"You are in a Catch-22," said Emmanuel Caicedo, a senior campaign strategist with Demos, one member of a coalition of 79 labor and civil rights organizations that formed the NYC Coalition to Stop Credit Checks in Employment.
"You can't pay your bills and so your credit is bad. And then you can't get a job to pay your bills because of your credit."
In April 2015, Walmart implemented a $9 an hour minimum wage for all of its 1.3 million U.S. workers, and committed to pay all current workers at least $10 per hour by February 2016.1 This is an important step from the country’s largest employer and in particular for the retail industry, where low-wage, unstable employment is the norm.
Demos and coalition partners have reached an agreement with the City Council and de Blasio administration to send a bill banning the use of employment credit checks to the City Council floor. In response, President Heather McGhee issued the following statement:
“We are pleased to see progress made in the fight for equal opportunity employment in New York City. Employment credit checks are a catch-22, preventing qualified workers from getting a job just when they really need one most. The biggest drivers of credit problems are job loss and medical emergencies.
Middle class income stagnation, and the inequality that it causes, is the principal economic challenge for the nation — and finance is to blame for it.
On Sunday, the New York Times published an unbelievably misleading op-ed on the cost of college by Paul Campos, a law professor at University of Colorado, Boulder.
Late Tuesday, news broke that yet another unarmed American, a black man named Walter Scott, was killed by a white police officer. As with Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Rodney King nearly 25 years ago, the brutality was captured on video for the world to see. The New York Times put the damning evidence at the very top of its homepage and it quickly spread throughout social media networks provoking outrage, disgust, horror, grief. These reactions have come most vocally from black Americans.
Black Twitter is a force. It’s also not particularly well understood by those who aren’t a part of it. The term is used to describe a large network of black Twitter users and their loosely coordinated interactions, many of which accumulate into trending topics due to the network’s size, interconnectedness, and unique activity.
Last Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio and First Lady Chirlaine McCray had a diverse group of 15 progressive leaders, from Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison to US Senator Sherrod Brown, over to their home for lunch. The agenda: chart a course to make inequality the defining issue of the American political debate this campaign cycle.
In the wake of higher voter turnout in Ferguson, the city council now has three Black council members, up from only one before the election. This is a welcome change.
In an op-ed in the New York Times over the weekend, University of Colorado law professor Paul F. Campos offered a provocative answer to the frequently asked question: why is college so expensive these days?
Today, Demos President Heather McGhee joined Mayor De Blasio and other progressive leaders and activists in the unveiling of a new initiative to make income inequality a central issue of the 2016 election cycle.
A recent report titled “The Racial Wealth Gap” examined, in conjunction with other factors, the role education plays in the persistent wealth gap between minorities and their White counterparts in this country.
