media Undermines Minimum Wage Increase

Residents of nine states  – Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington  – will see a boost to their local economy from a state minimum wage increase taking effect in the new year.

Unfortunately, media coverage of the change varies across place and often undermines public support for this progressive step…

Read the full article here.

Mobility Agenda Report: Community Benefits Agreements Are Improving Low-Wage Jobs

The progressive think tank, Mobility Agenda, is out with a report on community benefits agreements that says these agreements are transforming thousands of low-wage jobs into good, living wage jobs in communities across the nation. These agreements between developers and labor/community coalitions on p[rojects that use some public finding are legally binding and designed to boost wages and stregthen local labor markets…

Read the full article here.

A Payoff Out of Poverty

…Education and health, however, will take you only so far. Suppose Opportunity NYC succeeds. The likelihood is that these families will still be poor. One in three jobs in America pays less than $11.11 an hour, with no benefits. Full time, that’s less than $23,000 a year…

(Data courtesy of The Mobility Agenda’s Margy Waller)

Read the full article here.

Poverty

St. Louis faces test in addressing poverty
“It is time for bold leadership and programming on this issue without the constant inclination to blame the poor for their status.”
Good point – but by talking about poverty that is exactly the inclination you are going to get.

Poverty dramatically affects children’s brains
“Such deficiencies are reversible…”
Luckily, deficiencies in policy are reversible too. (All it takes is a change of frame.)

Area’s poverty not going to disappear on its own

“Less than 4 percent of respondents cited poverty as an issue, despite the fact Escambia County has the second-highest poverty rate (15.8 percent) of large counties in Florida…”

Surprised? Then you haven’t been listening.

An Enduring Crisis for the Black Family
“While half of all black children born to single mothers are poor, that is the case for only 12 percent of those born to married parents.”
You still want to talk about poverty? Get ready for this debate.

Health Care, Jobs, Benefits

Want Real Stimulus? Try Universal Health Care
“…in 2007 an estimated 116 million people, or two-thirds of working-age adults, were either uninsured for a time, faced steep out-of-pocket medical costs relative to their incomes, had difficulties paying their medical bills, or didn’t get the care they needed because of cost…”

Jobs ‘spread the wealth’ better than government
“Indeed, something that Obama and the rest of the redistributionists never seem to get in their haste to take ”the wealthy“ down a few pegs is that it takes wealthy people to create good jobs at good wages.”

Really? American millionaires are at record numbers…where are those good jobs you mentioned? 
or
Government ‘creates jobs’ better than anybody (employing 2% of the US workforce).

Women’s wages, benefits boosted by union membership
“…all else equal, joining a union raises a woman’s wage as much as a full-year of college, and a union raises the chances a woman has health insurance by more than earning a four-year college degree.”

Meltdown slows bid for family/work improvements
“The U.S. is one of only four countries out of 173 in a recent survey that doesn’t guarantee some form of paid maternity leave; the others are Liberia, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea.”
Just call us the Rebel Without a Paid Leave Clause.

Ideology and Poverty Measurements

Margy Waller has a good article in Alternet on poverty measurements today. I don’t have any specific comment on it. More generally, though, I think something that’s missing from the debate over poverty measurements is the fundamental ambiguity of the things being measured… Read the full article here