 We're still awaiting the arrival of one of our speakers who, unfortunately, has been victim to the Metro this morning, so we expect her soon. My name is Christian Dorsey with the Economic Policy Institute, and we're pleased to welcome you to this event this morning. I know that some of you were here when we kind of inaugurated this new event space in our new offices for events, both last week and this week. For those of you who are new, welcome. This is quite a step up from our previous event space, so we're glad that you could join us. A few logistical notes. If you need to step out of the room for any reason, take a phone call, use the restrooms, would ask that you would use the back door here, and then as you go through the lobby, the receptionist can direct you to where the restrooms are, but that will just ease the disruption on the panel should you need to leave while we're doing this. This event is being livestreamed, and we will also have the opportunity for the audience to pose questions when we get to the Q&A portion program, so rest assured, if you are inspired by what you hear, as I expect you will be, there will be an opportunity to engage in discussion. So at this point, just to frame why we're doing this event, why we're talking about what the Fight for 15 Movement means for the future pursuit of economic justice and the innovative ways in which people are organizing to achieve said aims, we're going to turn it over to our president of VPI, Larry Michele, Dr. Michele. Well, we're really happy to be having this event. We are in what I have called our wages moment, and for someone like me, I've been working on wage issues. Well, actually, I went to grad school in order to work on wage issues, and so that's at least a 40-year enterprise for me. But this is the first time we've ever had an emerging national debate, I think it will be a presidential debate, over what are we going to do to generate wage growth for the vast majority. At this point, if you listen to the primaries of both Republican and the Democratic primaries, there was universal agreement that wages have been stagnant for the vast majority. And the only dissenters on that are some of the usual right-wing think tanks that have been carping at us for years, but even the Republican politicians don't listen to them anymore. Now, it's not really wage stagnation. We refer to that frequently at EPI, but it really is the suppression of wage growth because it didn't just happen. It happened as a result of conscious policies that were implemented so as to provide employers all the leverage in the labor market. And so that's why I'm really happy for us to be having this conversation today. It's a big shift from my last day, which was dealing with Trump's speech on globalization, which cited EPI 20 times. And he performed what I call the bait-and-switch. He started out talking about trade and globalization, its impact on workers, which is a good thing. That was the only thing he had to say about wages. And then he did the bait-and-switch. Instead of just stopping there, he said, well, then our real problems are businesses over-regulated and corporations are over-taxed, which is just mainstream corporate blah, blah, not blah, blah. That's their agenda that they have drilled in for 40 years. And not only that, it's the agenda that we've pursued that actually has accompanied the whole era of wage stagnation and suppression. So how do you start out being an anti-elitist, talking about trade and end up with the Chamber of Commerce policy agenda is quite a remarkable feat. So it's much better today to be talking about wages, talking about the future. This is inspired by our invitation to David, to talk about his book. David has been a leader both in practice, in generating new policies, but also in sort of forcing conversations about how we do things differently, sometimes making people uncomfortable, in ways that I might not all agree, but that's the whole point of having a conversation. If we do things the way we've been doing things, as he will point out, then we're going to not get where we need to go. So we really do have to really think anew and be willing to explore all paths. And with that, we have David speaking, and then we invited other people who can profile the key issues that we are pursuing that are being pursued around the states that I consider part of the wages agenda, paid leave, labor force agenda, fair work we're scheduling, increased hours of work at work, etc., that we're hearing from the other speakers who are all going to provide information about those innovative practices. So I'm really happy to do that. Welcome all. Thank you, Janice. Sorry, yeah, we apologize for our nation's lousy infrastructure. It's another bipartisan failure. So then I'll return it to Christian, who's going to be the moderator. We're not going to go through bios because you have them. And we'll spend that time on the speakers themselves. So thank you. All right, so hopefully as you came in, you received a copy of the excerpted bios for our incredible panel here today. As you can see, even these excerpts encompass a full page front and back. So instead of taking that time away from the conversation, you all can read. But let me just give you the highlights. We of course will begin with David Roth, who is, as Larry mentioned, bringing great energy and innovation to the debate about how we create greater opportunities for workers. And his book, The Fight for 15 is the inspiration for today's event. We also have it on sale outside. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that the bookseller who comes to all of our EPI events and is providing David's book here appropriately at the price of $15. Get it? Fight for 15. But it's Writers Bookstore. It's one of the few independent bookstores around. And they specialize in scientific, technical, and policy books. And they provide their services to us at no cost. So please support them if you can. David is going to begin our conversation. And after David, we're going to kind of have not really responses, but extensions of the conversation from some key experts you see before us. Starting with Janice Fine, who is an associate professor at Rutgers University at the School of Management and Labor Relations and the Center for Innovation in Work or Organization. Janice has been doing a lot of work on innovation in labor standards enforcement and looking at some systemic problems from some new angles. So I think you'll definitely benefit from her participation. And we also have one of our great partner organizations represented by Eliane Farhott, who is the deputy campaign director for the Fair Work Week initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, who will talk about how that organization is bringing incredible energy to what has been a poorly understood issue nationally, but is growing in importance and understanding because principally of the work of CPD. And then we have an old friend to me, Alyssa Coyne-Schmere from Moms Rising. Alyssa has an accomplished career as a policy maven, primarily in the work of poverty and human services needs who has, as they say, taken her talents to Moms Rising as their national budget campaign director, who will talk about the incredible work that that organization is doing. First of all, it's a new kind of organization. It's a different kind of model of organizing and educating, but then taking an agenda that will, as you can probably guess by the name of the organization, primarily benefit mothers and working women, but they've hit that key point, that nexus for how what's good for women is good for everyone. So I think you'll definitely love hearing about that agenda and some of the great accomplishments that they have. So with that, we are going to turn over the lectern to Mr. David Rolf. Oh, you want to speak from there? Come on up here. Well, listen, first of all, first of all, I want to thank Larry and Christian and Ross and the staff and leadership at EPI for having me here. This is quite literally an organization without whom this book wouldn't probably exist because if you count the footnotes, I'm not sure who quite wins the competition between EPI, Roosevelt, CAP, Institute for Policy Studies, but a small number of organizations get dozens of research footnotes for those small number of readers who actually read the 30 pages at the back with the hundreds of citations in it. But the work of EPI is so incredibly important to the labor movement, to the progressive movement, to the sort of center left dialogue about economics in this country. And I really appreciate the leadership, the work, and being, you know, privileged to speak in a room called the Wellstone Conference Room, I think. So thanks for all of you for being here. And thanks especially to Larry and the team for hosting. I wrote this book in part because at a very young age, I was honored and privileged to be asked to lead a big organizing campaign that ended up putting 74,000 minimum wage home care workers in a union for the first time. And it was not the first unionization campaign for home care workers, but it was the biggest and it was sort of a domino that fell in the 1990s. And, you know, I didn't ever thought about writing a book or even an article about that at the time. And within a year, I started reading things by academics and journalists interpreting the Los Angeles Home Care Campaign in ways that as the leader of the campaign, I couldn't recognize. So when a publisher called after I many, many years later, had the chance to lead the successful $15 campaigns in SeaTac in Seattle. So, well, you know, I never written much longer than a campaign plan or an internal memo for the labor movement for which I worked. But this time, I think I actually want to put down and writing so what happened, how we did it, the big ideas and campaign practices that were that, you know, we adopted and used in the fights for 15 in SeaTac in Seattle. And as the process went on, it became obviously a much longer, much more detailed thing. And although I started writing it, thinking about telling the story of SeaTac in Seattle, which I do tell in chapters four and five, it really became a book about the narrative of work and workers in America, the trajectory of 200 years of progress followed by 40 years of reverse progress. And sort of the notion that, quoting from a popular Occupy slogan, it wasn't always this way and it doesn't have to be this way. You know, we shouldn't be naive. This was hardly a nation born into perfection. At the dawn of the Republic, we had slavery, smallpox, short life expectancy and suffrage restricted only to property owning white men. But we had this, on the other