“There are two economic realities in America today,” said moderator Lester Holt. “There’s been a record six straight years of job growth, and new census numbers show incomes have increased at a record rate after years of stagnation. However, income inequality remains significant, and nearly half of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.”

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Holt is right about the challenges Americans are facing. Nearly 50 percent of all U.S. households report that they would struggle to come up with $400 during an emergency. And 80 percent of Americans will experience at least one year of economic insecurity—either living in poverty, needing public assistance, or having an unemployed head of household.

The fact that inequality and income volatility were mentioned at all is a big deal.

In 2008, as millions lost their jobs in the midst of the financial crisis, the first presidential debate featured no questions on poverty or income inequality. And in 2012, just as Americans were beginning to climb out of the Great Recession, poverty was ignored by debate moderators—although President Obama still managed to talk about issues like low-wage work, access to community colleges and training, affordable healthcare and childcare, and pay equity. Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the presidential election this year, news networks have devoted less and less attention to poverty and inequality in favor of horse-race election coverage.

But just talking about poverty isn’t enough.

It’s critical that we move beyond talk, and focus on real solutions. Case in point: According to a recent analysis by Media Matters for America, Fox News covers poverty more than any other network on the air—but rather than educating the public on solutions, their stories reinforce stereotypes and false narratives about those of us who are struggling. Similarly, conservative politicians like Paul Ryan have delivered high-profile speeches and put forward so-called “poverty plans” for low-income communities, while still supporting trillions of dollars in cuts to antipoverty investments over ten years.

The same goes for the presidential debates. We need to know where the candidates stand on the policies that would dramatically reduce poverty and expand opportunity for everyone in America.

Where do the candidates stand on Unemployment Insurance, which is woefully underfunded and currently reaches only 1 in 4 workers who need it? What would they do to address college affordability—at a time when student debt has ballooned to about $1.3 trillion and too many low-income students are simply priced out of a college education? Where do they stand on raising the minimum wage—even $12 an hour by 2020 would lift wages for more than 35 million workers and save about $17 billion annually in government assistance programs. What about expanding Social Security—the most powerful antipoverty program in the nation—which lifted 26 million people out of poverty in 2015?

It’s time to ask the candidates: #Wheredoyoustand

That’s why this election season, TalkPoverty.org is working to push questions about where the candidates stand on poverty solutions into the presidential debate.

Unlike the first debate, the next forum will be a town hall featuring questions submitted through social media. Building off a successful 2012 #TalkPoverty campaign led by The  Nation magazine and the Center for American Progress, today we’re launching our #Wheredoyoustand campaign encouraging you to share the questions you want to hear in the next presidential debate. The idea is simple: if the media isn’t going to dig into the candidates’ policies, we will.

Share your question now.

Whether it’s through a photo, a video, or a tweet, we want to know the questions you think need to be asked. Once you’ve tweeted your questions using #Wheredoyoustand, share them on the Open Debate Coalition website so that more people can vote to hear them in the debate.

Below are some examples of questions to get you started.  It’s time to move beyond focusing on whether someone said “the p-word,” and make sure the debates address real solutions to poverty.

Every dollar spent on food assistance generates $1.70 in economic activity. Ask the candidates #Wheredoyoustand on food stamps #Debates2016

— TalkPoverty.org (@TalkPoverty) September 27, 2016

The US has 5% of the world’s population, but over 25% of the world’s prison population. Ask about that. #Wheredoyoustand #Debates2016

— TalkPoverty.org (@TalkPoverty) September 27, 2016

.@IamMikeRich is asking: #Wheredoyoustand on investments in jobs that reach low-income communities? #Debates2016 pic.twitter.com/ZLOXxJ3aum

— TalkPoverty.org (@TalkPoverty) September 26, 2016

Single mom Elizabeth Paredes is the assistant manager of a sandwich shop in Tucson. She’s paid a flat salary of $24,000 per year. While she routinely puts in 50 or more hours each week, she doesn’t earn a single dime of overtime. That’s because, under outdated rules that govern the overtime eligibility of managers, her employer doesn’t have to pay her for the extra hours she works.

When I was a kid growing up in Buffalo, a job like Elizabeth’s was a well-paying, middle-class job. Being a manager meant being in the middle class. And rightly so. Managers supervise people, open and close the store, handle the money, and make important decisions. They should be able to own a home, raise a family and build a nest egg for retirement.

These were middle-class jobs by design. The blueprint was the Fair Labor Standards Act, which gave most Americans the right to a minimum wage and time-and-a-half pay when they worked more than 40 hours in a week. The Fair Labor Standards Act was the crown jewel of worker protection and helped build the middle class.

But because of both the erosion of the salary threshold over time and concerted policy choices made by the previous administration, that crown jewel has lost its luster. So we’re taking action on behalf of working people like Elizabeth Paredes.

New rule

Today, the Department of Labor announced a significant change to the overtime rule that simply hasn’t been working for working people. In the process, we’re making it simpler for employers to identify which white-collar workers are covered and owed time-and-a-half for work beyond 40 hours in a week.

For decades, the salary threshold under which all white-collar, salaried workers qualify for overtime has failed to keep up with the rising cost of living. In 1975, 62 percent of full-time salaried workers were eligible for overtime protection based on their pay. Today, only 7 percent are eligible under the outdated salary level. The current salary level is so low that it does not effectively identify which white-collar workers are entitled to overtime protection. That is an economy out of balance.

So we’re fixing it. We have more than doubled the salary threshold — lifting it from $23,660 to $47,476 per year. That means some 35 percent of full-time salaried workers, based on their pay, will now be eligible for overtime.

What does this mean?

It means that Elizabeth and other workers like her will finally be entitled to overtime pay. Whether they’re assistant managers at a restaurant or supervisors in the human resources department, white-collar workers who earn below the new salary threshold have their overtime protections restored.

Employers have options for how they respond to the new rule, and they’re likely to do the following:

• Pay time-and-a-half for overtime work.
• Raise workers’ salaries above the new threshold.
• Limit workers’ hours to 40 per week.
• Some combination of the above.

Who benefits?

Today’s rule change, which takes effect on Dec. 1, will benefit 4.2 million workers, making them newly eligible for overtime protections. It clarifies for another 8.9 million salaried workers that they, too, remain entitled to overtime. Now, millions of these middle-class jobs are more likely to be rewarded with middle-class pay, and the millions of Americans who sacrifice family time to work extra will earn extra. If their employer chooses to send them home instead of paying for the extra hours, then it means extra time for family or other professional pursuits.

If you work full-time in America, you should be able to get by; when you work extra, you should be able to get ahead. That’s the commonsense principle we’re reaffirming today. With today’s update to the overtime rule, Elizabeth Paredes and millions like her will be able to punch their ticket to the middle class.

Today, as part of the Department of Justice’s inaugural National Reentry Week, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro visited Philadelphia to hear how brushes with the criminal justice system have stood in the way of employment, housing, and more—and how people have persevered.

Here are three stories told to Attorney General Lynch and Secretary Castro—they are representative of the experiences of millions of Americans held back by a criminal record.

Ronald Lewis: “So many doors have been closed in my face I know what wood tastes like.”

More than 10 years ago, when I was 25, I was convicted of two misdemeanors.  In one case, I was on the street with my brother when he was selling drugs, and I warned him that the police were coming. In the other, I tried to steal a pocketbook at Neiman Marcus.  I did my probation for these cases, and have been a law-abiding citizen ever since.

I am a father, a husband, a son, a friend, and ambitious to get ahead in life. I got a building engineering license in hopes of getting a good job. I am starting my own company so that I can give other people second chances working for me. I give freely of my time to be a role model to kids in my community and to younger men who are tempted by the streets. But to so many people, I am an “ex-offender,” and nothing more.

I’ll never forget the first time I was turned down for a job because of my record. I had been on the job for about a month when my background check came back. I was called into Human Resources and told they had to fire me because of my record. Security was called to immediately remove me from the building. It was the worst feeling of my life. It was humiliating to tell my family, who had been so proud of me, that I had failed again.

That was the first of many times that I was turned away from jobs I was qualified for because of my minor record. More times than I can count, companies have told me, “You’ll be great. Your skills are exactly what we are looking for.” But then that question about my background comes up.  So many doors have been closed in my face, I know what wood tastes like.  And because of my record, I can’t even take my kids on school field trips.  Do you know how devastating that is?

I do not and will not give up. My family is depending on me. My children are depending on me. I hope that one day, my record can be cleared, reflecting who I am now. That is why I am speaking out to support the Clean Slate Act, a bill in the Pennsylvania legislature that would automatically seal non-violent misdemeanor convictions after someone has remained crime-free for 10 years, as I have. This law would make a world of difference for people like me—and for our families and kids.

Helen Stokes: “I was denied from senior housing because of my arrest record”

I was 56 the first time I was ever arrested, in 2008. My husband, whom I later divorced, attacked me. When I called the police, he claimed that I had assaulted him. Can you imagine? Then two years later, after I took his ATM card for our joint account so that he wouldn’t spend our money on drugs, I was arrested for theft. Both times, the charges were dropped. I have never been convicted of a crime in my whole life.

After that, even though I had not been convicted, I got turned down for jobs because of my arrest record. Eventually, in 2014, I went to Community Legal Services for help. My lawyer got my cases expunged, and I thought that was the last I would hear of them.

But about six months later, when I was trying to move into subsidized housing for seniors, I was denied admission because of the record that I wasn’t supposed to have anymore. I couldn’t believe it. I called the lawyer who had gotten my cases expunged, and she called the property managers and provided my expungement orders, but they still wouldn’t let me in. I had tears in my eyes when I got the rejection letter. Even after I told RealPage, the company that had done the background check, about my expungements and filed a dispute, they again reported my expunged cases to another senior housing facility, which also rejected me.

By this point, I was panicked. My house was being foreclosed on since I could no longer afford the mortgage payments after my divorce. I was worried that I would end up on the street or that I could no longer live on my own.

Eventually, a social worker at Community Legal Services helped me find a senior apartment, where I will soon be moving. It is a huge relief. But I don’t understand why senior housing would hold cases like this against me to begin with, given that I wasn’t even convicted.

Community Legal Services has since filed a class action lawsuit against RealPage for illegally reporting expunged cases like mine. I am proud to be the main plaintiff in that case, because I think justice must be done for other people like me. Background check companies like RealPage must learn that they cannot report expunged cases. But housing facilities should also give people like me a fair chance instead of turning people away just because of an arrest record.

Tyrone Peake: “Employers weren’t allowed to hire me because of my 30-year-old record”

When I was 18 years old, I was arrested with a friend for trying to steal a car. We had our girlfriends in town for the weekend. When one of the girls’ mothers insisted that she come home, we tried to steal a car to take her back. Mind you, I couldn’t even drive—and we weren’t even able to get the car started. But we had broken open the ignition, and I ended up being convicted of attempted car theft. I did three years of probation, and I never got in trouble again.

