Updates – Page 19 – Alliance for a Just Society

“Be Bold!” Small Businesses Nationwide Call for Administrative Relief

We are on the edge of powerful moment. President Obama has an opportunity right now to make history, to take a stand, and to free millions of families from fear, and life in the shadows. He can open the door for millions of families to be fully recognized as part of this country.

We have a crisis, and we have a solution – Administrative Relief.

The time is now Mr. President. Act. Be Bold.

Senate Democrats are urging the president to step back, to delay offering administrative relief to immigrants until after the November elections. Like the Republicans, who have blocked immigration reform for years – they, too, are playing a political game with people’s lives.

So, this week, small business owners throughout the country are taking action. They are calling on the president to step up. More than 800 business owners have already added their names to a letter to the president asking him to act now.

If you are a small business owner, add your name to this letter today: http://mainstreetalliance.org/open-letter-relief/

Our businesses are deeply rooted in the towns and communities where we live and work. Immigrants are our colleagues, our customers and our employees. They add to the vitality of our economy and our communities. We see the suffering of families torn apart by deportations.

When we collect more than a thousand names – very soon now – we’ll send the letter to the president and let him know that he has our support, and we have his back, when he calls for administrative relief for our families.

Immigrant workers make enormous contributions to the U.S. economy. Now our president and our nation need to put immigration reform back on the table. The majority of the population believes in a path to citizenship.

Let’s offer Deferred Action to the parents of the Dreamers.
Let’s end Secure Communities, a program designed only to create fear in communities.
Let’s grant visas to the parents of all children living in the United States to unite families.
Let’s immediately stop the deportation of young people fleeing violence in Central America

This playing with people’s lives has gone on for tool long. Out families and our businesses are ready to fix our broken immigration system and start moving on to other, more critical issues that need close attention.

Be bold Mr. President! We will be there to support you.

Add your business name: http://mainstreetalliance.org/open-letter-relief/

Learning Experience: Two Bachelors Degrees and Deep in Debt

In my family, going to University was never a question. My sisters and I were raised with the idea that higher education was our ticket out of poverty. Like our peers, we clung to the American dream of graduating and establishing careers that would allow us to fulfill our dreams of traveling, building a family, owning a family home, and eventually retiring in comfort. What we didn’t count on was the crippling debt we would have to surmount.

I graduated in June from Seattle Pacific University. After working full time for the last four years, I earned two bachelor’s degrees, and roughly $140,000 in debt.

I was so steeped in the ideology of higher education that when the bills came in for tuition, books, and housing, the fear associated with the prospect of not having a degree to my name exceeded my anxiety at my mounting debt. So much so, that when the grants and scholarships that I had received began to run out, my mother consented to take out parent-plus loans to keep not only myself, but also my two elder sisters in college, under the condition that we would repay the loans in her name.

Some of my peers were not so lucky and had to drop out. Six months later they were working minimum wage jobs attempting to repay the loans they had been able to take out – still without their degrees.Continue reading “Learning Experience: Two Bachelors Degrees and Deep in Debt”

Let’s Truly Celebrate Workers’ Contributions – With a Living Wage

Is Labor Day just a day to celebrate workers’ labor in name, without ensuring that those workers actually benefit?

“The basic bargain of America is that no matter who you are, where you come from or what you look like, if you work hard & play by the rules, you can make it, ” says U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Tom Perez on the agency’s 2014 Labor Day website.

But for working families earning minimum wage, that’s just not true.

As the Alliance for a Just Society reported this week in Families Out of Balance, low-income workers are saddled with debt, and are earning wages well below a living wage. A living wage allows workers to provide for their family’s basic needs, as well as have some money for savings and miscellaneous expenses like clothing.

In seven out of the 10 states studied, the state minimum wage provides less than half of the living wage for a single adult. In all 10 states, the minimum wage provides less than one-third of a living wage for a single adult with two children.Continue reading “Let’s Truly Celebrate Workers’ Contributions – With a Living Wage”

Families Out of Balance: Living Wages Move Families from Survive to Thrive

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 26, 2014

Contact: Kathy Mulady

(206) 992-8787

kathy@allianceforajustsociety.org

Read the Families Out of Balance report here.

Low-income families are already struggling to meet basic needs. Factor in suffocating household debt, and it is clear that families not making a living wage have little chance of building for the future.

As the gap between minimum wages and living wages continues to grow, we find that low-income households face a disproportionate debt burden — to an alarming degree. Families are forced to navigate a system that sets them up to fail, resulting in painful kitchen table conversations as households confront impossible balance sheets.

Job Gap: Families Out of Balance, produced by the Alliance for a Just Society, is the first report in the Alliance’s 2014 Job Gap Economic Prosperity Series. This study examines just what it takes to move beyond living paycheck-to-paycheck and the challenges that low-income families burdened with debt face.

The report also includes living wage findings for five household types in 10 states and in New York City. The Alliance has produced a Job Gap Study on jobs and wages since 1999.Continue reading “Families Out of Balance: Living Wages Move Families from Survive to Thrive”

Job Gap: Working Families Struggling, Sliding Deeper into Debt

Debt – it’s become so entrenched in our daily lives that it’s almost a given. Debt is often a choice for higher income families, as an investment in the form of a mortgage or as a means to help pay for college.

However, lower-income households often end up in debt because their incomes leave them living paycheck-to-paycheck without a cushion for even minor incidentals. When an someone gets sick, the doctor bills pile up. If they attend college to improve their job opportunities, the student loan debt piles up.