hand, we had this crazy idea of, I'll recite the words liberty and justice for all that were written into the founding documents of our country. And for 200 years, we passed along more liberty and more justice to each successive generation, not in one completely straight line. There were moments where we regressed and went backwards, but as a general proposition for 200 years in this country, parents could actually look their kids in the eye and say, honestly, if you do the right stuff and you work hard and, you know, you use a cliche, play by the rules, your life will probably be better than mine. And that was a true statement that parents could tell their kids every generation in America until, always through struggle, by the way, always through movement building, always through social and collective action, for 200 years. And then sometime, shortly following the publication of the Powell memo, things began to go backwards. And, you know, I say in the first chapter of the book, because it is an election year, we should acknowledge that. If you were Jerry Ford or Jimmy Carter running for election 40 years ago and you gave a speech that predicted the future, I can imagine how it would have gone, right? My fellow Americans, as hard as it is to imagine, we're going to get out of this tough decade, the hangover of Watergate and Vietnam will slowly recede from the national consciousness, you know, we're going to see the last of the legal barriers to full economic participation by women and people of color fall. We're going to see no more gasoline lines, no more stagflation. The Berlin Wall will crumble. There will be no more foreign military threats to our soil. Americans are going to invent immigrant Americans, in fact, are going to invent new industries that will create three times more wealth in the next 30 years since it's been created in all of human history. That would have been a truly phenomenal prediction. It would have sounded strange and futuristic, some sort of Alan Toffler stuff. May he rest in peace. And no one would have really believed it. It all would have turned out to be true. But if the speech had then gone on to say the following, all that wealth we're going to create, 95% of it, we're going to distribute to the top 1% of income earners. The rest of it, we're going to distribute to the top 10% of income earners. The bottom 90% will take a pay freeze. The bottom 50% will take a pay cut. We're going to de-unionize, de-tax, deregulate, privatize, globalize. We're going to import third-world wages, export manufacturing. We're going to shred the funding systems for urban and rural public schools. We're going to make debt-free college a thing of the past. We're going to get rid of pensions. We're going to get rid of unions. We're going to replace old Jim Crow laws by a new economic apartheid for black and brown Americans who will continue to live in a permanent recession. And the net impact of women doubling their workforce participation from 1977 to 2012 will be $0 in take-home pay for the bottom 90% of income earning households. No one would have voted for that vision. But that's what we got. And we got it through the malice and negligence of leaders of both political parties. Because Americans believed the wrong ideas and followed the wrong leaders. That's what happened. Ronald Reagan famously gave us Pat Coe. But Jimmy Carter gave us the beginning of deregulation. Bill Clinton gave us NAFTA and welfare, quote unquote, reform. So through essentially a generation, we believed in a essentially trickle-down economic theory that if you were an honest economic conservative in 1975 and believed that all those things would actually lead to a more robust middle class and broader shared prosperity, we now have a 40-year experiment that proves you wrong. And so this book is really about, at its core, a couple things. One, why we need to be much more bold on wages. And number two, how that's just the beginning of thinking about a reset of the employment contract, the social contract, and the rules of who has power in America. So that's the story I take a couple hundred pages to tell. In this book, if you don't want to buy it, I forgive you now that I've given away the end, spoiler alert, and all of that. But I do want to talk a little bit about what happened in C-TAC in Seattle before we go to the panel. There are the first workers who went on strike for $15 were a group of fast food workers in New York in late November of 2012. It was one of three pilots that we were testing in SEIU about strikes for better wages, dramatically better wages. As you know, the narrative at the time was should there be no minimum wages, which is the libertarian rights perspective? But in the mainstream, should it continue to be 725? Should it go to 9? Or should it go to 1010? That was sort of the range of the debate outside of the far extremes. And when I first mentioned to a Seattle, sort of the liberal lion on the Seattle City Council about a $15 minimum wage, he said, do we even have the authority to do that? It wasn't something people talked about in city government or even in a lot of state governments. So November 2012, we had three pilots, fast food in New York, retail in Chicago, coffee in Seattle. And let's see what we can do. It turns out that the fast food workers in New York pulled off a dramatically more successful job action than we could mount amongst retail workers in Chicago or coffee workers in Seattle. And nationally, we decided to resource this fight for $15 in the fast food sector to start with. Obviously now, it's in airports, it's in home care, it's in childcare, even adjunct university faculty, which, shocker, make less than $15 an hour if you were to express their wage as an hourly wage and not a per course fee, have joined the fight for 15. But that first strike by a group of courageous women and men in Brooklyn walking, 200 people walking off to the job from a number of big global brand name fast food restaurants in November 2012 ended up being the shot heard around the world that launched the fight for 15. And over the next six months, workers in six cities went on strike, walked off the job, these were not traditional strikes, they weren't union workers, they weren't, they didn't have unfair anywhere on their picket sign to bless the strike under the rules of the National Labor Relations Board. They didn't all work for the same employer and in Seattle, we did succeed in shutting down, I think 14 restaurants, but there were probably hundreds of restaurants where individual workers walked off the job. So it was not in any way a traditional strike in the American sense of the word. But what it was is in some ways a strike against poverty, a strike against an industry and a reputational strike rather than sort of an industrial strike in the traditional sense that created a huge amount of media coverage and a huge amount of, electricity about this 40 year problem of wage stagnation. And I think people here in this room probably all know and appreciate that the value of the minimum wage peaked in 1968, the federal minimum wage, that if it had escalated with inflation, it would be roughly $12. If it had escalated with productivity, it would be roughly $22. If it had escalated with CEO pay, it would be roughly $30. And as, and during the same period of time, of course we transferred healthcare costs onto workers retirement costs onto workers. We extended commute times. They were embedded within sort of the entire economy, sort of an entire, an entire generation experienced impoverishment and cost shifting away from employers and governments on to workers. David, do you think that's darkness of motion? I don't know what that is. Yeah. So in Seattle, a woman named Carolyn DeRosher, who I write about in the book, was the first fast food worker probably in 100 years before there was a fast food industry, as we understand it today, to go on strike. She was the first woman who walked off the job on the evening of May 29th, 2013, hoping that her two co-workers would follow her out the door, which they did about an hour later, hanging a sign on the drive-through and on the door that said were closed due to short staffing. There was no staff left in the Taco Bell. And that became the first action and 24 hour series of actions around fast food in Seattle that ended up capturing the imagination of the city and became the single subject in which the municipal elections of 2013 were litigated. Between the airport workers in SeaTac that filed their own ballot measure after three years of frustrated union organizing efforts under the Railway Labor Act, which is essentially a union prevention law, because the baggage handlers in SeaTac would have had to recruit the ones in Honolulu and Portland, Maine to join a union at the same time if they wanted to get the government to hold an election. We had the airport workers file their own ballot measure to raise, to essentially write something like union labor's contract standards into law. $15, paid sick leave, full-time work guarantees, private right of action for enforcement. And in Seattle, in SeaTac, this little tiny city where our airport's located. And in Seattle, up the street, 15 miles up the street, a big city, workers were going on strike in the fast food industry and the municipal elections became litigated principally around the question of are you or are you not for $15? And sort of hilarious political moment, we had the incumbent mayor initially sort of say, yeah, wages ought to be higher, but I'm not sure we can do that alone as a city. The challengers say, I'm for 15, but I think we ought to negotiate it and phase it in over time and bring together labor and business stakeholders to figure out how to do it. And then the incumbent come back and say, no, actually I want 70. Actually, I'll sign any number, no matter how large as long as city council sends it to me. And then the day after the SeaTac election where the voters by 77 votes in this little working class city where there's a white majority, older white majority electorate and a immigrant person of color majority citizenry voted by 77 votes to raise the wage to $15 immediately. Went into effect seven weeks later, one step. I'll talk about that in a second. Then we had this 15 mile march from SeaTac to Seattle to bring the $15 wage from one city to the next. And a majority of city council were there serving coffee and cookies to the marchers as they got to city hall. So it was at that point, a question of how and not if. All these stories I certainly tell in the book. Contrast, SeaTac was a class war. What happened was the dominant airlines at SeaTac, principally Alaska Airlines, fought and fought