I am now 53 years old. I raised three daughters who are now all grown up. All my life, I’ve had a passion to help people, so I decided to pursue an associate’s degree so I could do health care work, graduating from Community College of Philadelphia in 2014. I never dreamed that a mistake I made when I was 18 years old would follow me for the rest of my life. But until recently, my decades-old record kept me from getting a full-time job in the field I’d gone to school to work in.

After I got my degree, I learned that Pennsylvania had a law that prohibited me from working in long-term care jobs because of my record. Even though more than 30 years had passed without me getting into trouble again, employers that wanted to hire me were not allowed to because of the law.  I eventually got a part-time job working as a recovery specialist, but the law prevented me from doing other jobs with the organization no matter how qualified I was—and no matter how much time had passed since my conviction.

Last year, Community Legal Services and pro bono lawyers challenged the law on behalf of me and other Pennsylvanians who had unfairly been stopped from working in jobs that we should be able to have. In December, Pennsylvania’s appellate court agreed with us and struck down the law.

The problems that I had because of my record caused me to doubt myself—and my future—for a long time. But I have a lot of joy knowing that this unfair law has been changed, there is a lot of hope and opportunity for me and others who come behind me and are trying to get ahead.

Editor’s Note: All three of these individuals were represented by lawyers in Community Legal Services’ Employment Unit. They gave permission for CLS and TalkPoverty.org to share their stories to help shine a light on the lifelong barriers associated with having even a minor record.

To commemorate National Reentry Week, TalkPoverty.org will feature posts throughout the week by leaders on reentry—all exploring the barriers to opportunity facing people with criminal records, and why addressing these barriers is a critical part of criminal justice reform.

A woman and her ex-husband shared custody of their 18-month-old daughter. After spending the weekend at her dad’s house, the girl was returned to her mother’s home with a case of diaper rash.

The dad notified the mom of the rash and gave her a tube of ointment that he had been applying. The mom watched the rash for several days, applying the ointment as directed by the medication’s instructions. When the rash did not go away, she took her daughter to the doctor, who found that the rash had become infected and reported the mother to the local child-welfare agency for child neglect.

The mom had done what almost every parent would have under the circumstances—she had treated the rash, watched it closely, and ultimately made the decision that it required medical attention. However, she was placed on the civil statewide Childline and Abuse Registry and lost her job as a home health aide. Until she was able to get a hearing and clear her name—a process that can take as long as a year—she was unable to get another job in the profession she had been trained in.

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In the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child sex-abuse scandal, the Pennsylvania legislature passed 23 bills containing hundreds of amendments to the Child Protective Services Law (CPSL). Exactly two of those amendments may possibly have stopped Sandusky’s abuse of children at an earlier stage. Most of the other changes involved redefining child abuse and expanding background checks in ways that are increasingly—and irrationally—resulting in significant consequences to the employment, reputations, and child custody of low-income people, especially people of color.  These consequences inevitably have great impact on children and families.

We’ve heard about the college professors and parent volunteers in schools offended by the inconvenience and intrusiveness of having to get child-abuse background checks. Little, however, has been reported about the people most affected by these background checks: low-wage employees, such as cafeteria workers, school secretarial staff, home-health aides, and day-care teachers.

Many people are being needlessly barred from employment—sometimes even losing long-term jobs—due to criminal records that are extremely old, minor, or irrelevant to their ability to safely be employed around children. Many more are barred from jobs because of placement on the registry without any court proceedings, or even proof. Under the new amendments to the CPSL, these consequences are being exacerbated.

Protecting children is necessary and commendable. But the registry is an arbitrary and inaccurate tool for assessing who presents a risk, either to their own children or those under their care at work. Yet the registry is regularly used as a screening tool. People with “indicated” reports are listed in the registry and barred from working in day care, education, health care, nursing homes, paratransit, and a growing number of other jobs, predominantly ones filled by low-wage workers.

Placement on the registry has always been too easy. When a county agency responsible for children’s welfare receives notice of suspected child abuse or neglect—from a teacher, a doctor, a neighbor, and (not too rarely) sometimes an angry ex-spouse—it is required to investigate the allegations within 24 hours. After speaking with the child (if that child is of speaking age) and any other relevant parties, and reviewing whatever evidence is available, the agency makes a decision whether or not to “indicate” the report—that is, place the suspected perpetrator on the registry.

There is no hearing, no opportunity to present evidence. A caseworker checks off a box, and an individual is placed on the registry effectively for life—unless this person successfully appeals within a very short deadline. The individuals concerned are not entitled to view the investigation file before or after placement.

All too often, indicated reports are based on faulty or incomplete investigations, or on actions or omissions by parents or caretakers that simply do not meet the statutory definitions of child abuse. Even with a careful investigator, the sometimes-fine distinction between lawful discipline through spanking and abuse can be lost.

In the experience of Community Legal Services, some social workers and supervisors put people on the registry too casually and do not comprehend the significant financial and emotional toll on the family that can ensue from a child-abuse report.

From an institutional perspective, checking off the box seems like a less intrusive option than removing a child from the home, and creates a record that the agency “did something.” It is a matter of routine. We also see many instances in which false accusations of abuse are raised in the course of contentious custody disputes, a circumstance that can be noted by a social worker as a concern, but disregarded in a “better safe than sorry” posture. 

The recently expanded definitions of child abuse make this bad situation worse. The removal of the word non-accidental from the definition increases the risk that parents and caretakers will be placed on the registry for accidents that happen in the normal course of children’s lives.

It is now child abuse if a parent or caretaker acts or fails to act in a manner that creates a “reasonable likelihood” of injury, whether or not an injury actually occurs. Neglect is defined as, among other things, any repeated or prolonged act that “threatens a child’s well-being.” These are extremely low standards; all parents make judgment calls, knowing their child and their individual and family circumstances, that arguably could carry a reasonable likelihood of harm to body or well-being.

In our experience, low-income parents and caregivers are more likely to have governmental agencies involved in their lives and questioning their judgment calls; in effect, they are held to a higher standard of parenting than middle- and upper-class parents and professionals.

The CPSL amendments have also broadened requirements for background checks to an absurd degree. Now, anyone on the registry who has “routine interaction” with children at work is barred from such employment, even if children are never under their care or supervision. One government agency has interpreted “routine interaction” as passing in the hallway.

I am certainly not suggesting that convicted sex abusers be able to work in day cares or schools. However, are we really concerned that someone who once accidentally left an iron on, who didn’t treat a burn sufficiently, even who once lost it and slapped her delinquent teenage daughter, is such a danger to others that he or she can never drive a school bus, hand out food in a cafeteria, or even diligently and safely care for children in a day care?  Certainly there are individuals who inflict great harm to children and those individuals should face appropriate consequences.  But lumping them in with parents and caregivers whose actions were accidental or the result of a minor and isolated incident results only in detracting resources and energy from the more egregious cases and in deepening poverty for families.

The commonwealth should revisit the recent CPSL amendments to effect a more rational and balanced approach that will both protect children and afford parents the ability to make sound and reasoned parenting choices without losing employment opportunities for life.

Although the explicitly discriminatory policies and practices that created these disparities are now illegal—thanks in part to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed employment and pay discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin—the inequities persist. That’s because many of the channels through which opportunity is passed, like social networks, are shaped by biases based on race and gender. Regardless of whether these biases are conscious or subconscious, patterns of old-fashioned segregation stand in the way of eradicating them.

Recently, I gained some profound insight into this phenomenon from a most unlikely place: a second-grade music class.

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The fact that it was a music class in a racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse elementary school offered a powerful symbolism. Here were kids from two different classrooms, with distinct cultures, family backgrounds, and personalities blending their voices together in harmony. Yet, even with the freedom to sit almost anywhere they chose, the students self-segregated by race and gender to a large degree. This seemed innocent enough at first. After all, it’s human nature to gravitate toward those we share more in common with or with whom we feel most comfortable. However, the broader implications of this tendency became more evident as the class went on.

Halfway through the period, the kids began an exercise in which one student would bounce a ball to the rhythm of the song the class was singing. Each time they finished a verse, that student would pass the ball on to someone else to continue the song. After a few rounds, one of the girls in the class spoke up about the fact that the boys were only passing the ball to other boys. When the teacher asked if other people had noticed the same thing, every girl and even a few boys in the class agreed. After enlisting the students to come up with a solution to make the game fairer to those who had been excluded, the exercise resumed under the new rules. Shortly after, another student mentioned that only students from one classroom were getting the ball. By the time they worked through that problem, time had run out for them to complete the exercise.

There were at least three important takeaways from this simple example that can be applied to the way we perceive and address race and gender inequities in this country.

• The costs of inequality and discrimination may be more heavily born by those who have been discriminated against, but they are problems that belong to all of us—as such, individuals in leadership have a responsibility to listen to, acknowledge, and pursue solutions to these problems. For example, due to racial and gender biases, industries and jobs with a higher concentration of women and people of color tend to have lower pay—often minimum wage. As a result, these workers are more likely to earn poverty-level wages and need to turn to public assistance, which means that American taxpayers essentially subsidize the employers who pay inadequate wages. But policymakers can take action to rectify some of this. According to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute, raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2020 would not only lift wages for 35 million workers, many of whom are people of color, but it would also save $17 billion in public assistance spending annually.

• Ending discrimination requires moving beyond a basic acknowledgement of the problem to honest, inclusive, and constructive engagement on the causes and solutions. For example, in order to target enforcement of equal pay laws and gain better insight into discriminatory pay practices, the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently announced a proposal to annually collect summary pay data by gender, race, and ethnicity from businesses with 100 or more employees. If implemented, this would be an important first step towards identifying bad actors and holding them accountable.

• Segregation exists in nearly every area of American life, including in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and places of worship. Regardless of intent, the result is often exclusion and marginalization of people outside our immediate social circles. In the end, this limits the full range of what could be available to all of us. Historian Richard Rothstein has painstakingly documented the history of racially explicit federal, state and local policies that have segregated African Americans into isolated slums across the country. These policies have created a legacy of racial injustice that has garnered national attention in cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago and Flint.

I was heartened to see a second-grade teacher address biases within her classroom. Now it’s time for more of our political and business leaders to follow suit.

We got a chance to see this story in practice in the boom of the late 1990s, when the unemployment rate fell to its lowest levels in almost three decades, settling at a year-round average of four percent in 2000, the peak year of the boom. In this period, wages rose rapidly at all points along the income distribution, with workers at the bottom of the ladder actually achieving the largest gains.

The same principle would apply today, with the gains of a tight labor market going disproportionately to the most disadvantaged. The unemployment rate for African-Americans is typically two to two-and-a-half times that of whites. This means if we can lower the unemployment rate for whites by one percentage point, it is likely that the unemployment rate for African-Americans will fall by two percentage points. For African-American teens, the ratio hovers near six to one, meaning that a one percentage point drop in the white unemployment rate is likely to be associated with a six percentage point drop in the unemployment rate for African-American teens.

