ALIGN

National Jobs with Justice and the Excluded Worker Congress commemorated International Human Rights Day by releasing Unity for Dignity: Expanding the Right to Organize to Win Human Rights at Work, a report highlighting on-going efforts to dramatically expand workers’ human right to organize and collectively bargain. The Excluded Workers Congress and the report highlight workers who have historically been excluded from labor protections, the right to organize, and underrepresented in the labor movement - domestic workers, farmworkers, taxi drivers, restaurant workers, day laborers, guestworkers, workers from Southern “right to work” states, workfare workers and formerly incarcerated workers.

This new report from the Fiscal Policy Institute identifies $5.4 billion a year in state government "back door" spending in the name of economic development and job creation. An additional $2.8 billion a year is being drained from New York's local government budgets because of a variety of tax expenditures in state law. In these tough budget times, these billions of dollars in business tax expenditures, which have historically lacked transparency and accountability, must be examined carefully - program by program - to determine whether the promised benefit is real, and if so whether the expense entailed is justified.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund’s new report, Creating Good Jobs in Our Communities: How Higher Wage Standards Affect Economic Development and Employment, examines the impact of living wage standards on economic development subsidies. It finds that economic development wage standards have no negative effect on citywide employment levels. The study finds that the 15 cities effectively implementing business assistance living wage laws—Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Cambridge, Cleveland, Duluth, Hartford, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Oakland, Philadelphia, Richmond, San Antonio, San Francisco, San Jose, and Santa Fe—had the same levels of employment growth overall as a comparable group of control cities. The study also finds that these laws do not harm low-wage workers. Employment in the low-wage industries most likely affected by the living wage laws was unaffected by the change.