and fought against any notion that the contracted work at the airport would ever be unionized and ever be high wage. These were jobs that paid $60,000 a year in today's wages in the 1970s. We have a congressman whose name incidentally in economics policy institutes, Adam Smith. No relation as far as I understand it. Democratic congressman who represents SeaTac. His father was a baggage handler. On his father's baggage handler salary that family bought a home sent their kid to college and law school. They had a pension, they had a health plan. Today, that baggage handler no longer works for United Airlines, works for one of an alphabet soup of no-name subcontractors that are paid, whose workers are paid minimum wage without benefits. Until 2013. The SeaTac voters changed that. The Seattle voters wildly and enthusiastically embraced the idea that the next mayor and the next city council should be for $15. And then while we had this direct conflict, yes or no in SeaTac. We're literally, it was like a nursing home organizing election for any union organizers in the room. We're like the day before the vote, people were so polarized, they were either wearing a sticker that said vote yes or they were averting all eye contact when you knocked on their door. That was not answering. Completely polarized electorate, 77 yes vote margin. And then the, and you know, a couple stories I tell are that number one, you know, like the vote no committee met in this wonderfully swank hotel where they served red wine and prime rib for lunch at their campaign meetings and talked about how terrible it would be if the wage went up to 15 because then they couldn't afford to give their staff free meals anymore, which is some days the only meal they got. We often had people in the room recording these things so we could leak them to the press. And it's like, what did you just say that you staff can't afford to eat? But in fact, that's what they did say. The guy who runs this chain of parking lots in SeaTac said, you know, well, if this passes I'm just gonna replace all my staff with kiosks and mechanize the work. The Washington Post followed up with both the luxury hotel and the parking lot owner after the election and said, what, so what happened to, so your hotel go out of business? Well, no, it turns out that the investors met and because they could no longer make the same amount of profit per room night, they decided to invest more money, double the number of rooms, broke ground on a new wing of the hotel with two presidential suites and a spa. And the guy who threatened to replace his staff by kiosk said, you know, that wasn't such a good idea. My customers actually want customer service and he hung a big banner on the side of his one of his buildings that said now hiring $15 an hour. So when we got to Seattle, there was a somewhat different debate and the business community essentially said, let's talk about how and not if. And so for four months, I had this interesting experience. You know, I bargained, one of the things I organized workers and I bargained contracts for like a living. That's my day job. And I had this interesting experience of sitting across a bargaining table convened by the mayor of a big city for four months, bargaining how to get to 15 with the leaders of the business community. And the head of the Chamber of Commerce, the head of the restaurant association, the head of the hotel association and the owner of the space needle were sitting across the table for me, a UFCW leader, an AFL-CIO leader and a group of community leaders as we spent four months passing proposals back and forth with the mayor coming in to be the tie breaker whenever we got to impasse. And that's the story I sort of tell in chapter five about how this politically constructed bargaining process ended up raising wages for far more people than any union contract could possibly do in today's economy. So the way I close the book, you know, I go through, those of you who want to buy it and read it, I hope you will enjoy it. Why the fuck, why the fuck? Because I do, there's a lot more than I could possibly cover in a short talk. But I'll just say one last thing about the way I end. You know, I think most people in this audience in this room understand that the business lobby has been reading off of the same script since the 1880s when it comes to labor standards that it's always is gonna hurt the people it's intended to help. It's always gonna drive businesses out of town. It's always gonna cause mass unemployment. And despite every change in, despite the eight hour day, the end of child labor and 29 or so increases in federal minimum wage, that simply has never happened. So the arguments against higher wages and better labor standards seem to be completely resistant to data in a way that almost no other political or social subject matter might be. The head of the National Publishers Association in 1937 predicted that if Congress enacted any minimum wage law at all, America would fall and crumble like ancient Rome. And the head of the department store lobby in 1913 said that if Congress prevented children under the age of 16 from working more than eight hours a day, that there would be no department stores left. I bought this shirt at Nordstrom Rack last night when I caught the train in from New York. Department stores may in fact go out of business, but will have far more to do with Amazon and e-commerce than it will ever have to do with the fact that 14 year olds can't be forced to work 12 hour days. So as we think about every great social movement in history, whether it was abolition, whether it was suffrage, whether it was sweatshops, whether it was the early labor movement, whether it was voting rights or civil rights, and even today into the victory around marriage equality, every great movement has begun with a seemingly implausible demand. The end of slavery when seven, I think seven, depending on the year between seven and 12% of Americans were in fact slaves, and an entire region had another economy built on slavery and the political in the constitution was written to ensure its political survival. Women's suffrage when whole industries and religious faiths feared that that would put them out of business. In an era of robber barons and cartels, an eight hour a day when the average construction and manufacturing worker worked a hundred hours, as he demands. And 15 seemed a little crazy when we started to a lot of people. We were called insane. We were called killing, fly, let economic death wish. You know, we have got some economic problems in Seattle. We have far too few housing units for the people who want to live there. But the restaurant industry that predicted, you know, Tom Perez always says to me when he says, you know, I always pack my lunch when I come to your city because I keep reading that there's no more restaurants. In fact, restaurants in the country are San Francisco and Seattle, the first two large cities to raise their minimum wage is far beyond the $15. So the lesson I think is to do something small that if you want to bother with inspiring people to take dramatic and bold action to change their lives, you better pick a big morally aspirational goal and not a small and at the end of the day, I predict, I'm looking around the room, I don't see anyone here whose title is President of the United States. I couldn't tell you, I asked several governors, do you know who the governor of your state was 100 years ago? None of them can answer the question. Most of us couldn't name a governor, a senator, a entertainer or an athlete from 100 years ago. 100 years from now, we're gonna remember any of our names. What people will remember 100 years from now is whether when the American dream was at its greatest level of risk, a handful of bold, courageous people had the courage to stand up and do something about it. And I hope we give them a reason to remember us with appreciation. Thank you. All right, David, thank you very much. And while we get the tech ready for Dr. Fine's presentation. All right, Dan, we're locked here. Would you give me a quick hand here? All right, I'll just say a couple of things while you're starting, is that okay? First of all, I want to thank the guy which has made an enormous difference and is the best tradition of scholarship. And the house that E.P.I. built, it took me a while to find the new place. It's very nice, Larry. Thanks to Larry, thanks to Christian. And I just want to say that I've heard David now three days in a row and every time he does this, it's better. And every time he does this, it's different. And I don't know if this is the talk, but so this is a great book and I do hope you all buy it. I also just want to give a shout out. My son, Ben, is in the house and that's really great for me. So he said to me a couple of while ago, Larry, he goes, you know the people at E.P.I.? So I couldn't resist. Looking for an internship next summer, maybe, I don't know. Okay, thanks. So you guys, I'm going to talk about something I hope your eyes won't roll back in your heads, but basically I want to think about enforcement and implementation. I'm a political scientist, I wasn't organized. When I was caught, it was somebody else's worry to figure out implementation, right? We were like, you passed the laws and tell them to make it happen, right? The older I've gotten, the more obsessed I've gotten with enforcement and implementation. So I'm just going to very quickly sort of throw out a set of ideas, some brain food for thinking about enforcement. I'm here with Eli and CPD, which has done such great work. Okay, so we're in an incredibly interesting moment. There's an attempt to re-govern the market from below, right? Through passing these really interesting, innovative and smart $15 an hour minimum wage policies, wage theft, need sick leave. There's a whole bunch of things, fair scheduling. So the question is, how are they going to be enforced? If contemporary rates of federal minimum wage, overtime, health and safety violations are any indication, we should be worried. And so the thing I want to make is how we should think as innovatively about enforcing laws as we are thinking about the policies themselves. So just very quickly, I want to sort of give you basic sense of the world of enforcement and what we understand about it as scholars, those pesky scholars who write about things that the organizers recognize. So the first is, we know that there's a huge problem with complaint-based enforcement. Those are most vulnerable to wage theft and workplace accidents are not only the least likely to know their rights, but even when they do, they're the least likely to come forward. Okay, following