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But even if we accept that full employment is especially important for the most disadvantaged groups, there is still the question of how we get there. At present, the biggest obstacle to higher levels of employment is inadequate demand for goods and services in the economy. If there were more demand, we would see more people employed.

The first place to turn to for policies that boost demand and employment is the Federal Reserve Board. While the Fed did take extraordinary measures in an attempt to boost the economy during the downturn, its current policy of raising interest rates goes 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Higher interest rates make it more expensive to buy a car or house. They also discourage companies from increasing investment in equipment, software, and buildings, and deter state and local governments from investing in infrastructure. Higher interest rates also prevent people from refinancing mortgages, which would save them money on their monthly payments.

The reason the Fed raises interest rates is to slow the economy and prevent inflation. While there are indeed times when inflation could be a problem, our economy isn’t currently suffering from excessive inflation—nor is it in danger of doing so any time soon. In this context, any Fed rate hikes will needlessly slow the economy and prevent people from getting jobs. And while the small rate hike in December likely did not have much negative effect on the economy, any further rate hikes almost certainly would seriously impede growth. It is therefore important that the Fed exercise caution with any future rate hikes and only take this step if there is a real threat of inflation.

But even if the Fed can be persuaded not to restrain growth, we will still likely need more demand in the economy to return to full employment. The most obvious way to generate demand is with more government spending, ideally through public investment. This approach has the great advantage of creating more jobs today and making ourselves richer in the future. For example, spending to promote clean energy—whether in the form of research or subsidies for the use of solar and wind power—will lessen the damage that we do to the environment, leaving less harm for future generations to deal with. Spending on physical infrastructure and mass transit will speed transportation times and reduce gas use. Money for education will give us a better trained and more productive work force.

We can also pursue full employment by reducing our trade deficit, which is running at an annual rate of more than $500 billion, or a bit less than three percent of GDP. This is money that is creating demand in other countries, while more balanced trade would create greater demand in the United States. Ordinarily the mechanism for reducing the trade deficit is a lower value for the dollar. That reduces the price of U.S. exports for people living abroad while raising the price of imported goods for people living in the United States. The result is that we export more and import less, bringing the trade deficit closer to balance and creating jobs.

However, lowering the value of the dollar is probably not a plausible strategy in the current world economy. With most of our major trading partners experiencing weaker growth than the United States or even recessions, we cannot expect them to absorb a hit to their trade balance. But we should keep a lower valued dollar on the to-do list for better economic times since the trade deficit is a key obstacle to maintaining full employment.

Finally, we can move towards full employment by reducing the supply of labor, specifically by lowering the average number of hours that people work. It used to be the case that workers took a portion of the benefits of productivity growth in the form of more leisure. While that has not been true in the United States to any great extent over the last four decades, workers in other wealthy countries have continued to see reductions in the length of the average work year and/or workweek.

Indeed, across Europe, four to six weeks of paid vacation annually is standard. Workers have paid sick days as well. By reducing the number of hours per worker, there is increased demand for more workers. This story explains how Germany managed to lower its unemployment rate in between 2008 and 2009 even though it experienced a more severe recession than did the United States. By promoting policies that spread work among more workers, the government can hope to create a tighter labor market, which will also give workers the bargaining power they need to obtain higher wages.

Although full employment is not the complete solution to poverty, reaching it would go a long way. It should also be an area of bipartisan agreement. After all, conservatives are supposed to like the idea of people working hard to lift themselves up. But they can only work hard if jobs are available, and they can only lift themselves up if their wages are just.

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The U.S. economy continues to improve and the unemployment rate is decreasing, reaching a seven-year low of 5.2 percent in New York City in September, according to the New York State Department of Labor. But many people are still looking for a job or seeking a better one, which can be a stressful and time-consuming process. Lured by advertisements and the promise of work, some turn to an employment agency for help.

The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA), which I serve as Commissioner, licenses and regulates employment agencies. While we are very vigilant in our protection of job seekers, with such a high demand for services and many people desperately in need of work, there are inevitably those who try to take advantage of vulnerable individuals. This has led to a proliferation of predatory employment agencies that exploit the unemployed or underemployed who are trying their best to provide for their families.

One of these individuals was Rosa. After paying $125 to an employment agency, the agency sent her to a laundromat that they claimed was looking for workers. However, when Rosa went to inquire about the job, the owner of the laundromat said they were not hiring and had never asked for workers. Rosa returned to the employment agency asking for a refund, but was refused one. Their only response to her was that she was “too old” and so the laundromat just didn’t want to hire her.

And Marlon, a man from Queens, New York, paid a $125 advance fee to an employment agency plus a $774 fee for a construction training class. The agency guaranteed Marlon a job. Not only did it fail to come through on that promise, it never even referred him to a potential employer. When Marlon returned to the agency to demand a refund, the office had been abandoned.

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We at DCA have seen too many job seekers respond to ads for employment only to have agencies charge them illegal fees as high as $1,400—for processing their application, background checks, or “required” trainings like Marlon’s. Many of these agencies operate without a license, send people to jobs that don’t exist, or place them in jobs that don’t pay minimum wage.

This is a growing problem among our immigrant and low-income communities, as they are often the main target of these scams. Over the past year, DCA received more than 600 complaints about employment agencies, and as a result initiated more than 225 investigations into both unlicensed and licensed offices. In the past year, DCA has issued more than 400 violations and secured more than $77,000 in restitution for 269 consumers who were charged illegal and predatory fees.

DCA has also increased its education and advocacy work in this industry. Together with New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), DCA recently created a Job Hunter’s Bill of Rights, which is available in eight languages. It outlines what employment agencies can and cannot do. Advocacy groups have been distributing it to employers and job seekers throughout New York City. Some of the rights and responsibilities noted include: an individual’s right to a full refund of any advance fee if an agency doesn’t find that worker a job or if a job offer isn’t accepted; the job seeker’s right to file a complaint regardless of immigration status; and the requirement that employment agencies refer workers only to employers that are hiring.

“Every day, predatory employment agencies take advantage of unemployed low-wage and immigrant workers,” says Manuel Castro, Executive Director of NICE. “That’s why [we have] worked with DCA on this Bill of Rights. With DCA cracking down on bad actors, and a campaign pushing for legislative reform, low-wage job seekers will be better protected when looking for quality jobs.”

We urge New Yorkers to know their rights, including the right to submit a complaint to DCA about employment agencies in New York. For job hunters who choose to use an employment agency, it’s important to check the local laws and know your rights. Here in New York City, get our tips and read the Job Hunter’s Bill of Rights. There are laws and rules that can protect the unemployed and underemployed from these predatory practices. Knowing those rights is the first step.

Author’s note: Read the results from DCA’s investigations of employment agencies.

Either scenario would mean that thousands of low-income and disconnected young adults would miss the valuable opportunity to serve their communities, and their neighbors would miss out on the vital services that AmeriCorps members provide.

As CEO of The Corps Network, a network made up of more than 100 Service and Conservation Corps, I am extremely concerned about the potential consequences of these cuts on low-income youth and their communities.  In 2014, more than 10,500 of our Corps members were living below the poverty line, on public assistance, or were court-involved upon entry into the program. Many of these young adults were also out of school. But instead of seeing them as liabilities, we view them as “Opportunity Youth,” because of their enormous untapped potential and their desire to improve their own lives and the world around them.

As an AmeriCorps member in The Corps Network, a young person receives a stipend or living allowance to perform service projects in their communities and on public lands. These projects range from planting trees and gardens, to building playgrounds and parks, to restoring degraded environments and habitats, to weatherizing and retrofitting low-income housing.  In order to undertake this work, Corpsmembers learn technical skills and earn professional certifications.  Their experiences help them advance their education, gain hands-on work experience, and develop skills in communications, teamwork, and leadership.

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I’ve been talking with our Corps about the potential impact of the proposed Congressional cuts, including with several staff and participants at the Youth Conservation Corps (YCC), located just outside of Chicago.

“We might have to close. AmeriCorps and additional private funds leveraged through AmeriCorps are especially important,” said Robert Shears, YCC’s Executive Director.

YCC Corpsmember Samuel Myers told me about how AmeriCorps service has helped him transform his life.

“If not for AmeriCorps I would still be on the streets. I would not have career goals—nothing like that,” said Myers. “YCC AmeriCorps helped set me straight. [I] feel good at the end of the day because I get to do things for people that they want to do but can’t. I wish more people would realize how important it is.”

Of particular concern to both Shears and Myers is the possibility of losing funding for the AmeriCorps Education Award that can be used to pay for postsecondary education.

“The award is a huge incentive for youth to join,” said Shears. “We’re focused on trying to help those Corpsmembers get through at least their second semester of college—that would be impossible without the AmeriCorps Education Award.”

“I am going to need some help to even think about going to college,” Myers added.

Shears noted that the cuts proposed by Congress might seem pennywise but they are decidedly pound foolish.

“There are few [programs] that provide both education and jobs skills to local young people while also providing important community benefits,” said Shears.  “Youth who are disconnected from work and school are a much greater burden on the tax system than those who are using our program to break out of poverty. Our members also serve as important role models in their disenfranchised communities.”

Many of the service projects are specifically designed to help low-income communities address environmental justice issues.  Corpsmembers turn abandoned lots into parks, playgrounds, and gardens; install energy-saving (and money-saving) retrofits in low-income homes; plant trees and organic urban farms in places that lack green spaces; cut down invasive trees and deliver the wood to families in need in rural areas; and provide community education around environmental health issues. Through AmeriCorps funding, the Corpsmembers are making a difference in their own underserved communities ranging from rural towns and Native American reservations to low-income neighborhoods in our country’s biggest cities.

Julian Amos is another YCC AmeriCorps Corpsmember who said that without the program he “would be on the streets right now.”  He also pointed to the tangible results he sees in his community.

“Feeding people, and helping build a house for a low-income family—all of that is helping out,” he said. “It also helps people like me get to where [we] need to go—into jobs and college. I’m just trying to get my foot in the door.”

The opportunity AmeriCorps offers is especially important in the wake of a recession as young people who have limited experience and few marketable skills suffer the most.

As a 2013 study conducted by The Corporation for National and Community Service found: volunteers without a high school diploma are 51% more likely to find a job than non-volunteers; people from rural areas who volunteer have a 55% greater chance of finding employment than non-volunteers; and volunteers who have been out of work have a 27% greater chance of finding a job than out-of-work individuals who do not volunteer. In short, young people who participate in AmeriCorps – regardless of their socioeconomic background – improve their chances of finding employment, getting on a career pathway, and becoming a productive adult and citizen.

Because of the AmeriCorps cause and the clear pathway to greater economic security that the program offers, demand already hugely outpaces available AmeriCorps slots. In 2011, 582,000 AmeriCorps applications were received for only 82,000 slots. As a result of budget cuts, AmeriCorps slots presently stand at around 73,000—now Congress is considering cutting that by another 25,000.