It is an impossible balance sheet, resulting in families cutting back on necessities like health care, meals, or heat in the winter as they try to scrape by.

Today, Alliance for a Just Society released Families Out of Balance, the first report in the 2014 Job Gap Economic Prosperity Series. The report shows exactly how dramatically lower-income workers are disproportionately burdened by debt.

In addition, the reports shows that minimum wages in 10 states studied across the country fall far short of a living wage – even without adding debt to the equation.Continue reading “Job Gap: Working Families Struggling, Sliding Deeper into Debt”

In the New York Times, Make the Road N.Y. Members Tell Obama “Stop the Deportations”

Juan Carlos Valdez, a member of Alliance For a Just Society affiliate Make The Road New York, is featured along with his family in a new video on the New York Times site. From MRNY:

While Juan Carlos’ sons are protected by the President’s temporary Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), unless the President takes meaningful executive action, Juan Carlos and his wife Nancy could one day face deportation and have their family — and the life they’ve worked hard to build for their kids in New York City — torn apart.

That’s why we’re coming together for a national day of action for immigration relief next Thursday, August 28 in Washington, DC. You can take action today by calling the White House and asking President Obama to stop deportations of immigrant families.Continue reading “In the New York Times, Make the Road N.Y. Members Tell Obama “Stop the Deportations””

Let’s Put Some Muscle on Those Skinny Health Care Networks

** This article by LeeAnn Hall first appeared in Huffington Post **

Have you heard about the latest fad in health care? It’s called “skinny networks.”

Normally, when I hear the words “skinny” and “health” in the same sentence, I think about the importance of diet and exercise. Yet, when we’re discussing health provider networks, there’s nothing healthy about skinny.

A health provider network is the set of primary care doctors, specialists, hospitals, and other facilities in a patient’s health plan. When you’re selecting your health insurance, often one of the first things you do is check the provider list on the insurer’s website. You want to know whether you’ll be able to see your doctor if you choose that plan.

However, being able to see your family doctor isn’t the only thing that matters in a health provider network. Patients also count on networks to offer specialists and facilities close to home, so they can get care they need when they need it, without exorbitant out-of-network costs.Continue reading “Let’s Put Some Muscle on Those Skinny Health Care Networks”

Justice for Michael Brown! End Racial Profiling and Police Violence

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The images of protest and militarized police response in Ferguson, Missouri are shocking. But developments in that small suburban town are simply exposing the racial reality that millions of people of color face every day.

Everyday experiences with the courts, media, government authorities and police remind us, in ways large and small, that the lives of young brown and black kids have little value in society.

Police and vigilante killings of young black and brown people are commonplace in communities of color. The killings of Renisha McBride, Ramarley Graham, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant and others in recent years have cast a national spotlight on an epidemic of senseless killings of unarmed people of color. All too often our children are dying at the hands of those entrusted with public safety. All too often the killers go free. The message is clear: black and brown people just don’t count.

It has been widely reported that in Ferguson—a town whose population is nearly two-thirds Black—there is only a single Black city councilperson, and three Black police officers in a force of 53. Ferguson reported 8 times as many black arrests as white arrests for the first part of 2014. Blacks represent 86% of all traffic stops and 92% of all searches. The data show a clear practice of racial profiling. The numbers might differ a little from place to place, but these statistics are a stark image of the racial divide that exists in small towns and large across our country today. Racial disparities in crime statistics are the norm from coast to coast.

Blacks, Latinos, American Indians and other people of color are routinely excluded from the halls of power and subjected to racialized police policies like profiling and stop-and-frisk.

Continue reading “Justice for Michael Brown! End Racial Profiling and Police Violence”

Fair Wages Aren’t Enough, Workers Need Hours, Predictability, too

There’s no question that working families across the country are struggling to get by; wages for most income levels have been stagnant or declining over the past decade, while the cost of living has continued to increase.

One key to helping working families is increasing wages so that there are more living wage jobs available. However, increasing the minimum wage is only part of the solution for helping families whose low-wage jobs do not always include steady work.

Living wage calculations, like those produced by the Alliance for a Just Society, must make assumptions to remain consistent year after year. One of those assumptions is that workers have jobs where they can actually work 40 hours per week, year-round (for 2,080 hours per year). For many workers, this assumption doesn’t match their reality.

For retail and restaurant workers, a steady schedule with enough hours can be hard to come by. Retail salespersons and food preparation and service workers are two of the top five occupations with the greatest projected job growth between 2012 and 2022, but are also low-wage occupations, with 2013 median annual wage of $21,140 and $18,330, respectively. These jobs are also often shift work, without set schedules.Continue reading “Fair Wages Aren’t Enough, Workers Need Hours, Predictability, too”

Beyond Cellblocks Webinar: Ending Police-ICE Collaboration

This year, Alliance for a Just Society is hosting a series of webinars discussing techniques used in different parts of the country to combat racism and criminalization. Our most recent webinar focused on tactics for ending police collaboration with Immigration officials. This Friday, at 11 a.m., join us for a webinar on Native American storytelling. Click here to register for the storytelling webinar.

A little bit about our last webinar: Throughout the country, police have been partnering with immigration services, resulting in unfair targeting and treatment of racial minorities. On July 1, the Alliance for a Just Society and the Center for Intercultural Organizing convened a live webinar discussion about ending collaboration between local law enforcement agencies and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).Continue reading “Beyond Cellblocks Webinar: Ending Police-ICE Collaboration”