me so far? All right, we know that due to the groundbreaking research of David Weil, we know how to approximate non-compliance with wage in our laws by sector. We know how to do this. David's done it. And what he's found is that there's only minimal overlap between the sectors with the highest rates of non-compliance with wage in our laws and those sectors from which the highest numbers of complaints originate. Make sense? Yeah? Okay, so in other words, enforcement systems that are premised on the assumption that workers will complain when they have a problem are inadequate. We know this, it's indisputable now. Strategic enforcement, which David Weil has led on and is now the head of the wage in our division, targets highly non-compliant industries and takes advantage of industry-specific structures and regulations to go beyond individual firms and impact larger networks of employers. That's the basic deal. And I'm not gonna go through this, but this just shows you how little the relationship is between complaints and underlying problems. So here's the problem, right? When you do enforcement, can you guys all see this? Don't get worried. I know it's a two by two, but it's really... So it's the idea that in quadrant one, that's where we've got a lot of complaints coming and we know that there's also a lot of underlying violations. So quadrant one, that's fine. We could do all complaint-based enforcement if that's what was really happening. Here's the problem. Quadrant two is where there's very few complaints but we know there are very high violations. That's what's not happening, okay? And interestingly, there's even a quadrant where there's a lot of complaints and actually pretty low violations. Can you guess what sectors that might be coming from? Sorry? Unions and government, right? From people who feel like they can complain, right? So that's our challenge. Okay, so here's the good news. The good news is that at the federal level, there has been a total renaissance, a complete sea change because of the work that David Weil has done, not only since he's become Wage and Hour Director but before that, working actually starting in the Bush administration with lifers at the Wage and Hour Division to understand this problem. And in my view, that's where a lot of the work has to happen, right? With the long-term staff at these agencies. Anyway, so what's happened is that at the federal level, there has been a shift from complaint-based enforcement alone to a significant amount of strategic enforcement. So that now 42% of investigations are actually originating, not from complaints but violations are coming from targeting the sectors that have the largest number of violations. Okay, making sense so far. All right, now here's the issue. What my research shows is that there's no policy learning taking place between the federal government and state and local government. So basically, most state and local agencies that are charged with enforcing these new exciting laws are implementing entirely complaint-based systems. So here's the story. Here's what they tell me. I've just finished doing about 40 interviews and I have about 20 more to go. People who any place where a law has been passed in the last four years. Here's what I find. They're unaware of the scholarship on the limitations of solely complaint-based enforcement. They lack any kind of vision or theory about how to achieve compliance. They don't know what they don't know. They're reluctant to engage in aggressive enforcement because they think that business will get mad at them and they lack resources to do it. So what's happening in a number of the agencies that have actually implemented these complaint-based systems? You know what they tell me? They're not getting very many complaints. Okay, so this is a real problem for people who are trying to implement these really exciting re-governing the market from below kind of labor policies, right? They don't understand that silence doesn't equal compliance. The other thing is they don't have a plan to target the worst sectors, right? You have to have a theory of the case. You have to have a logic of enforcement of complaints of deterrence. That's what they don't have, right? So here's another example. They don't have a plan to triage complaints based on severity, number of workers impacted, or even whether the complainant is still employed a firm. So they're treating every complaint the same way, even though we know that most workers, low-wage workers are most likely to come forward when after they've left the firm, right? That's great. We want them to get their redress, but we don't want our precious resources to be focused. We don't want to treat all cases the same. That's not equitable. That's just strategically dumb, right? So the reasons that local and state governments have given me for not doing strategic enforcement, first is resources. They say strategic enforcement takes more resources than complaint-based enforcement. That's a wrong assumption, but that's what they say. The second is they say business won't like it. And here's what's interesting about that. Here's what businesses tell me. What they don't like is random sweeps. They like when somebody just barging in and does find anything big but has to do a citation because they've made the trip, right? Businesses that don't like unfair competition and that are adhering to the law, they like this kind of stuff. They want strategic enforcement. And then the other thing the governments tell me is that they're afraid of getting sued by targeted firms or sectors, right? And there's no evidence that that's happening so far. Anyplace, a few places where this is happening. So my argument here, my conclusion is these organizations are not focused enough on enforcement, our organizations that are passing these policies and that what they're doing is hitching backward enforcement regimes to forward-looking labor policies. So I'll just say a little bit more. Are you following me so far? Is this making sense? Yeah? Okay, smiling and nodding. I throw chalk at my students when they're not looking. I also like take all cell phones and put them in a box till the end of the lecture. Just mourning you guys. So the idea, right, is that strategic enforcement, sorry, the ascendance of strategic enforcement into a co-equal position with complaint-based enforcement is a major step forward and it needs to be embraced by state and local government. But here's the other thing. For strategic enforcement to fulfill its promise, the argument I wanna make now for the next few minutes is that workers, worker organizations and where feasible high-road firms must play a central role. Here's what I mean. Those with the most information and the greatest incentives to partner with government need to work with government to enforce the law. I wanna argue that there will never be enough investigators. So, co-enforcement is the idea that unions, worker centers and high-road firms in relationship with inspectors help to patrol their labor markets for unfair competition. So let me just give you an example. In California, the labor commissioner has targeted sectors rife with wage theft, including agriculture, janitorial, home health care, car wash, hotel, warehousing and restaurants. Investigators used to conduct randomized sweeps, identifying their targets literally through the yellow pages and internet searches. Now they work with community-based organizations that because of their relationships with vulnerable workers, they know where the violations are occurring and how they're masked. The organizations are helping to bridge the trust and the information gap between workers and law enforcement. So because of co-enforcement, because of strategic targeting and co-enforcement, California in the last two years has had the highest amount on record of minimum wages assessed, the highest amount on record of overtime wages assessed, the highest total amount of civil penalties assessed, et cetera. Here's another example. The San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement was established in 2001 to monitor prevailing wage. In 2006, the Board of Supervisors amended the minimum wage ordinance to add a section that created the community collaborative. It funds a set of community organizations and nonprofit legal aid organizations to engage in education, outreach, complaint identification, resolution or referral. Now it's giving out about a million dollars a year, so it's got 19 investigators, it's a local government department and it's supporting this set of organizations. The Filipino Community Center, the Chinese Progressive Association, and this just gives you a sense of how effective they've been. This is back wages and interest by source of the complaint. The vast majority of money, $4.5 million, $3.8 million in FY 14 to 15, came through these collaborative organizations that have the relationships to get vulnerable workers to come forward with their complaints. So the idea is, what I want you to think about is, it was never the idea that government was gonna enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act by itself. It was always the idea that it was gonna be unions and firms patrolling their labor markets in cooperation with government. That's what we've lost. Now we think that it's government's job alone. No matter how many investigators we have, we'll never have enough and they'll never know what workers know and what worker organizations know. So here's what I want you to think about. These vulnerable workers are the ones that are on the work site every day. They have tacit knowledge of the work process. They have information about what the employer is doing. They have experience of the work conditions and the changes in employer behavior over time. They have relationships with other workers and their presence at the work site every day. They know what's going on, but they don't come forward. How do you get them to come forward through workers organizations? If you want the information workers have, you have to work through worker organizations. Worker centers, community organizing groups, and unions. So that's sort of the argument that I'm making. Do I think it would be good to have high road firms involved in enforcement? Absolutely. Are there high road firms involved in enforcement in many low wage sectors? No, but where they are, like home care and janitorial, it makes a huge difference. So the idea, the basic argument of co-enforcement is the following. The first, you've got to recognize and leverage the unique capabilities of each partner. Okay, so you have to understand what do state regulators do? What should workers do? What do worker organizations