The very programs that strengthen our young people, our communities, and our nation need to be fortified, not torn down.

No kidding, Mr. President.

This isn’t news to anyone. For most people, the Internet is key to basic life functions: correspondence; applications for jobs, college, and benefits; Facebook stalking your friends’ friends’ friends, expressing yourself with 90’s TV show gifs; and participating in the oh-so-enlightened conversations occurring on message boards everywhere.

Although I jest, lack of Internet access is a serious barrier for many low-income families, and its consequences are very real: students who have broadband at home achieve higher graduation rates than those who do not; high speed Internet access is strongly associated with greater economic development for communities; and the Internet is a critical prerequisite for accessing a huge proportion of job applications. I spent the past year studying how these folks use public computing resources in Chicago, and I can tell you that having access at home, work, school, or a public center really changes what opportunities are available to you.

But none of this matters because everyone has smartphones now, right? Problem solved. Except that you can’t write essays, craft a resume, do your taxes, or animate, analyze, and code anything worthwhile on your phone. And sure enough, the effects of these limitations show: mobile-only Internet users have lower digital skill levels than people with access to desktops.

And although the proportion of people who do not have Internet in some capacity at home or work has been reduced to an all-time low, the consequences for those who remain excluded have multiplied because the vast majority of institutions provide services in a way that assumes online access. This is very bad news for the quarter of Americans who don’t have decent broadband at home.

All this being said, the ConnectHome initiative, while great for the 275,000 families it serves, won’t even make a dent in the approximately 95 million people who need it. If we’re going to have a national conversation about digital skills and Internet access, then let’s recognize that while ConnectHome and mobile Internet access play important roles in filling the critical gaps in services for our most vulnerable families, the overwhelming need for Internet, devices, support, and training in underserved communities requires a broader strategy.

We’ve been here before: policymakers did attempt to address these digital disparities in the Recovery Act after the 2008 recession. The Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) invested $4.7 billion dollars in broadband access and adoption, including $201 million in Public Computer Center grants to fund 3,500 new and upgraded public computer centers across the country.

For a lot of communities, these types of public computer labs are where low-income individuals who lack Internet go to get the technology and training they need. Labs are located in public housing, senior centers, schools, health clinics, community technology centers, and most importantly, public libraries, who are the real MVPs of Internet access in America, despite the massive cuts many systems have faced.

These public computer centers are heavily relied upon: for example, my research suggests that half of their 80,000 weekly users in Chicago—more than one-third of whom have incomes of under $10,000—use public computer centers every day. And, the most recent available data clocked the average wait time in about two-thirds of Chicago Public Libraries at more than three hours. And that’s a problem for users, especially low-income households, who don’t have that kind of time to wait around to access basic services. And, centers and their support staffs are doing so much more than providing Internet and computers: they’re teachers, curators of learning resources, amateur social service referrers, homework helpers, and job search coaches.

The value of public computer centers goes beyond technology itself. For teenage users in Chicago, 88 percent reported that they performed better in school through center use and one-third reported that the computer centers made them feel safer because they were off the streets. For Chicago adult users, 58 percent were looking for jobs and 37 percent of all respondents said the Chicago centers had helped them find a job, due in part to staff assistance.

These centers were dealt a huge setback when BTOP’s funding ended in 2013. Now, without a dedicated source of funding, every budget year is a battle to prevent cuts or underfunding. And, when we fail to invest in libraries and public computer centers, they are forced to cut staff and training programs or close altogether. Until the next generation of wireless provision produces better, cheaper alternatives, it’s critical that we financially support these libraries and public computer centers on a far broader scale than ConnectHome.

It’s time to think seriously and creatively about how to fund systemic, sustainable changes to get low-income households connected to the resources they need—in every community.

Tracey: And I’m Tracey Ross.

Rebecca: So, Tracey, before we dive into what today’s episode is gonna be about, I thought we should do the number of the week.

Tracey: All right, let’s do it.

Rebecca: Ready?

Tracey: I’m ready. I’m burning up.

Rebecca: She’s ready! She’s so ready! You are so ready! All right.

Tracey: Give it to me.

Rebecca: The number of the week is… 25.

Tracey: Okay. So, since I was involved in the planning of this episode-

Rebecca: I didn’t really hide the ball there, did I?

Tracey: No. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that it’s the number of years since the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed.

Rebecca: Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner. Yes, indeed. It is the 25^th anniversary of the ADA. It happened just this past weekend. And actually we’ve been celebrating all week long over at TalkPoverty.org with what we’ve been calling talkpoverty and disability week, because the intersection of poverty and disability is all too rarely discussed.

Tracey: We’ve got some great pieces, some personal testimonies, some work by advocates in the field that are working closely on this issue, so please check out the pieces they’re fantastic. They’re on TalkPoverty.org.

Rebecca: Greg will really appreciate what a solid plug we’ve just put in.

Tracey: You’re welcome, Greg.

Rebecca: But we also have a fabulous lineup on today’s show – and, in fact, many of the folks who have been contributors to TalkPoverty and Disability Week are actually gonna be guests on our show today. So we-

Tracey: I’m excited. I know! I was like, “wow!”

Rebecca: I’m excited too. I should have paused for excitement there.

Tracey: So who do we have?

Rebecca: We have Alice Wong, she’s the founder of the Disability Visibility Project, which is a partnership with StoryCorps.

Tracey: We also have Michael Morris, executive director of the National Disability Institute.

Rebecca: Courtesy of the Vera Institute, we will also be featuring some remarks from attorney and civil rights activist T.L. Lewis. Also the founder of HEARD, an important organization that does advocacy on behalf of deaf individuals. But first we’re joined by Talley Wells, Director of the Disability Integration Project at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.

Tracey: You’re listening to TalkPoverty radio. I’m Tracey Ross. I’m joined by Talley Wells, Director of the Disability Integration Project at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. Thank you for joining the program.

Talley: Thank you for having me. It’s very exciting to be here. And happy anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Tracey: Yes, and happy 25^th anniversary back to you. And we’re excited to be commemorating this anniversary on today’s show. So I want to start out by asking, what is the significance of the ADA in the work that you do?

Talley: The ADA is at the heart of the work that I do. My work is based on the United States Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision. Olmstead was decided in 1989; it is the most important civil rights decision for people with disabilities. It’s often called the Brown v. Board of Education decision for people with disabilities, because it is a decision that is transforming our country’s infrastructure for people with disabilities from a system that was all about institutionalizing people – separating them from society – especially here in Georgia, where we had thousands and thousands of people in institutions – and instead, providing them the accommodations and supports so they can live full and meaningful lives in the community, so they can work and live in their own homes, and be as much a part of the community as every other person. So the ADA is at the heart of the work I do, and the reality is just because the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision eight years after the ADA was passed and told the country that it needed to provide supports and services for the community, that’s still not happening. And so my work is about really realizing the promise of this extraordinary Supreme Court decision, and this extraordinary Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Tracey: And you wrote this week for TalkPoverty.org about these very issues – the ADA and the Olmstead case. And you say that people are still segregated into institutions and excluded from participating in society. In what ways have you seen this occurring?

Talley: Well, just think about it. And, I’m sure, in the neighborhood that you are in – and every community across this nation – we have nursing facilities. And nursing facilities are basically institutions that have a lot of people who have disabilities who could be living in the community if we had a much more robust system of homecare and support, so that people don’t actually have to go into a nursing facility – and that’s just one example. In Georgia, we have institutions that were created in 1842, and still exist today – where people with developmental disabilities and people with mental illness are confined, many times for years and years. Now that’s changing in Georgia because we’ve been at sort of the forefront of Olmstead because of the Supreme Court case, and because the Justice Department came back in 2007 through to the present, and has really sort of enforced Olmstead here. But we’ve had a long way to go, and it’s systems that exist not only here but throughout the country. I was recently in New Jersey, where there are thousands of people who are still in institutions.

Tracey: And we’re using, you know, ADA and Olmstead back and forth. Can you actually just explain for our listeners who might not be familiar with the law and with the case, how these relate to one another?

Talley: I would love to. So the ADA – what most people are familiar with – the Americans with Disabilities Act – are – is the fact that the Americans with Disabilities Act requires either a reasonable accommodation or a reasonable modification. And basically what the ADA says is that if someone wants to work in a job, then the employers should provide some sort of modification or accommodation so they can get equal rights to that job as other people. It’s also thought of with respect to architecture and infrastructure so that if a wheelchair ramp would enable someone to get inside a courthouse, or get inside a school, or get inside their home or workforce. And that’s sort of what people think of with the ADA and the reasonable accommodation is at the heart of the Olmstead case. If we step back, and look at when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, Congress issued a number of findings. And in those historical findings, which Congress made at the very beginning of the Act, Congress said in this country, people with disabilities had historically enough to that time of the Act, in 1990, been discriminated against and segregated. And one of the ways that they had been discriminated against and segregated was by institutionalizing them. Essentially, if you institutionalize someone, you are separating them from everyone else. You are also making it very difficult for them to go to the store, for them to have a job, for them to be part of the day to day life that everyone else is a part of. And so, when Congress made those findings, they then said that people with disabilities must be included as long there is a reasonable accommodation. And “reasonable” is a word that’s used throughout the law, and most people think of it with respect to “reasonable doubt,” but pretty much – most of the law has some sort of reasonableness component and that is, essentially: “what would an objective person think is reasonable?” And so, whatever that is, then you apply it with the combination, so: how can you accommodate someone to include them? And when the Olmstead case was brought on behalf of two women, Lois Curtis and Elaine Wilson, who were here – just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. And they had repeatedly been held in Georgia Regional Hospital in Atlanta, which is our psychiatric hospital locally. And their doctors said they were perfectly capable of living in the community, but they needed support. And the problem was Georgia only provided those supports in the institutions. So if they were gonna get the supports they needed, they had to essentially be segregated from society. So the argument that happened in the Olmstead case was a simple “reasonable accommodation” argument – that it would be a reasonable accommodation for the state of Georgia to enable them to live in the community, and provide the supports they’re providing to them – just not in the institution, but in the community. And with that simple statement by the United States Supreme Court, the walls of segregation that have separated so many people with disabilities not only here in Atlanta – but in every city, every state in this country – have begun to come down.

Tracey: And yet, without enforcement the ADA and what Olmstead provided would be a theoretical framework. So, what is the role of an organization such as yours in ensuring that these rights and protections are actually experienced by people with disabilities?

