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09.07.17 expense manager

Fran works six days a week in fast food, and yet she’s homeless: ‘It’s economic slavery’

Fran Marion and Bridget Hughes are leading voices in Stand Up Kansas City, part of the Fight for $15 movement that aims raise the minimum wage across the US

Once a customer has barked their order into the microphone at the Popeyes drive-thru on Prospect Avenue, Kansas City, the clock starts. Staff have a company-mandated 180 seconds to take the order, cook the order, bag the order and deliver it to the drive-thru window.

The restaurant is on short shift at the moment, which means it has about half the usual staff, so Fran Marion often has to do all those jobs herself. On the day we met, she estimates she processed 187 orders roughly one every two minutes. Those orders grossed about $950 for the company. Marion went home with $76.

Despite working six days a week, Marion, 37, a single mother of two, cant make ends meet on the $9.50 an hour she gets at Popeyes (no apostrophe founder Al Copeland joked he was too poor to afford one). A fast food worker for 22 years, Marion has almost always had a second job. Until recently, she had been working 9am-4pm at Popeyes, without a break, then crossing town to a janitorial job at Bartle Hall, the convention center, where she would work from 5pm- to 1.30am for $11 an hour. She didnt take breaks there either, although they were allowed.

The homeless Popeyes worker fighting for fair wages in Missouri

I was so tired, she says. If I took a break I would go to sleep, so I would work straight through, she says.

Even with those two jobs, Marion was unable to save and when disaster struck she found it impossible to cope financially. Last month, the city condemned the house she rented the landlord had refused to fix faulty wiring and the leaking roof and she was made homeless.

Her children, Ravyn, 15, and Rashad, 14, are now living with a friend, two bus rides away. Because of the time and distance, Marion hasnt seen them in a week. She and her dog Hershey, a goofy milk-chocolate colored pitbull, are sleeping at the apartment of fellow fast food worker, Bridget Hughes: Marion on the sofa, Hershey on the balcony.

Its a downtrodden two-bedroom apartment in a sketchy neighborhood. Sex workers stake out the busier street corners; many of the houses are boarded up or burnt out. The detritus of drug addiction litters the streets.

While she tries to save for a deposit on a new home, Marion is sharing with Bridgets husband, Demetrius, and their four children. Not having a home, honestly, you guys, it makes me feel like I am a failure. Like I have let my kids down, says Marion, sitting among the plastic bags that hold her life. The rest of her familys belongings are stored in a van downstairs, a van she cant drive because she hasnt got the money to get it insured.

Marion
Marion at her friends house. Photograph: Tom Silverstone

After she quit her janitorial job, hoping to find something more flexible so she could see more of her children, Marion started interviewing for a second job in fast food. I have always needed two jobs. You basically need two jobs to survive working on low wages, she says. Working so hard for so little security makes her feel like I am getting nowhere, she says. My family is not benefiting. Im working so hard to come home, and still I have to decide whether I am going to put food on the table or am I going to pay the light bill, or pay rent.

It makes me feel like a peasant. In a way its slavery. Its economic slavery.

Unsurprisingly, Marion seems depressed. She looks down when she talks, raising her big, sad eyes only when she has finished. But her whole face lights up when she talks about her kids. They are my world, she says. [They] brighten up my soul. She worries that all this pressure is bad for her self-diagnosed high blood pressure. Like 28 million other Americans, she doesnt have health insurance. She hasnt seen a doctor in her adult working life.

Bridget and Demetrius are hardly doing better. She earns $9 an hour at Wendys, Demetrius makes $9.50 an hour working at a gas station. Rent and bills, including childcare, come to about $800 a month, and they are barely scraping by, living paycheck to paycheck. Hughes says she has missed her childrens graduations, doctors appointments. She tears up as she explains how economic necessity meant she was forced to return to work two weeks after she last gave birth, and had to give up breastfeeding.

Marion
Marion with her niece. Photograph: Tom Silverstone


But Marion and Hughes are fighters, figureheads in what some see as the next wave of the civil rights movement. The pair are leading voices in Stand Up Kansas City, the local chapter of the union-backed Fight for $15 movement, which is campaigning for a nationwide increase in the minimum wage. And they are determined to make a difference.