do? And what do high road firms do? The second is, it's really important to think about how do you rootinize the flow of information and resources across the state society divide? Sharing of information, resources, formalizing roles and repeat interaction. And then, you remember that old canard about men are from Mars and women are from Venus or whatever that is, right? You cannot expect investigators and organizations just to naturally get along. There has to be some kind of facilitation. There has to be what the academics call collaborative governance, right? Where you really spend time facilitating that relationship. And finally, there has to be political support for these kinds of collaborations. So just some very quick examples. Since 1996, the LA Unified School District has been training and deputizing building trades union members to enforce the prevailing wage in union and non-union worksites. In Austin, Texas, the Workers Defense Project has been doing all kinds of co-enforcement, including with the Austin Police Department. And the city of Austin now requires its contractors to allow the worker center to help patrol and to go on worksites and talk to workers about working conditions. In LA, the Clean Car Wash Campaign partnered with the State Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, the Attorney General, and basically they allowed the organizers to make presentations to their investigators. They created access to investigators for organizations. They worked together with groups to build cases. They interviewed workers at the worker centers. They coordinated on sweeps. They strategized on organizing campaigns and they worked on enforcing judgments together. So that's just an example. There are many, many more examples, but here's what Julie Sue says, the head of the Labor Commission in California. She says, part of the mythology of government neutrality is the idea that the labor commissioner's office should not work with community-based organizations, unions or other groups on the outside because somehow this is an evidence of bias. I respond by analogizing community partnerships to a model which is already well accepted in law enforcement, community policing. COPS work with community groups on the ground all the time because those groups know the communities and have their trust. So that's just an example. I'll just say that this harkens back to the original logic of the Fair Labor Standards Act envisioned by the second new dealers. They basically said public control of competition rather than protection of work conditions would be more effective in establishing fair work standards. A quasi-judicial agency in which enlightened employers and unions could band together and help police sweatshop employers. So that was the idea. It fell apart because of politics, not because it wasn't the right idea and we defaulted to a complaint-based system that doesn't work for so many workers. So I'll just leave you with, I want you to imagine what this could look like in a locality just to give you a very clear model. Imagine if non-compliance is above a certain threshold in a particular sector, we would connect licensing to wage an hour in health and safety compliance, right? So that restaurants and others wouldn't be able to get re-registered or re-licensed unless they paid the money they owed. In highly non-compliance sectors, they'd be required to fund a turbocharged enforcement regime, maybe a penny per hour would go into an enforcement fund or they'd be required to post a high bond as part of licensing. Employers would be required to join an employer association that sort of works with them on compliance because we know that an organized labor market is a more compliant labor market and workers would belong to an organization and be provided with certain know-your-rights and skills training. We would establish mechanisms for worker voice both at the workplace and across the sector through elected workplace reps or if there's really small workplaces through a sectorally-based, locally-based authority. So that's the idea, right, that worker organizations would be funded to do training and education and enforcement given a broad mandate and standing to engage in each stage of the enforcement process and investigators would work with the employer association and the worker organization to investigate complaints. So the question is, could participatory enforcement regimes help build power for worker organizations by driving organization and representation back into workplaces or local labor markets by providing a dedicated funding stream for enforcement work for organizations? Could they help raise the floor and increase the possibility of taking wages out of competition and facilitating unionization? Thank you very much. So next up, we're gonna have Elian Farhat from CPD. What was this? Or should I, I can... Are you done? You're not doing slides. I'm not gonna do slides, no. I hope I can hold your attention without slides. I didn't prepare a dance routine, but we'll see what I can do. So, well, first, it's great to be here with everybody. It's great to be on this amazing panel with EPI. So impressive in doing such important work. So my name's Elian. I work in the Fair Work Week Initiative at CPD, we're a national network of organizing groups. And the Fair Work Week Initiative is the place within CPD where we really focus on the crisis hourly workers across the country are facing in terms of their work hours and their schedules. And I am gonna keep this to the five, try to keep it to five minutes. You're gonna have a big 10,000-foot overview. I'm hoping we can have some more conversation and questions. But I'll cover quickly some of the challenges that hourly workers are facing across the country and then the policy solutions that we're moving forward. We also have a whole other piece of our work around organizing workers. It's a big lesson on the fight for 15, organizing hourly workers to make the demands in their workplaces as well as to their policymakers as a way to really create enough leverage and pressure to win more on both fronts. But today I'll just speak about the policy. But before I get into the work, I just wanna tell you how I came to this issue. So I've been working on this issue for about a year and a half. And I've been an organizer for most of my salary or all my salaried career has been as an organizer. But before that, I was a server and a retail worker. And as I came to this issue, came the Fair Work Week Initiative, I was thinking about it, like what's up with this issue? And as a formerly former hourly worker, I wasn't like feeling it the way that I expected to be feeling it. And so as any organizer will do, I started searching for stories in my history and my family's history and my community's history. And they started flowing, I mean, you start scratching the surface and the stories of people dealing with erratic precarious work hours and wild instability are everywhere you look. And I remember it really crystallized for me. I was sitting at home, the Minnesota, I'm from Minnesota. I'm based in Minneapolis. It's awesome to be in the Wellstone Room. And I was sitting at my kitchen table and the Minnesota legislature was actually debating one of the first bills on this issue that ever been introduced in the country. And it was really just to elevate the issue and elevate the crisis in the state. And I was live streaming it and my little sister called, she said, can I come over and study? Yeah, totally come on over. My little sister is going to community college. We are, it's a low wage family. Both of her parents are immigrants, my dad and my stepmom. She's working and trying to go to school and she comes over and while I'm listening to this debate on the Minnesota floor, she tells me the story of what her days have been like recently. And it wasn't like I'm like trying to get an organizing story just like my sister telling me about how screwed up her schedule has been. And she tells me that in the last two days she worked a shift then was held on, so she worked a shift from like noon to five. She had an on-call shift that she was told that she would have to stay for so she closed. Then she had to come back less than eight hours later and open all while trying to cram in studying for an exam that she had the next day. My sister like could not plan her schedule, couldn't study, was just being jerked all over the place and was trying to get ahead. And I realized like her story is like the story of so many other people. And if we just start asking and listening they're everywhere. And so I'll just say like as you're going through your days just start listening to the conversations people are having around you. When you're in the stores just start listening. I took the train at the airport and the flight attendants were talking about their schedule. I took the train, I was just in New York, all these like multiple cars that I was on. I heard people talking about their work schedules, their work hours. Everywhere you look you're going to hear it. And so I really encourage you to start thinking about it because hours are everywhere and they're such an essential component of the way we understand work and our lives and are really the other half of our wages, right? They're wage and hour laws. And so as the movement for 15 and higher wages as the movement for paid leave are moving forward and elevating and winning which is so exciting we have to pay special attention to the other side of the equation which is hours. And when you are paid by the hour it doesn't matter how much you earn if you're not working enough hours. If you accrue paid sick time or if paid family leave by the hour if you're not working enough hours at one place you won't be able to take full advantage of them. And so it's a real essential component of this movement to really elevate our standards and bring stability to working people across the country. So some of the challenges. So I'll just list them very quickly and I'm gonna go fast. So some of the sort of the persistent challenges that we see around hours across the country. So first we see a real problem around involuntary low quality part-time work, right? So in America today the majority of workers are hourly workers and too much of the hourly work and the part-time work in the country are in low quality jobs, low wages, low benefits very precarious hours. We've also seen a real troubling elevation in the number of involuntary part-time workers in the country, right? So people who wanna be working full-time but can only find part-time jobs. The recent numbers came out at a little bit over six million workers in America are involuntarily part-time. That