Talley: That’s been one of the great learning experiences for me in this work. I – go to law school, and you see these Supreme Court decisions, and you learn all about them, and you sort of think that that – that will change things. But if you really spend your time looking at it, and remember what happened with Brown v. Board of Education, just because you have the Supreme Court say something, doesn’t mean that a state’s actually gonna do what the Court said. Going back to Brown v. Board of Education, and Olmstead is very much the same thing. You had the states fighting all the way up to the Supreme Court, and then the Supreme Court turns around and says “State, you have to do it.” And so the state that has fought it all the way up to the highest court in the land, now has the obligation to carry it out – and so are they actually going to do what the Court has said when they’ve been fighting it all along? What we saw, of course, with school integration was “no,” that the states simply were not going to carry it out, and that the courts had to get more and more involved. And with disabilities we had sort of the same experience. In 1999, we had the decision; the state of Georgia decided to do a lot of committees. They basically created a blue ribbon commission, they created a Governor’s commission, to look at Olmstead. They had the legislature do some findings. They did a lot of planning, but very little implementation, of how the state was gonna actually provide the reasonable accommodation – not just to Lois and Elanie, who were the two plaintiffs, but to all people with disabilities who were confined in institutions. And then what really became the impetus for change in this state was that we were involved in the last month of cases and got The Atlanta Journal Constitution involved, which is our newspaper here, and they did a huge expose on all of the problems inside of the hospital. They found over 100 people who, as they put it, “would have lived but for the fact that they were in the hospital,” and who died in the hospital. And there were all sorts of incidences of abuse and neglect. So while we were finding these cases – and the role of our organization as a legal services organization and the role also of protection advocacy organization is to represent individuals. But we needed additional help, and the newspaper article brought the United States Justice Department, and ultimately resulted in a settlement in 2010 where Georgia now not only had to serve Lois and Elaine but this settlement was a statewide settlement that Georgia was finally gonna close these hospitals that have been around since 1842 – not only close them, but provide the supports and services to the community for individuals throughout our state. And this settlement that happened here in Georgia – similar settlements are happening across the country, because the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has now made Olmstead one of its number one priorities. And if you go on the Justice Department’s Olmstead website, you can see cases are happening in pretty much every state in the land to ensure that everyone with a disability doesn’t have to live in an institution, but can live full and meaningful lives in the community.

Tracey: And I really appreciate you drawing some of the comparisons between the Olmstead case and Brown v Board and something we’ve talked about a few times on the show is the need for other social justice movements to include a disability lens. So whether it’s, um, you know a racial justice cause or LGBT rights there are obviously in all of these social movements people who experience disability. How do think that other movements can do a better job of incorporating the disability lens?

Talley Wells: There’s a woman named Kate Gainer who lives here in Atlanta and she was part of the civil rights movement for African Americans and people of color. She says that when the laws changed, and society changed, she was able – she had the right to get in the front of the bus but it wasn’t until much later, and the push from the disability rights movement that she was able to actually get on the bus because she uses a wheelchair. Every single group- socio-economic, ethnic, racial, age- has people with disabilities, and they are vibrant parts of that community. Yet many times they’re still excluded. I had a friend come and meet with us for, um, a gathering who is a disability rights advocate and uses a wheelchair. And we realized that in this group of fairly progressive people, twenty people, she could not go to a single one of those peoples house because she could not get into their house. That’s what it means to be excluded, to not go over to your friends’ houses, to not be able to get into the workforce. So, and another favorite example I have is there is a museum called the Disability Right Museum Right Museum on Wheels that has been part of this extraordinary celebration of the American’s with Disabilities Act that is traveling across this country to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary. And in that museum there is a letter from President George H.W. Bush who signed the Americans with Disabilities Act and he said that he was extremely proud, that is one of the most important things he did in his administration but it really came to his understanding of how important this was, and what it meant to have simple things like curb cut when he became someone who uses a wheelchair. And so that’s something he wrote in March of this year and it shows that President Bush, I’m sure, never thought that he would be a person with a disability. But it can happen to any of us. There are people with disabilities that have been President, that are part of every movement and it is so integral to include the disability rights movement. I enjoyed watching the celebration of the civil rights movement, at the LBJ, the Lyndon Baines Johnson, anniversary of the Civil Rights Act and the disability rights community did a great job of talking to the LBJ library about making sure that they included people with disability. And that wasn’t necessarily the way the program was going to be at first, but they changed it because the disability rights community stood up and made it clear that that’s absolutely a part of the civil rights movement.

Tracey: And one way that you’re disseminating more information about disability rights and getting resources to advocates is through your new website, Olmsteadrights.org. Can you tell me what prompted the creation of this site and what resources does it provide?

Talley: I’m so proud that you have brought this up, because we are so proud of Olmsteadrights.org. OlmsteadRights the impetus for the creation of this was that we have this amazing transformation that’s happening throughout the country, changing from a a nineteenth century system of segregation and institutionalization to a twenty-first century system that is not even a system – it’s an understanding that people with disabilities don’t have to be in institutions they can live full and meaningful lives in the community. Of course most people with disabilities don’t live in institutions, but there are so many of them that do and that even though this whole transformation is happening, so few people know about it. So we decided to do three things: We wanted to tell the story of people with disabilities who had been in nursing homes, who had been in institutions for developmental disabilities, who are now living full and meaningful lives in the community. We also wanted to tell the stories of people who were able to avoid going into the institutions. So we have lots and lots of stories, one of my favorite stories is my former client, Harold Anderson, who is now my boss because he’s on the board here at, at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society. We advocated for him, we had a mediation set up in the nursing home where he had been living, he had lived for I think seven years in various nursing homes, and we got him out, he’s now not doing all sorts of things in Atlanta including being on the executive committee of our board. So we wanted to tell stories like Harold’s- of real people- and we also wanted to ensure that self-advocates, people with disabilities, families of people with disabilities could advocates for themselves based on Olmstead. And third we wanted to provide legal tools and so we have a lot of legal tools, legal pleadings, legal outline, for lawyers so they can do Olmstead cases, and our focus is legal services organizations, protection and advocacy organizations, that do this work every single day. But it’s also for lawyers across the country to make sure that anyone who is either at risk of going into an institution or who is in an institution can live in the community. So I hope everyone will come to Olmsteadrights.org, the other thing we have in it is a history videos, we have the oral argument from the Supreme Court case, we’ve got a lot of resources so people can really come to understand the Olmstead case and how it’s transforming the country but how much further we have to go.

Tracey: Our guest is Talley Wells, director of the Disability Integration Project at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, thank you for joining us.

Talley: Thank you.

Rebecca: Next up, we’re gonna play some remarks for a recent event hosted by the Vera Institute, on the intersection of criminal justice and disability. And specifically, we’re gonna play some remarks from TL Lewis, the founder of an organization called HEARD, Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of the Deaf.

TL: I begin every discussion that I give, that I present, by centering the space, and that means uplifting the names of people who are no longer with us, making sure that we all recognize that we’re not talking about numbers, we’re not talking about statistics, but what we’re talking about are human lives. So I will begin today, like I begin every other day, not with scanning the building upon which we all sit, or stand. Tanesha Anderson, Freddie Gray, Anthony Hill, Ezell Ford – these are African American people with disabilities whose lives were cut short by law enforcement. News media and advocates alike erase parts of their identities; they often mention that they are black people who have been murdered by police officers, but what they don’t often mention is that these are people with multiple marginalized identities, and those marginalized identities all together are what led to their untimely murders. Their lives mattered. Their black lives mattered. Their disabled black lives mattered. And that’s important for us to be able to state in this space. Today, I want to propose to you all something that some people might call lofty, others might call revolutionary- others might say it’s impossible. But before I begin, I want to remind you that those same words were used with advocates like the Honorable Senator Harkin as related to the ADA 25, 30 years ago when it was conceived of. So I want you all to dream with me for a while. Let’s explore what’s possible, and not worry about what exists now. Let’s think outside of the box, outside of the realm. So that’s what I’m challenging us to do today. So stay with me. So here’s what I propose: I’m proposing an end to police brutality and mass incarceration by engaging in intersectional disability justice advocacy that – because of its historic and present work related to deinstitutionalization and creative community-based solutions – is already steeped in creative – creative and innovative, transformative deinstitutionalization policies and practices. And at its core, that’s what mass incarceration is – it is institutionalization, and it’s important to name that as well. So here are the statistics and information that provide a framework for my proposal. I’m just gonna run down some brief statistics that are available online. Children with disabilities are three times more likely to be placed in foster care than those without disabilities. Children with disabilities are four times more likely to be living in poverty than those without disabilities. 65% of boys and 75% of girls in juvenile detention have mental illnesses. Children with disabilities are 50% more likely to drop out of school than those without disabilities. Black children represent 18% of the preschool enrollment population but 48% of those preschoolers – preschoolers, yes – were receiving more than one out of school suspension. The larger question, of course, is why are we suspending preschoolers, but the second is, okay let’s talk about racial disparity and disability disparity in those – in those numbers. Children with disabilities enter the juvenile system at 5 to 6 times the rate of youth who do not have disabilities. Up to 85% of children in juvenile detention have at least one disability – and of that 85%, only 30-some-odd percent of them are receiving access to services in their schools pursuant to IDDA which Dara mentioned earlier. 60% unemployment rate which was mentioned by the Honorable retired Senator, and disproportionately underemployed or not employed within the deaf and disabled communities. So, those are the kind of key statistics that should paint the- the- the broad strokes and these last three are super critical, so stay with me. The largest mental health providers in the nation are jails – Cook County in Chicago; Riker’s Island in New York; and LA county jails. Blacks and Latinos make up 30% of the US population, 60% of the incarcerated population, and now 20% of our population here in the United States, of course, has disabilities. We represent 20% of the population that is in the United States. We represent – studies have shown – 60-80% of those who are incarcerated in jails and prisons across the nation. So at the end of the day what that means is people with disabilities are the largest minority population in jails and prisons. Period. If ever there was a crisis of institutionalization with people with disabilities, that crisis is now. It’s impossible to address the issues of mass incarceration without addressing it with a disability and deaf justice lens.