The Fight for $15 movement is probably the most high profile, and successful, labor movement in the US, and has successfully pushed for local raises in the minimum wage across the country, mostly in Democratic strongholds. Trump comfortably won Missouri in 2016, although the major cities Kansas City, St Louis and Columbia voted Democrat. But the pair are confident that by coming together, the millions of Americans working low wage jobs can effect change even now.

Its not just us, its all across America, says Hughes. She says she felt invisible before the Fight for $15 movement.

On 14 April 2015, campaigners held what was then the largest ever protest by low-wage workers in US history. About 60,000 workers took to the streets in cities across the country calling for an increase in the minimum wage.

When protesters came to Marions restaurant, she says most of the staff moved to the back of the restaurant to distance themselves from the activists while her corporate boss smirked and laughed as they read their demands and said what they needed. I looked at him and I thought, You dont have these worries, she says. How can you laugh at someone elses pain? And I am going through the same thing. Thats when I joined the Fight for $15.

wages

There is wave. There is momentum. I think that with all of working together, we will win $15 in the end, she says.

Its been almost a decade since the Great Recession, and America has witnessed a record 82 months of month-on-month jobs growth. The national unemployment rate now stands at a 4.3%, a 16-year low. But month after month, it is the low-wage sectors fast food, retail, healthcare that have added new jobs. Wage growth has barely kept pace with inflation. The national minimum wage ($7.25) was last raised in 2009.

Across the US, 58 million people earn less than $15 an hour; 41 million earn less than $12. In Missouri, Kansas City and St Louis councils recently passed local ordinances that would have increased the minimum wage to $13 an hour by 2023 in Kansas Citys case.

But backed by local and national business interests, Missouris governor, Eric Greitens a bestselling author, former Navy Seal and a rising Republican star has moved to roll back the increases, arguing businesses cant afford raises and will leave. Liberals say these laws help people, Greitens said in a statement. They dont. They hurt them.

Not so, says David Cooper, senior economic analyst at the Economics Policy Institute. We have decades of research on this and it all concludes that increases in the minimum wage have had negligible impact on jobs growth, he says. The academic debate is currently about whether that impact is a small gain in growth or a small drop. Either way, he says, a small rise in the minimum wage has an outsized impact on low wage workers. A $1 an hour rise from the current minimum of $7.25 would give the average low wage worker $2,000 more a year, says Cooper. That is a huge injection of income, he says.

The intense lobbying against an increase is simply a device to keep wages as low as possible so that employers can capture as much profit as they can, he says. Polls show that the majority of Americans are in favor of an increase. At least 40 cities and states around the country will raise their minimum wages in 2017, thanks largely to ballot measures. Those measures will deliver raises of around $4,000 a year for more than one-third of the workforce in states like New York and California, according to the National Employment Law Project.

But Greitens is not alone in fighting back, helped by a study of the impact of Seattles minimum wage hike by the University of Washington, which seemed to suggest higher wages had translated to fewer jobs. That the methodology of that study has been heavily criticized (utter BS, according to Josh Hoxie, director of the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies ) and stands in contrast to piles of studies that found the opposite hasnt negated its popularity with anti-wage hikers.

Marion:
Marion: At the top of America, when it comes to Trump and them, their goal is to keep us down. Photograph: Tom Silverston/Tom Silverstone


Marion isnt in it for the politics. She is in it for the money, money that means one thing for her: getting her family back together and giving them a secure life. We pick her up at Popeyes and drive to a pleasant Kansas City suburb. Cicadas thrum as she beams strolling from the car to hug her daughter Rayven and goddaughter Shi Ann.

Shi Ann, in her rainbow hued LOVE T-shirt (the O is a butterfly), plays with princess flip-flops and squirms, giggling in Marions arms. Princesses dont put their fingers in their mouths, laughs Marion. I ask Rayven how it is living without her mum. The idyll is over. Tears fill her eyes. Marion goes inside so we cant see her cry.