is almost twice the number pre-recession and there's every indicator that that number is not gonna budge. So it's almost like our new normal that level of involuntary part-time work and Janet Yellen in her recent testimony to Congress really noted that and indicated it's a place where there's quite a bit of where the slack in the economy is. And so if we really are being intentional about building an economy that works for everyone where everyone has the opportunity to thrive, we really need to pay close attention to low quality part-time jobs and this very troubling level of involuntary part-time work. A second sort of persistent challenge is a real lack of input and flexibility. So a recent study showed that right around half of all early career hourly workers have zero to very, very little input into their schedules. So we are in an environment where working people are being compelled to have open availability to say I'm open all the time, like plug me into work whenever you want and I'm really feeling a lot of pressure to do that. So when you can't actually inform your availability and when you get scheduled, it creates a lot of rigidity in a person's schedule and it makes it very challenging for them to plan outside of the short notice that they get, which is the next piece, which is like very unpredictable and unstable hours. So we're also seeing wild variations in people's schedules, both in terms of when they work week to week and how much they work week to week. So I hear stories of somebody working five hours one week, 20 hours the next week, all at different hours, they can't plan ahead. And again, there's statistic out there that 38% of all early career hourly workers get their schedule a week or less in advance and that number is right around 50% for part-time workers. So you see like, and this is like, everyone's experiencing these problems, it's just compounding, it's just getting worse and worse. We also see some other very troubling trends, right? So we also see very clearly disparate impacts on women and workers of color and we see the erosion of career ladders. So as employers are shifting to a more part-time workforce, really investing less in their workforce, really creating a pool of low quality part-time jobs, the opportunities for working people to advance, to cross-train, to move up to full-time, to become supervisors are falling increasingly to the wayside. So to recap, involuntary low-quality part-time work, lack of input and flexibility, unpredictable, unstable hours, disparate impacts on women and workers of color and erosion of the career ladder. And so I'll just close with some of the policy solutions that we have moving for, that we have moving across the country. So right now, more than 13 states and cities have introduced policies to really update our work hours policies and set standards that make sense. And so we break them into a couple buckets. So as you can have probably hopefully seen in my remarks, the problems are vast and they are on multiple fronts and they require many solutions and there's a lot to do. And so we have policy solutions that address each of them. They're constantly being refined and perfected. We're always finding another thing that needs to be addressed because our hours are really complicated, important pieces of our life that touch a lot of different fronts. So the policies that we have moving that, again, be happy to talk more in-depth about the specifics. So there are policies that we've developed that are moving that promote full-time work. Very exciting in San Jose, the opportunity to work initiative is on the ballot. So it's the first time we've ever, I think in America's history, we've had hours policy on the ballot and it really, it's targeted to address a crisis of under-employment in San Jose and promote full-time work. We also have language around part-time parity. So part-time workers can earn up to 58% less than their full-time coworkers for the same work. They also have less opportunity to advancement, less opportunity for investment. And so policies that really promote part-time parity, we have policies around advanced notice. So really making sure that working people get their schedule two to three weeks in advance, that there are protections within that advanced notice window that reinforce the sort of stability of that advanced notice and compensate workers when they make themselves available at the last minute for their employer. We have policies around adequate rest. So we're in this very strange place in our country where we have people who aren't working enough, people who are like scrambling to cobble together enough hours of work to pay the bills. And then on the flip side, we have people that are being like totally overworked or like the story of my sister working at clope and closing late at night, opening very early the next morning. So a set of policies around right, around a right to rest and really promoting healthier schedules. And then finally policies that really promote worker voice and input. So really, actually, you know, like none of us actually have a right to a schedule. We don't actually have any language that protects us from retaliation for simply making a scheduling request. And what we see in workplaces is that one of the most popular ways to retaliate and to punish workers is with their schedules. They'll go bat hours, they'll get crazy hours, hours will get cut, all sorts of games get played with their time. And so really beginning to put in place a set of protections for workers around their work hours. And like I said, those policies are moving a lot of places. Very exciting Seattle, very well. Might be the next place to pass scheduling. So again, on the forefront and really thinking about these policies as the next step as paid family leave or as they can save time, the minimum wage gets increased and passed. Really following up with making sure that we're completing the comprehensive package around wages and hours with hours policies. So I'll stop there and pass it on. And we'll get Alyssa from Mom's Rising set with her presentation in just a moment. Is that it? Yes. All right, thank you, sir. This one all the way. I wanna make sure it's not gonna come alive. So thank you so much, EPI, for having us here today. Really excited to be with this great panel and being a room full of people who are changing the nation and making things better for moms, families and all of us. For those of you that don't know, Mom's Rising is an organization of over a million members working to increase family economic security, decrease discrimination against moms and women and build a nation where both businesses and families can thrive. Women are now over half of the entire paid labor force and for the first time in history, moms are now three force of all primary and co-bread winners. Times have changed as we keep discussing, yet despite these record breaking labor force changes, as Secretary Perez always says, we have leave it to beaver policies in a modern family's world. And while these changes start with the fact that women are now over half of the entire paid labor force, they also have to do with the fact that our economy has changed from a manufacturing economy to a consumer based economy. So we have some work to do and some changes to make in the policy arena to make sure that we boost families, businesses, the economy and our nation. And all of those are kind of wrapped up in each other. So the way that moms Rising usually likes to talk about these policy changes and illustrate it is with stories from real moms. So I'm gonna share some of those stories and then we'll tie into the policy changes and some of the wins that we've been seeing recently. So the first story I'd like to talk about is from Cynthia. She said, I worked for an advertising firm at one event. It was obvious about how many women worked for the executive director. I asked him why and he told me, I can pay them less. I was 23 and shocked. I hadn't yet learned that I was less valuable than a man. This is a big deal. Of course, no woman is less valuable than a man. And in fact, Pepperdine University has found in a study of Fortune 500 companies that has spanned over 20 years that the exact opposite is true. The more women in corporate leadership, the higher the corporate profit. And even so, women on average earn only 79 cents to a man's dollar. Moms earn just 73 cents. Black women 60 cents. And Latina women only 55 cents to a man's dollar. This gap hurts our economy because women make up three fourths of purchasing decisions. So when we don't have funds to spend, it hurts the local stores and trickles down into the overall national economy. We need to raise the wage and also move forward pay transparency legislation to lift everyone. Raising the minimum wage is particularly important because the majority of minimum wage workers are women. And I would add in that we also need to pass legislation for the tipped minimum wage, which is oftentimes left behind in these discussions. The next story is from Barbara. She said, I didn't have paid sick days. So I had to postpone taking my kids to the doctor. One time this resulted in my daughter having a serious untreated ear infection that harmed her hearing. Barbara isn't alone. 