While many have begun the important discussions surrounding the harms visited upon so many communities of color and different communities, religious affilitations and so on and so forth – our native nations. There’s been, you know, a very – a vast chasm of discussion about disability. And there is absolutely right – those discussions that do center on disability and criminal justice tend to focus on very specific portion of people with disabilities to the detriment of other disability communities which is highly problematic. (26:13) For example, I’m gonna skip some stuff because I can come back to it later for example people who are deaf, diabetic, epileptic, you mentioned these things, have actually been murdered by police officers, because people don’t have intellectual disabilities, don’t have mental health conditions, are not experiencing crises, but have physical conditions that render them, because the police officers are not utilizing the ADA, mitigating, or taking time to stop before they resort to lethal violence against our community members, literally are being murdered because they have a disability, so we have to state in this space, and our jails and prisons are literally overflowing with people with disabilities, out in California and many other states. We’ve had judges actually ruling we need to de-incarcerate specific prisons because they are literally overflowing with folks, so that’s kind of the large lay of the land and despite this long standing federal disability rights laws that we all know of and love and cherish- the ADA, the rehabilitation act- which so many people before us spent so much of their lives invested- their hearts, invested- in creating these laws, what we have to acknowledge is that laws alone do not create, we cannot legislate social, cultural, and organizational and agency change. We have to take further action, and that’s kind of where we are today, and I’ll give you some “for instances” right? So, for instance, although it’s rarely discussed deaf people and people with disabilities are often wrongfully convicted because of lack of access to police officers, attorneys in the courts, then once they’re institutionalized they’re physically and sexually assaulted and subjected to depressing isolation and other forms of exploitation. I’ve worked for a decade on more than fifteen death wrongful conviction cases. The majority of these cases have uncanny similarities, in at least two respects- there are many others but I’ll name two- private police departments fail to provide reasonable accommodations in terms of communication. Detectives, attorneys, and judges alike- the entire system is guilty. Let’s be clear. We’re not blaming police, we’re not blaming just- the entire system is ableist and audist and we need to name that in this case. Ableism is discrimination based on your ability; audism is discrimination based on your ability to speak or hear, um, as opposed to sign and listen with your eyes or listen with your hands if you’re a tactile sign language user. We can’t prioritize certain kinds of abilities over other abilities and that’s really important also to name. Similarly, deaf, deaf blind, deaf disabled, and hard of hearing prisoners customarily experience discrimination and terrible abuse in our prisons, punished for failure to obey commands that they can’t hear, using sign language to communicate, for failure to follow rules that were never conveyed, for missing counts that they were never aware of, for filing grievances about these persistent inequities, they’re denied interpreter services, deprived of access to medical and mental health care services in the prisons, denied access to education and reentry programs, cut off from access to the most basic human interaction, all of this coupled with inaccessible telephone systems in the prisons, which I will get to momentarily. I recently submitted, testimony to the Senate, they had us- their second ever hearing on solitary confinement and I shared with the Senate and the world- hopefully folks are actually reading our testimony- that the solitary- the use of solitary confinement against people who are deaf and people with physically disabilities is- let’s be clear- solitary confinement is torture for anyone, period. It should not be used against anyone in any elongated way and I would argue it shouldn’t be used at all but that’s a whole other revolutionary idea that’s not the point of discussion today. But what we do know is that we have deaf people who within weeks, sometimes hours and often in months, literally try to kill themselves as a result of the deprivation that happens, while they are experiencing solitary confinement at the hands of our government. That is in our name. We are responsible for that. There’s a large discussion about solitary and people with mental health. Where’s the discussion about solitary and people with other disabilities? And our children, we- the ACLU did a wonderful job of recently bringing, shedding light on the issue of putting our babies in boxes in solitary confinement and what that does to them mentally and otherwise but there is not a discussion about physical disabilities and solitary confinement. We should be fighting for all of us at once, not one thing at a time, not only mental health but not deaf. There is no reason a deaf person or any person with any other disability, which is the vast majority of our prison population, should be in solitary confinement. And that’s what we need to be saying as advocates, not “let’s not put people with mental illness in pri-, in solitary.” So, I’m gonna hold on that because I’ve got more I wanna share, alright. Finally, despite the existence of these wonderful laws which we all support and uphold, will soon we, my organization -an all-volunteer non-profit organization- will soon be on our fourth year of advocacy just to get telephones for people who have communication disabilities in prisons across the nation. As of last month, eight prisons across this nation had videophones. Eight. That means for decades countless deaf people, deaf, deaf blind, deaf disabled, hard of hearing, have had no access to their loved ones, their babies, their families, their attorneys. And we know that people who are deaf actually experience the least access to the justice system in the first instance, so why don’t we make sure that they can at least communicate effectively once they’re in the jails or prisons across the nation? This is the kind of advocacy we need to see from folks. So right now we’ve got criminal justice reform and prison advocates who are really finding ways to drastically decrease mass incarceration. They’re proposing things like capping sentences, legalizing certain drugs, etc., etc., alternative courts, what I’m proposing, is that this, the situation of mass incarceration is, has grown way too large and that those things are not going to work; we will still end up, even if we were to release all of those people in these proposals, with mass incarceration levels above what we had in the 1980s. So what I would like us to do is to think about a justice system that- what would it look if we applied disability justice principles, right? And so here’s my alliteration of the day, and this is what you should take home with you. Our justice system could decriminalize disability, deescalate law enforcement situations for people in crisis, divert all people with disabilities away from jails and prisons, demand disaggregated data collection on disability in jails and prisons, deinstitutionalize those of us who are presently trapped in the clutch of the system because society has failed for so many decades to provide meaningful support and accommodations for people with disabilities in the first place. Many people who are presently incarcerated, um, are incarcerated now for behaviors that forty years ago would have landed them in a psychiatric facility. That’s important to state. We have to start re-envisioning and reimagining criminal justice. Criminal, what is criminal? Right, because criminality is a social construct, and what is justice? And what could that look like if we actually applied a racial justice, a trans justice, a disability justice lens? I think that that is the way we can advance the rights of all of us and we really need to recommit ourselves to the long and bitter struggle for justice as the honorable Senator mentioned, so thank you.

Rebecca: This is TalkPoverty Radio on the WeAct Radio network. I’m Rebecca Vallas, and for a very special episode commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, or the ADA, I have with me Alice Wong. She is the founder and the coordinator of the Disability Visibility Project, which was done in partnership with StoryCorps. Alice, thank you so much for joining TalkPoverty Radio.

Alice: Thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca: So I understand that you and I were both at the White House event commemorating the 25^th anniversary of the ADA. I didn’t see you, but I understand now that you were there in a special way.

Alice: There’s a really awesome device, called BeamPro, and it’s basically a teleconferencing device that allows a person to use their left hand at home and they can operate a robot. So it’s kind of like people can see me through the monitor, and I’m moving around in the Red Room and the Blue Room and the East Room. I couldn’t believe it. It was thrilling to be in the White House, and to actually say hello the President.

Rebecca: So, you – you were the first person to ever use this BeamPro technology in the White House. Is that right?

Alice: I believe so. That’s what they told me at the White House. So it was a huge honor, and really – you know- an adventure to try to use it and to make sure it all worked. Kind of sort of similar of the President and me side by side, virtually.

Rebecca: It’s pretty amazing.

Alice: Well, this is life in 2015, now. I think there’s a lot of amazing interest in technology and things that are available online now that really give people with disabilities a way to participate in ways that they haven’t before, and one thing that I maybe should I mention: so many amazing people with disabilities using Twitter and Facebook, makes me think about when I was younger – in the pre-Internet days – and, wow, if I had that as an option, the world would be so different.

Rebecca: Well, in full disclosure to our audience: that’s how you and I know each other is through Twitter.

Alice: Yeah, it’s pretty funny.

Rebecca: So, tell us a little bit about the Disability Visibility Project you coordinate in partnership with StoryCorps? What is that project about and how did it come into being?

Alice: The Disability Visibility Project is kind of like a grassroots campaign that I launched last year, and it’s kind of a one year project, kind of encouraging people with disabilities to stand a part of this lead up to the really landmark 25^th anniversary of this Americans with Disabilities Act. There aren’t enough stories – people with disabilities telling their stories on their own terms, and it’s kind of an easy way to really get the community involved. And Storycorps is a wonderful national nonprofit located in Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco, and they have a mobile tour that goes throughout the country. And we’re just trying to encourage people from all over the country to try to participate and just tell the stories of their lives and what they care about. And now with the StoryCorps app, people don’t have to travel. They can just use their smartphone and record their story. There are a lot of different ways.

Rebecca: And tell us about a few of those stories that you received through the Disability Visibility Project. I think you have some actually for us on tape that we’ll be able to play for our listeners.

Alice: A lot of people talked about education in their career lives. And one thing that has been clear that – in some of the interviews, is the notion of economic self-sufficiency. People who grow up having a disability – how they need to take care of themselves. And what they need to do in order to take care of themselves. In many ways, they need education, earning money, working hard, and sometimes, there are a lot of policy areas that come along with that, so that’s been in some interviews so far.

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Rebecca: And let’s play a clip of one of those interviews.

Speaker: If you don’t have a disability, you know, you basically are encouraged to always present yourself in terms of what you can do, that’s your identity- hopefully, if you have a healthy sense of self. The things that you can’t do are simply the things you haven’t learned how to do yet, or that you didn’t really care about in the first place. I feel like the message that a person with a disability gets is: your identity is based on what you’re unable to do. It’s how well you can argue for not being able to do something.

Rebecca: Alice, now I understand that several of the interviews you did for this project were on the subject of people with disabilities fighting for economic justice. Let’s hear a clip from one of them.

Speaker2: Well, and I think the next frontier – and I know there are people working on this, and talking about it, so it’s like some nuanced idea – it’s really economic justice for people with disabilities. I mean, we are among the poorest of the poor in this country, the most unemployed or underemployed demographic. And you know I think economic justice is really the next fight – and it’s the fight now, right, and it’s the fight in the future.

Rebecca: Something we talk a lot about on TalkPoverty radio is how disability is both a cause and a consequence of poverty. What are some of the ways in which we need to see policy change building on the successes of the Americans with Disabilities Act and other pieces of critical legislation to really move forward and realize the goals of those pieces of legislation?

Alice: One of the easiest things in my mind – and easy in my mind, but really difficult, I think, politically is really the asset and income limitation for people with disabilities to receive either SSDI or Medicaid. For so many people with disabilities, these are major disincentives towards working. Whether or not they have the drive, the talent, and the opportunity to work, these kind of barriers really keep people with disabilities who want to work, who want to pay taxes, earn income, and actually create access and wealth and contribute to society and it’s punitive for many of us, in modern community-based services, because there are linked with Medicaid, and all of these aspects, income limitations, are really hampering a lot of disabilities – younger people, who want to work, are wanting to enter the workforce, but cannot.

Rebecca: And where can our listeners find more about the Disability Visibility Project?

Alice: We have a website called disabilityvisability.com. We also have a Twitter, at D-i-s-v-i-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y.

Rebecca: It’s a doozy to spell. Well, thank you so much Alice Wong for being on TalkPoverty radio today. This has been – this is a really special episode for me in a lot of ways and I’m really glad you were able to join us for it. Alice Wong is the project coordinator for the Disability Visibility Project, a community partnership with StoryCorps.

Alice: Thank you so much Rebecca.

Rebecca: You’re listening to TalkPoverty radio. I’m Rebecca Vallas. And to continue this special ADA-at-25 episode of TalkPoverty Radio, I have a very special guest with me – Michael Morris. He is the executive director of the National Disability Institute. Michael, thank you so much for joining the program.

Michael: Thank you for bringing me on and I look forward to the conversation.

Rebecca: Well this is obviously a wonderful and celebratory week, but a point that you and other people have made is that we really still have a lot of our work cut out for us. For example, one tragic sentence that I write and say routinely is that “disability and poverty go hand in hand.” And this is something you and I have discussed at length over the years- that 25 years after the ADA, this is still the case. Why is this still the case?