Later, Marion says Rayven wants to leave school at 16 and get a job in fast food to help out. Ideally, her mum wants her to go to college but nothing is ideal for the Marion family at present.

After the visit, we drive back into the city to All Souls Unitarian church where Marion and Hughes are set to address a panel of academics, union leaders and others. The neighborhood is a world away from their own. A giant Louise Bourgeois spider menaces a manicured lawn at the Kemper art museum close by. The two women are unintimidated. They hold the room with ease as they talk about their fight with humor and a confidence that things will change.

Guests ask why they dont go back to school, get higher paid jobs. Hughes has a college degree but as the daughter of a low wage worker said she could only afford community college. Employers saw her degree as worthless, and she ended up $13,000 in debt. She did have a job in a tax office but lost it only to find that thanks to Missouris business-friendly rules, she was barred from working for another tax office by a non-compete agreement. (Fast food franchisor Jimmy Johns imposed a similar agreement on its workers but dropped it last year after a public backlash.)

Barred from tax office work, Hughes said fast food was all she could find.

Marion says the argument that fast food workers should leave for other, better paid, jobs misses the point. People like fast food. The companies that make it make fortunes. We are the foot soldiers for these billion-dollar companies. We are the ones doing the work and bringing the money, she says.

At the top of America, when it comes to Trump and them, their goal is to keep us down, she says. Between these billion-dollar companies and Trump, its a power trip.

They can afford to pay more and, she believes, eventually they will. We are still coming. No war has been won over night and we are not giving up.

More than that, she likes working in fast food. I love it. Im good at it. Just like Martin Luther King said, If you are going to be a road sweeper, be the best damn sweeper there is, she says. I dont know. Its just this society is all messed up.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/21/missouri-fast-food-workers-better-pay-popeyes-economics

09.06.17 Merchant Services

We let the 2007 financial crisis go to waste | Torsten Bell

Attlee and Roosevelt built a fairer world off the back of economic catastrophe, says Torsten Bell, director of the Resolution Foundation

Its not the time passing, its the opportunity for retrospection that kills you. Or at least thats how it feels looking back a full 10 years to the day when I was working in the Treasury as we got the news that the French bank BNP Paribas had frozen funds exposed to US sub-prime mortgages. The crunch part of the credit crunch had arrived, and with it a chain of historic events that led to the first bank run in Britain in over 100 years and the collapse of Lehman Brothers just over a year later. Looking back over that decade is not pretty, and should leave us asking: is this really the best we can do?

While British politicians share responsibility for not foreseeing the crisis, they deserve some credit for their immediate response. Alistair Darling and Gordon Browns decision to put money into our banks, eventually owning most of the Royal Bank of Scotland, stopped the downward spiral and prompted similar action from other governments, including that of the US. With hindsight, it may appear to have been the obvious course of action, but at the time very little was obvious as the right way forward was debated across the Treasury and Bank ofEngland.

But not only did we in Whitehall fail to see the crisis coming, we failed in anticipating its long-term impact. We expected unemployment, repossessions and business insolvencies to surge, just as we had seen in the recessions of the 1980s and 90s. But none of these reached anywhere near the levels seen in the past. Repossessions peaked at a lower level than in 1991; the annual rate of business liquidations remained well below those seen in the 1990s; and unemployment fell just half as far as it had in the 1980s. Some groups, including black men and the young, paid a heavy price, but the infamous 3 million unemployment figure that scarred Britain in a previous recession was never breached.

In contrast, not a single Whitehall meeting I recall remotely anticipated the colossal pay squeeze that would see real earnings fall by over 10%. We should have spotted earlier the changed dynamic of a flexible labour market, very low interest rates and a big depreciation of the exchange rate, whichfed quickly through into the higher inflation and lower living standards still evident today. Had we done so, we might have recognised earlier that employment levels were understating the economic damage being done and, for example, pushed harder against opposition to more radical action from Mervyn King, then governor of the Bank of England.