80% of low wage workers and 40% of private sector workers don't have access to a single paid sick day. The absence of this policy hurts workers and our economy alike. In fact, presenteeism, which means having to go to work sick, costs our national economy $180 billion annually and lost productivity surpassing the cost of absenteeism. So advancing this policy boosts our families and our economy. The drumbeat of these stories continues on. Sonia had to go back to work just one week after having her first born child and only four days after having her second baby. She said, I wanted one on one time with my babies, but I didn't have any leave. The US is the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn't have this critical policy in place. In fact, only 13% of all people have access to paid family leave, both maternity and paternity leave through their employer and only 5% of low wage workers do. The absence of this policy doesn't just hurt families, but it hurts our economy. Studies show that when this policy is in place, moms are significantly more likely to return to the labor force a year after giving birth and significantly less likely to use programs like SNAP and other long-term government support programs. Businesses win too, with increased productivity and retention, which saves recruitment and retraining costs. Advancing paid family leave is a win, win, win, win, as we like to say, because it helps families, taxpayers, businesses and the economy. Christina said, I'm frustrated that our child care costs more than our mortgage and our car payments combined. People that live in DC are very familiar with this story. She's not alone. Child care costs more than college now in most states. Yet the economic gains of investing in child care are tremendous. For every dollar invested in child care, there is a later $8 return in investment for an average child and up to $20 for a high-risk child. Why is this return on investment so high? Because of lower, later grade repetition, less future interaction with the criminal justice system and less future reliance on longer-term government support. Advancing this policy area is crystal clear for our economy and our nation, particularly because parents need safe and rich in places for their kids so they can go to work and kids need safe and rich in places so they can thrive and child care workers need to be paid fairly. After all, when we all do better, we all do better. There's hope in our stories as we found in recent years. Don said, when my child recently was approved for health insurance, I asked the agent, do you mean if my son needs another surgery, it's covered? Yes, he said, we can't exclude conditions any longer due to the Affordable Care Act. Yay. So thank you to all those in this room that has joined moms rising and passing what is often called one of the largest anti-poverty programs our country has ever seen. Now nine out of 10 people in our nation have access to health care. These stories aren't isolated incidents. We all know that when this many people have the same problem at the same time, it's not an epidemic of personal failings. We have structural issues that must be addressed together. These stories are an outline of the daily lives of women in our nation. And of the public policies, our nation needs to advance in order to boost women, children, families, and our economy. We need access to affordable child care, to paid family leave, to sick days, to fair pay and living wages, to healthy food, and to health care. All of these are policies that need to be updated to boost our families. But don't worry, solutions are possible. And while they may seem like a long list, a long to-do list, we know that together we can get these solutions done. Together, our actions and the contacts we make with leaders in the media add up. Consider some of our wins in recent years. Now more than 30 cities and four states have passed paid sick days. And dozens of jurisdictions have moved forward paid family leave. Consider that increasing the minimum wage have passed in red and blue states. And that affordable child care policy is gaining momentum across the nation, has become a chief talking point in this election. And consider that together we've protected CHIP and Medicaid, which covers one in three children. Wins are happening, and how are these wins happening? We said that we would cover the unique organizing model that moms rising use. We have, the work that we do have many avenues for citizen engagement open as possible. At the same time, so that busy people can choose what they have time to do. Oh, just come alive. Sorry. So that busy people have time to do it in each given moment. In addition, many layers working together at the same time are often most effective. We call this layer cake organizing. Sorry guys. So I'm gonna go through very quickly some of what moms rising does and the different layers of our layer cake as we like to call it. So the first is synergistic collaboration. Moms Rising has over 200 local and national organizational partners. Here's just an example of our partners in North Carolina. This is duplicated around the country. We also have, I don't know why they're doing that. One click member advocacy. This is what most people think of when they see an organization with a dot org in their name. This involves sending letters, signing on to statements and much more. The big deal is that moms rising always delivers the content that our members generate online to leaders who can make a difference. Then we have member voice proxy. Our members often can't take a day off to lobby. So we invite them to create visual representations of their policy priorities so we can deliver those to be a proxy for their presence and invite the media to cover the delivery. This is why you might see me every now and then walking around Capitol Hill with a rubber ducky in my hands or a teddy bear or diapers signed by moms. That's why you see me with those items. Then we have on the ground engagement. Moms Rising is active on the ground in one way or another in all 50 states. Some states have local staring committees. Sometimes they just do one national action and there's always local happenings and gatherings occurring. And then a big piece of our work is storytelling. Our stories are powerful ways to open the eyes of leaders in the media and to let our members know that they aren't alone. Traditional and new media. We involve the traditional media in everything we do and get a lot of coverage. We're also our own media outlet with over 2,000 bloggers, a radio program, a combined blogging and social media reach of over five million readers. We also have translate our communications into English and Spanish with a new website that we launched in Spanish called Mamas Compadere. And finally, we cultivate legislative champions. At Moms Rising, we know we're working to advance many policies at the same time and that a simple thank you goes a long way and we always work to cultivate and educate legislative champions. We're working together and this all adds up to an incredible impact because we know that when moms rise, we all rise. Thank you. Thank you, Alyssa. And if all the panelists would do me a favor, there's a little icon with a face voice coming out if you press that to get your microphones live. We can then get into a little discussion with our remaining time. We started a little bit late, so we'll extend the period for you all to ask some questions. And I do believe we'll have some sandwiches coming if that is gonna intrude on your lunchtime. You can grab a little sandwich after we're done. I'm just gonna ask one framing question and then we're gonna get to the audience. And each of you had struck me in your own way, really outline not only what's needed for workers, what's needed for the public, which has been marginalized, which is not seeing the progress that it needs, but you've also kind of identified benefits that would accrue to businesses, to institutions. And in a binary world where it's often seen as what's good for workers is bad for business, and vice versa, this is a pretty new way of thinking about organizing and educating. And David in the spirit of you're talking about are needing to do things differently. How do we break through so that businesses like the ones in Seattle, once they actually look at it, realize, oh, it doesn't have to be bad for me. But this is not just about businesses, it's also about people. People tend to think about, well, if it's good for me, there's no way the employer's ever gonna go for it. And part of what keeps people quiet is not only the fear of retaliation, but the thought that maybe perhaps this is not gonna be looked at favorably. So how do we change this dynamic so that we can actually have this win, win, win conversation? Yeah, so that's an awesome question that would itself generate a book probably. New idea, I wanna cut. Yeah. Commercial success for non-fiction publishing is what it is. So you're welcome to it. No, so there's a bunch of things in your question that I think are really worth talking about. First of all, I can't resist the temptation to just address the issue of collapsing binaries. We are in a world of collapsing binaries. Every, if you name, give me a binary and I predict that in 100 years, no one alive will remember what the hell we were talking about. The binaries will generally be treated by future generations the way we sort of think about astrology today in relationship to astronomy or bloodletting in relationship to surgery. All of this or that, that's gonna go away. Let's just talk about today. 70%, listen, not just labor organizers, not just EPI economists, but such really crazy left-wingers as the Chicago Federal Reserve, Standard & Poor's, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have all written reports about the fact that dormant consumer demand is a long-term threat to economic growth in America. We have a 70% consumer demand driven economy and here's a little secret about low-wage workers. They're really bad customers. They don't buy a lot of stuff. And even though some of that stuff is manufactured by low-wage workers in China, a lot of it is transported, sold, a lot of services are delivered right here. So here's what happens generally. I mean, there is some truth to the idea that if you give billionaires tax breaks, that they will produce jobs, except that for every dollar worth of tax breaks, you get 80 cents worth of jobs. So it's not on balance, a very good investment. If you give a low-wage worker a pay increase, something like 2.0, Larry would know this, even many of you in this room would know this, it's a 2.3, 2.4% multiplier effect. So that if you, what happens, you give a low-wage worker a pay raise, they do two things. They pay down debt, which frees up future spending capacity, or they just buy stuff. There's a broken dryer, they haven't fixed, so they've been going to the laundromat, they buy a dryer. The deck out back was at a broken step, they go to Home Depot and they fix that. They fill a prescription where they were cutting their pills in half. Reenroll in community college, they go see the doctor for the first time in five years. These are all things which have a stimulative effect on local economies because everyone they're transacting business with is local. You give a billionaire a pay raise, or a tax break, or a regulatory relief. It's a significant portion of that. It gets offshoreed or speculated, people speculate on Wall Street, or they send it to a tax haven, or an overseas bank account, or business. So on balance, it's a much better investment for the economy to stimulate demand through increasing disposable income for working people and retirees than it is to privilege those who already have the most. This town will be the last place on earth to get the memo about collapsing binaries or about middle-out economics. But a couple years ago, right after the Seattle victory, the White House was nice enough to do an event celebrating the minimum wage movement. And the guy next to me was actually a pro-$15 business owner from Kansas City who