Michael: I think there’s no single reason. I think attitudes change slowly. I think that there’s discrimination in this country still that prevents many people with disabilities from being employed. The estimates vary of anywhere from 50-80% of the disability population is not in the labor force. We know people with disabilities are two times more likely to be living in poverty than their non-disabled peers. But I think the real issues that confront us is a combination of policy and practice.

Rebecca: And, going back to the poverty rates of people with disabilities even who are working, something that is perhaps less well known but really is quite staggering is that poverty rates are disproportionate for people with disabilities even when you compare part-time workers and full-time workers with and without disabilities. Maybe part of this is about the disability pay gap – we’ve got new research finding that for workers without disabilities who are paid a dollar, workers with disabilities are paid just .68c on that dollar. Do you think that maybe these – how do you explain these disparities?

Michael: Well, it’s so interesting. That’s really some new research which compounds the challenges people with disabilities face. So those who have been fortunate enough to get into the workforce find their pay gap than women, racial and ethnic minorities. So, what does all that mean? It means that, culturally, we have a long way to go for people with disabilities to truly be accepted for their talent, for their value, for their contributions to communities, to the workplace, and to our economy.

Rebecca: Now, switching gears a little bit, it’s not just a story all about income poverty disparities. The National Disability Institute, which you lead, has also looked at how people with disabilities are doing when it comes to having savings – even just a little bit of savings. What have you found there?

Michael: Yes. We’ve been able to analyze data from several major studies- one by Finra, one from FDIC- surveying households. And here again we see some stark contrasts. When people with disabilities were asked do they have enough funds for any kind of financial emergency – car breaks down, could be a healthcare emergency – people with disabilities were 2 to 3 times more likely not to have any rainy day fund, any emergency fund. So, it’s more than the income gap. It’s this lack of savings. And, we investigated further and see that 80% of people with disabilities have no retirement account, have not ever seen a person to talk about any financial planning. So, we really are at a point in time, that I would have expected when – frankly, I was there at the White House, back on the lawn, with about a thousand others, when President Bush signed the ADA, and I don’t know if I could have seen the future 25 years later, but my expectations- and I think so many people in the disability community, their expectations as well – that promise of the ADA, in addition to promoting independent living and community participation, was also about advancing economic self-sufficiency. We’ve got a long way to go.

Rebecca: And it isn’t just retirement accounts, right? Some of the work you guys have done has also found that almost half of households headed by working-age people with disabilities are either unbanked – have no bank at all, no mainstream financial inclusion – or underbanked. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Michael: Yes, that information came from the new study we did with FDIC that almost 1 in 2 individuals with disabilities heading households were either unbanked or underbanked – and if that isn’t a serious problem enough by itself, the secondary problem was people with disabilities as compared to people without disabilities were more likely to use alternative financial services- kind of a fancy name for pawn shops, and check cashing places, predatory lending operations, that – on top of – let’s kind of add up the pieces here. If you’re working, you’re probably earning less on the dollar from new research. You’re also not in the financial mainstream. You’re also using alternative financial services. And you’re less likely to be planning for the future in terms of retirement, or down the road – even to have emergency funds. So if there’s anything that I would stress to people thinking about “well, we’re at 25 years, where do we go?” I think the compass couldn’t be pointed more directly than on this issue of poverty and disability. It’s unacceptable and we know we can do better.

Rebecca: So what can we do to increase the numbers of people with disabilities who are included in that financial mainstream?

Michael: Well, we’re working with 19 community partners in 6 cities in a project called “Roads to Financial Independence,” where we’re providing on a 1-to-1 basis opportunities for financial education and financial coaching to individuals with disabilities who want to return to the workplace, or get into the workplace for the first time, are already working- is help them assess their financial capability and status, set financial goals, and look at – if they have no credit, how do you establish credit; if they’re heavily in debt, how do we help them reduce debt; how do we help them establish a savings account? We do expect, over the next several years, to be working with several thousand individuals with disabilities, and learn – really, for the first time – how can the financial world and the disability world and all kinds of community partners, work really well together and what kind of results can we then achieve?

Rebecca: And in your TalkPoverty column this week, you mention that there are a number of recent policy developments that offer concrete opportunities to help bring people with disabilities into the financial mainstream. And specifically, you mention the ABLE Act, legislation that was passed last year. Can you tell us a little bit about the ABLE Act – what it does, and maybe if there are ways in which you don’t think it goes far enough?

Michael: Sure. ABLE Act is, to me, a historic piece of legislation. Took 8 years to get through Congress, and basically it sets up for a certain number of people, who will be eligible – people with disabilities – to establish tax-advantaged savings accounts. It’s somewhat modeled after the 529 college savings accounts, but with several important differences. Number one: the use of the money in the account is not limited just to paying college tuition, and housing, and books. It covers the range of needs that people with disabilities face, often as an extra cost of just living a better quality of life, that’s related to transportation, employment, education, purchase of technology, extra healthcare costs. So it really covers a lot of ground to change a person’s outlook on what they can do. But it even does more than that. It allows, for the first time, for people on SSI to get past the asset limit we talked about a few minutes ago – of $2000 for an individual, $3000 for a couple. No federal public benefit that is means or resource-tested will be able to count the ABLE account that would disqualify someone from being any longer eligible for that public benefit. So in those several ways, this is really a historic change in thinking. Now, unfortunately, it is limited to only a segment of the disability community. It will only help people whose age of onset of disability was age 26 or younger- that leaves out millions of people – and it also restricts the amount of money you could put aside in a savings account annually to $14,000. Now, over time one is going to accumulate more money, but this is so important because, to me, it also is the first time in public policy where Congress is recognizing, “wait a minute. People with disabilities have extra costs other people don’t have.” Sometimes just to get out of bed with personal assistance services. Sometimes it’s technology which will help them speak, or read. Sometimes it’s other assistance related to employment, or transportation. These are costs that could be covered as part of the money set aside in ABLE account. So it’s pretty significant, and I think – I hope – we’ll continue to be able to build on it, expand the population who’s eligible. But, more than that, I really see over the next 5 years, a potential 5 million ABLE accounts opened across the country. What’s exciting about that to me is it sets up a culture of savings, which we didn’t have. It takes away the fear of losing public benefits because those asset limits related to an ABLE account, an ABLE account will be excluded. It really allows a person to dream, and I consider an ABLE account as almost a down payment of really – a first step toward freedom, and independence.

Rebecca: And another policy you mention in your TalkPoverty column relates to the Earned Income Tax Credit, or the EITC. What is it that you think should be done with the EITC, and why is important for people with disabilities?

Michael: Well, EITC -I know, Rebecca, you know- is for people with and without disabilities. It has lifted millions of people out of poverty. For people with disabilities, many of them are unaware they may even be eligible. There’s a lot of myths and misinformation about Earned Income Tax Credit. During the past ten years, National Disability Institute has worked collaboratively with the IRS to do outreach and education to the disability community that: you do not have to be a family, you do not have to have a family with children, to be eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit. We have helped, over the past 10 years, 10 million low-income taxpayers with disabilities actually be helped with their tax return, and have recouped over $2 billion in tax refunds. But what we do know is the Earned Income Tax Credit could be even better. Right now, you have to be age 25 or older to be eligible. And it really – this is something, unusually, both at the Republican and Democratic sides – or spectrum – of ideology, there is agreement to bring down the Earned Income Tax Credit to a much lower age – 18, 19, 20. We also know the benefit is skewed towards families with children, and so an individual, which represents lots of folks with disabilities who are not part of a family – they’re getting a much lower credit or benefit. We had one of the key people of the IRS at our summit last week, who shared a very interesting statistic: despite our work with helping people with disabilities access the Earned Income Tax Credit, there are still 1.5 million individuals with disabilities who are eligible for the credit but have not realized that what they have to do is file a tax return. So we’ve got a way to go, but the EITC is an important tool. I think we’ve proven it to be, that is helping thousands of people in the disability community, and millions of low-income Americans really finally escape poverty.

Rebecca: Michael Morris, executive director of the National Disability Institute. Where can our listeners find more about the reports that you guys have done, and the other resources that you have?

Michael: Thank you for asking. We have a website that we hope will be easy to remember. “www.realeconomicimpact.org” And we urge people as well to join our Real Economic Impact Network.

Rebecca: Michael Morris, thank you so much for joining TalkPoverty radio.

Michael: Thank you, Rebecca.

Rebecca: And that’s our show. Thanks for listening to TalkPoverty radio on the WeAct radio network. We’ll be back next week, Thursday at 4. Also available on iTunes as a podcast or you can listen online at weactradio.com. Special thanks to our executive producers Alyssa Peterson and the one and only Greg Kaufmann, CAP’s amazing poverty and press teams-

Tracey: -and, as always, DC’s own Christlyez Bacon gets the last word. Thanks for listening.

Christlyez: [raps] I work and get paid like minimum wage, sites to hit the clock by the end of the day, hot from downtown until the hood where I stay, the only place I can afford cuz my block ain’t safe. I spend most of my time working trying to bring in the dough, and none of those could come at me with a HMO, and nowadays it’s common for grandparents to outlive their grandkids, and those the type of odds that we handlin’. I’m not a slave to a man with a whip, I’m a slave to the U.S. mint, and it got me doing things in my life that never made any sense, but it paid me in dollars and cents. I need the money for the food and healthcare, the schools and bus fare, you can’t pay the rent without the U.S. right there, with shackles on my hands and toes – they got a brotha moving slow but my soul is determined to go. I want freedom. Freedom. Now I don’t know where it’s at, but it’s calling me back. I feel my spirit is revealing amount. We just tryna get freedom. Freedom.

Many of the long-term services and supports that many people with disabilities need in order to live and work—such as personal attendant care—are not covered under most health insurance plans, and are prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest among us. As a result, if, like me, you require long-term care due to disability, you likely have only one option for access to coverage: Medicaid. For many people with disabilities, access to long-term care through Medicaid comes from eligibility for Supplemental Security Income (SSI). SSI also provides a limited cash stipend of up to $733 per month and beneficiaries must maintain assets below $2,000 in order to remain eligible.

The SSI program has powerful work incentives to enable beneficiaries to reach their potential in the workforce. For example, SSI removes one dollar in benefits for every two dollars earned, so that beneficiaries can gradually work their way off of cash benefits while maintaining access to the long-term services and supports that Medicaid provides.

Even if beneficiaries start earning enough to completely work their way off of cash benefits—which occurs when earnings exceed roughly $1,540 per month—they will continue to maintain their SSI and Medicaid eligibility under a special provision called “1619(b)” (as long as they continue to meet the program’s asset limits). Under this provision, beneficiaries can earn up to a certain threshold that varies by state, ranging from $27,244 per year in Alabama, to $65,144 per year in Connecticut. Additionally, SSI beneficiaries who have high medical costs can request a higher “individualized threshold.” While people do not receive a monthly cash benefit when they earn more than the SSI income limit, as long as they remain below their earnings threshold (and maintain assets below the limit) they continue to be a part of the SSI program and have access to Medicaid, including the long-term care many need in order to work. With the help of these work incentives and supports, more than 312,000 SSI beneficiaries were working as of the end of 2013.