Today, when we know this is the defining economic event of most of our lifetimes, its even clearer that our response has fallen short. Yes, progress has been made on financial regulation, where the danger doesnt lie in an immediate repeat of the crisis but in us forgetting why such changes were required in the first place. Banks have a capital base three times stronger than 2007, while institutional reforms under the coalition government and better international coordination are very welcome.

But the question people are rightly asking isnt whether we have fixed the weeds of financial regulation. Its about whom Britain works for. Reflecting from that perspective is much more depressing. We have failed to put the energy created by the crisis to good use. There are indeed some puzzles we lack definitive answers to, such as why our productivity levels are flatlining. But there are many other areas where despite knowing exactly what needs to be done, we still havent taken action.

Britains public finances have been the centre of political debate over the past 10 years, but where has that left us? With the national debt more than doubling since 2007 and the deficit set to be with us well into the 2020s. There have been big rows about the pace of deficit reduction, but one lesson of the crisis that everyone agrees on is that Britains tax base was too narrowly reliant on banking. Yet we seem to have forgotten that cutting taxes is easier than putting them up, meaning that a period of prolonged fiscal consolidation is a very silly time to be making major tax cuts. Yet that is exactly what we have done, with 18bn a year of income tax cuts that mainly benefit better-off households, and 9bn a year in corporation tax cuts. This undermining of the tax base has slowed down the repair of the public finances and put unsustainable pressures on some public services.

On living standards, there is not some magic bullet to put right the fact that families on low and middle incomes have seen their living standards rise by just 3% since 2002-03. But acting on housing, which puts huge pressures on living standards, is very much within our control. Way back in 2004, a review by Kate Barker clearly outlined the need to increase housing supply. At the time a pitiful 225,000 homes a year were started. Fast forward a decade, and it was just 170,000: not what a learning curve looks like. Its not just housing where weve ignored a problem to the detriment of intergenerational fairness. We knew before 2007 that our vocational education system was letting down swaths of young people. New technical qualifications, T-levels, are set to be introduced, but further education spending is back to what it was 2005-06 while secondary school spending has increased by a quarter.

For all the talk of ever-increasing income inequality, it has been broadly flat in recent years, after a fall during the crisis. Britains problem, in 2007 and today, is not that inequality always rises but that it is simply too high. But rather than reducing it, the coming years risk bringing the largest rise in inequality since Margaret Thatcher was in Downing Street. 9bn in cuts to tax credits and benefits for low- and middle-income families are in train, cuts that neither main party wanted to focus on in the recent election. Its not capitalism delivering rising inequality, its the wrong policy choices.

The past decade has brought a recognition that government has more of a role in improving the lot of workers. However, with the welcome exception of George Osbornes big minimum wage hikes, that consensus has done too little to deliver actual improvements. The coalition government simply tinkered at the edges of zero-hours contracts, when anyone in practice working regular hours should just be entitled to a regular contract. And why, in this day and age, is it still accepted practice for hotel workers to be given their shifts just a week ahead, when efficient companies around the world regularly plan months in advance?

Ten years of necessary ultra-loose monetary policy have left British households as addicted to personal debt and consumption as ever, posing a significant risk to growth if weak income growth continues. With interest rates remaining near zero, we should realise we cant be as dependent on central banks to manage a future downturn. But wheres the preparation for shovel-ready infrastructure projects if and when that happens? Or, for that matter, the additional public and private investment we need more generally?

After the second world war the Attlee government didnt simply try to undo the damage of the war. From the NHS to our national parks, it used the energy from that cataclysm to build a better Britain. Franklin D Roosevelts New Deal wasnt simply a response to the Great Depression, but a set of interlocking reforms aiming to build a fairer country. The financial crisis highlighted the big challenge of our time: to ensure the economy delivers for working people. Looking back over the last decade, its clear we have far from delivered. With Brexit looming, a lots changed in our politics. But when it comes to our economy, things simply havent changed anywhere near enough.

Torsten Bell is director of the Resolution Foundation

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/09/2007-financial-crisis-go-to-waste-attlee-roosevelt-economic-catastrophe

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