owned of all things like a record shop. And I mustn't know those things existed anymore. And he sort of said, well, I made a point that he then agreed with and expanded on as a business owner, which was, listen, there are variables in your pricing structure no matter what business you're in. If you, there could be a weather event in Guatemala that impacts the price of coffee beans. You could hire someone who has a history as a cancer patient that could end up impacting your health insurance rates. Currency fluctuates. I mean, depending on what business you're in, there are all sorts of different pricing things you have to manage. And in part, being an entrepreneur is in fact being skilled at doing exactly that at figuring out how you manage a sort of variable set essentially a complex variable equation on the input side and then outputting something that people wanna buy for what you're able to sell it for profitably. So wages is just one factor in that, which it certainly explains why the purported inflationary effects of minimum wage increases really never seemed to occur because wages are only one of many, many costs in an enterprise. So I think the good news is there are an increasing number of business people who do in fact get it. My friend and collaborator, Nick Hanauer, is sort of the evangelist on this issue of exactly what you said, Alissa, you know, I forget whether it was Eliana or Alissa, who quoted Gertrude Stein and Nick Hanauer saying, when we all do better, we all do better. One of you did. But this idea that in fact, both rise together was, you know, it's not new, it's not radical, you know, Henry Ford was an anti-Semite in a union buster, but he at least understood that if you paid factory workers enough to buy the products they're making, then your car company will do better. And I was speaking, I had a number of difficult meetings with an airline CEO during the CETAC campaign. One point I said to him, like, wouldn't it be like kind of good if the people who put fuel on your jets could someday afford to buy a ticket on one of them? Anybody else? That was great. All right. But I was gonna say, I'd like to start a rock band called Collapsing Binary. It's not working? No, it's fine. I mean, we should just take more questions. We'll figure out that in a second, Janice. All right, so if you'd like to ask a question, just do us a favor, please raise your hand and we'll bring a microphone over to you so that you can be recognized. Hi, good morning. So my name's Melanie Trotman. I write about labor issues for the Wall Street Journal, not the editorial. Thanks for the clarification. Hi, I'm a news reporter. I have, so this is for Janice. For Janice, you had mentioned actually something I was gonna raise. You mentioned the California Labor Commissioner how she said that collaborating on enforcement gets these groups or gets the government accused of being biased. And I see and hear that all the time from business. My question to you is, how are you seeing more involvement from business? And if not, is there anything afoot to get them more involved? Do you wanna take these one at a time, Christian? Or do you? Sure, great question. Really nice to know you. So a couple of things I would say to that. One is businesses have been involved in enforcing the law in construction and janitorial. Some of the best examples in the country are when construction unions work with contractors on enforcing the law on their job sites. The same is true in janitorial. There's a great organization called the Maintenance Cooperation Trust Fund in LA that's worked really hard. And it's a Taft-Hartley Fund, but it brings together unionized contractors and non-unionized contractors because they recognize that unfair competition hurts them and they wanna do something about it. So they actually contribute a penny per pound an hour into an enforcement fund. So I think there are a lot of examples of historically of this understanding that you have to take wages out of competition. You have to deal with unfair competition in order to address this. What I think's happened, David sort of talked about it a little bit is that the center of gravity, a lot of these business political institutions has really migrated to the right. So whereas there used to be different voices speaking for business, I think that's really, really narrowed. And I think one of the exciting things about this moment we're in is that there were real efforts being made by different organizations, some of whom are represented here, but some aren't. For example, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and their recent partnership with CARE.com, to try to sort of set standards together. And CARE.com is the largest in the sector in terms of making those matches between nannies and others and people who wanna employ them. The Restaurant Opportunity Center has been bringing Mario Batali and all these really famous chefs together to say, we don't want a restaurant to be a sweatshop sector. So I think there are actually in this sort of burgeoning new labor movement that David's such a great exemplar of, a real effort to try to work with employers. I think we have to get beyond the sort of market fundamentalist rhetoric. And I'll just say lastly, the thing I think is so fascinating is historically, business has been involved always in setting standards and in policing its sector. What's shocking is when you introduce the idea that worker organizations ought to be involved in the same way. So I'm hopeful that those high road firms that really want to raise standards in their sectors will see the benefits of cooperating on enforcement. But you're right, there are lots of sectors where there are too few high road employers, where we've got this new normal of violation of wage and hour and health and safety standards. And in that case, there might be an argument that in a third world country, we have to put up with that. We have to accept that businesses in order to function have a business model that means that they have to cheat. But in the United States of America, absolutely not. I'm Antonia Jorn, I'm a union lawyer and I have a question for David. So when I tried to promote, I mean, I'm very excited about the rulings in the National Labor Relations Board on concerted activity and have even posed the idea of provonal work by union lawyers to help people assert their rights to engage in concerted activity. But the response I get is, how does this lead to stable union organizing? So how does it lead to union organizing in your work in the 2015? So I will self-identify as a heretic on this issue just to give people context. So, you know, let's just acknowledge that 6.7% of private sector workers in a generous overestimation by the Labor Department's flawed methodology, 6.7% of private sector workers are estimated to be represented by unions in the United States. There are only five states where that number exceeds 10% and three of those are Alaska, Hawaiian, West Virginia, very small states by population, the other two are New York and Washington. So it is still possible in a handful of cities to be a labor leader and go to work in a big marble building like I do and have the experience or the perception that this is still a big powerful movement. It isn't, right? It is a weak, dying set of institutions that will not come back. And the enterprise bargaining form of labor power that Congress assigned to the US labor movement in 1935 is fundamentally flawed as a structural proposition. And so the premise of the question is why don't unions do more and better? Why don't we give away our right of way in order to facilitate worker power and worker rights in a more general sense rather than this transactional idea of just gaining more union members in the short term? And I think the spirit of the question is exactly right. Effectively what we did in Seattle was give away our right of way. We bargained a contract for 100,000 low-wage workers instead of 45 nursing home workers who got a fourth step in their grievance procedure or something. And the real problem that your question sort of implicitly identifies is how do you build sustainable organization by giving away your core product for free? And that is the problem that the labor movement has now in a majority of workplaces and the problem that public broadcasting has a number of institutions. No one suggests that Kroger or Safeway give away loaves of bread for free. But what I suggest to the very end of the book is that we need a new plan for a labor, a new labor system in the country. That while General MacArthur was imposing American-style enterprise bargaining on Japan, General Eisenhower was resurrecting an older model of German bargaining when we had two white male Republican generals operating as dictators of occupied countries, we had Eisenhower reimposed a sectoral and regional bargaining system on Germany which allowed membership to be voluntary but standards to be universal. Where MacArthur imposed America's system on Japan. Today Japan's in the fourth decade of a recession and Germany has the largest middle class in the world by population. So I think we need to figure out a new system for industrial and labor relations in the country that figures out how to incentivize but not require membership in sustainable organizations. Ultimately collective bargaining did three things well. It created economic powerful workers at a scale that touched tens of millions of people and with a revenue model that was independent of government and philanthropy because most union members are now public sector members it is no longer independent of government or philanthropy. So we have to create a new robust model for the 21st century that avoids the pitfalls of the failed enterprise bargaining model that America consigned itself to and instead thinks about how to produce power scale and sustainability in some sort of replicable model for the 21st century economy. That's my view. Well thank you David and I think we'll take this opportunity to end the panel since we've kind of kept you past the appointed time and everyone I just want you to join me in really acknowledging what has been a conversation that has connected a lot of dots provided a lot of useful information but I think also at the same time done the rare thing of inspiring further thought and activism about how we can actually make some greater gains in some of the issues that we've discussed. So all credit to that goes to our panel David Rolf, Janice Fine, Eleon Farhott and Alyssa Koyd-Hishmere. Thanks to all of them, thanks to all of you. Again, we have fight for 15 books available out the right side of the room or left side of the room for the price of.