Obstacles to Long-Term Employment

While the SSI program’s work incentives and supports are extremely helpful for workers with disabilities, beneficiaries with long-term employment can face a number of challenges. For example, the ridiculously low SSI asset test of $2,000—which has not budged in nearly three decades—is an ongoing struggle. The asset limit may not be a problem for some beneficiaries without work who are living on an SSI benefit of $733 per month. However, if you’re making $50,000 a year, the asset test means having to spend what you earn each and every month and never being able to save for the future. Some might say that workers with disabilities who can earn $50,000 shouldn’t remain eligible for SSI and Medicaid. However, if you have $60,000 worth of healthcare costs, you couldn’t survive—and couldn’t work—without access to the long-term care these vital programs provide.

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Workers with disabilities whose earnings exceed their threshold limit face challenges as well. Take Jenny. At the age of 16, she suffered a spinal cord injury in a skiing accident that resulted in quadriplegia.  She went on to college and has worked as a teacher in California since graduating. Jenny is a shining example of a person who has been able to thrive under SSI’s system of work incentives. However, after many years as a teacher, Jenny’s annual salary increases pushed her above her individualized threshold, and she was recently informed that she is no longer eligible for SSI and the Medicaid that comes with it. Jenny thus faces a catch-22: California’s school system does not allow Jenny to reduce her hours unless she works a two-thirds time position, which wouldn’t give her enough income to continue to pay her monthly bills and survive. But she also doesn’t earn enough to pay for her long-term supports and services out of pocket if she loses her Medicaid coverage. Don’t we as a society want Jenny to thrive as a teacher educating our children and also be able to get the care she needs in order to work and live?

Medicaid Buy-In Programs

Medicaid Buy-In (MBI) programs were established to address this challenge. They enable workers with disabilities like Jenny to “buy into” Medicaid by paying a premium.

Nearly every state has established an MBI program, each with its own financial eligibility requirements. While these programs enable many workers with disabilities to climb the economic ladder without losing access to the long-term care they need, many have income limits that are too low to help workers like Jenny. For example, California’s MBI program has a net income cap of 250% of the federal poverty level—far below Jenny’s current income. Only 15 states have programs with higher income limits than California’s, including three that have no income cap at all.

In addition to raising the earnings cap on eligibility for long-term care through Medicaid, we also need to address the problem of portability. As states’ MBI eligibility criteria vary widely, eligibility for one state’s program doesn’t guarantee eligibility for another in the event of a move. What we really need is a national Medicaid buy-in program that allows workers with disabilities to continue to climb the economic ladder and seek job opportunities without fear that they will lose the long-term care they need in order to work.

Out of Options Post-Employment

Longer term, Jenny will face a challenge that many workers with disabilities confront when employment stops due to retirement or a medical setback. This is because the Medicaid work incentive policies that allow some of a worker’s income to be disregarded for Medicaid long-term care eligibility do not apply to “unearned income” such as SSI benefits, annuities, or short- or long-term disability payments. While policies vary across states, this can be devastating for people suddenly living on a fixed income, who then face requirements to “spend down” a significant portion of that income on medical costs in order to maintain their eligibility for long-term care, leaving them with insufficient income to live on.

This is the future that lies ahead for many successful workers with disabilities. The federal government spends billions of dollars to help persons with disabilities return to work—but this misguided policy effectively requires you to work until you die, or to live in abject poverty in order to maintain access to the long-term care you need in order to live. This half-empty cup continues to impede progress toward the ADA’s vision of economic conclusion and participation in society.

Long-term, we should work together to establish a social insurance program that ensures access to long-term care. In the meantime, Congress should enable MBI participants to retain their access to Medicaid long-term services and supports despite medical setback or retirement. And it should eliminate or significantly raise the 1619(b) asset limits—and the SSI asset limits generally—so that workers with disabilities may save and plan for a modest retirement. Twenty-five years after the passage of the ADA, these measures would finally provide workers with disabilities like Jenny and I the opportunity to achieve the full American Dream.

When I was preparing to move from seventh to eighth grade, I came home with my list of pre-selected classes—we were tracked and I was on the gifted and talented circuit.  I was able to choose two electives. My mother and I had a horrible relationship that was filled with physical, verbal and emotional violence on her part. On my part, it was fueled by reluctance to just “keep my mouf shut,” as my mother put it. However, once in a while I would play nice with her. On this particular evening she was sitting in her black leather recliner chair—it was a part of a pair, but its partner was in another home with my “no count cheatin’’ stepfather—napping before going to her third job.

“Ma, I needa figa out what Ima take fo’ my ‘lectives next year.”  (This was before I learned to assimilate and forget my first language—that would come a little more than two years later). My mother opened her eyes, sat up and responded, “Take typin’, Cupcake. As long as you kin type you neva gonna be outa job or havta clean no White folks home.” Then she fell asleep. Normally, when I asked her these questions, I was just humoring her. But something happened that evening. I looked at her tired, skinny frame. My eyes lingered on her cracked and peeling hands, and I saw a future that scared the shit out of me. I checked off Typing I and Spanish I.

During high school, I was placed in foster care with well-to-do families. I went to college, and I wanted for nothing financially because the money that used to go to my foster parents became my stipend as a young adult in “Independent Living” until I was 21. However, I had no family to return to because my last foster family left me while I was in my senior year of high school. They moved away to another state and did not take me with them.

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I spent my holidays and summers with my college boyfriend’s family. I worked as a Temp and put my typing and computer skills to use. Whenever I would sign up with a temporary employment agency, they would give a typing test and completely flip out that I was Black and smart and could type over a 100wpm with less than four errors. My mother was right. In my adulthood, I was never out of a job because, when times were hard, I could fall back on my typing skills and do Administrative and Executive Assistant work. I have never cleaned anyone’s house for a living. In fact, there was a time when I was financially solvent enough to hire a housekeeper.

My mother was right until now—Post-Prison. I am now as poor as I was before I went into foster care. I am poorer than I have ever been in my entire adulthood, and I am recently homeless. Prison did not just leave me worse off financially; it caused my mental state to deteriorate to how it was when I was in foster care. Throughout my high school years, I attempted suicide several times. I spent years before my first attempt planning my own death.

While incarcerated, everyday was a battle to live. There, I was sexually bullied and physically attacked on two occasions. In my experience, this is what happens when you report your attackers in prison: the administration arranges for you to be sent to a higher security prison. And when you are attacked or threatened at the higher security prison and you report it, they lock you away in the Segregated Housing Unit (SHU). In the SHU, you spend 23 hours a day in a cell for five days a week and the entire weekend. You get one 15-minute call per month.

When I was not locked in the SHU, I was put on suicide watch. There were times when I was put on suicide watch in retaliation for submitting grievances alleging I was being harassed by an officer. Suicide Watch consists of a big blue quilted gown that is accurately named the “Turtle Suit”; a quilted blanket; a cold, cold cell (so cold my fingertips turned blue); and psychiatric help in which the psychologist (if you are lucky to have one instead of an intern) yells questions about your mental well-being through the steel door. I stopped talking and eating for days at a time. Ultimately this punishment would cause me to become suicidal.

While I was not without my mental health woes pre-prison, my suicidal ideation and anxiety had never approached what I felt in prison. No one can survive that environment without internalizing the daily subjugation of dehumanizing treatment. The threat of violence was always present (from officers and inmates). The trauma from prison has caused my self-worth to deteriorate. I suffer from anxiety, panic attacks, and flashbacks daily.

I am employed very part-time with an organization and they know my story, respect me for who I am, and acknowledge my gifts. Yet on my own, I cannot even get an interview with a temp agency. I cannot pass a background check for housing, and even if I could, my income puts me well below the poverty line and I cannot afford my own place.

Prison does not rehabilitate; that propaganda is a lie. I have been home from prison for almost a year, but I am still not free. Prison has impoverished me financially and mentally, and so I cling to the hope of having a life worth living.

As my colleague Rebecca Vallas and I explained in a recent Center for American Progress report, having a criminal record is a major cause of poverty, and cleaning up a criminal record is one of the most powerful tools for overcoming the barriers associated with it. The states have recognized the power of this policy alternative, with 23 states having expanded their record-clearing laws between 2009 and 2014, as documented by the Vera Institute.

In contrast, there is virtually no statutory authority to clear records of federal court cases. Indeed, even though nearly every state permits arrests not leading to conviction to be cleared, there is no similar authority for federal cases. Even a person who is acquitted in a federal court has no explicit right to seal that case.

Jane Doe was desperate enough that she forged ahead with an expungement petition, even though it was the longest of long-shots. She is a Haitian immigrant who in 1997 was struggling to raise four children on a net monthly income from her home health aide job that was exceeded by her monthly rent alone. She participated in a staged accident as part of an automobile insurance fraud scheme which, had it been successful, would have paid her $2,500. Instead, she was found guilty of a federal charge of insurance fraud. She was sentenced to five years of probation, ten months of home detention, and a restitution order of $46,701 (toward which she faithfully paid $25 monthly, no matter how bad her financial position in later years). But in the eight years since her probation ended in 2007, Jane was fired from home health care jobs a half-dozen times after her background check. As a result, she has been unemployed most of the time.

In considering Ms. Doe’s petition, Judge Gleeson had to determine whether he had the authority to expunge a federal criminal case. In the absence of a federal law explicitly permitting expungement, he looked at whether federal courts have “ancillary jurisdiction” for that purpose. He concluded that of the nation’s twelve federal circuit courts of appeal, five may permit expungement, while five explicitly do not (with apparently no ruling in the other two). Even though he serves in one of the five circuits that may permit such a ruling, Judge Gleeson acknowledged that he was “acutely aware that ‘courts have rarely granted motions to expunge arrest records, let alone conviction records.’”

Judge Gleeson found “extreme circumstances” warranting expungement of Jane Doe’s case. The factors he pointed to for justification of his ruling included Jane’s otherwise clean record, the 17 years since the offense, the “dramatic” adverse impact on her ability to work, and her role as a minor participant in a nonviolent case.

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But here’s the thing: While the impact of the federal conviction on Jane might be “extreme,” it is not unusual in the least. At the Philadelphia legal aid program where I work, we received more than 900 new requests for help last year alone by people whose criminal records were preventing them from working. A great many of these people also had old, nonviolent cases that cost them jobs and leave their families in poverty.

For instance, consider my following clients who have been involved in federal cases:

• JT was convicted of sale of heroin in 1985, after a bad decision to try to sell drugs to provide for her children quickly ended when she sold to an undercover cop. She learned her lesson, served five years’ probation, and hasn’t been arrested since. Now 57, JT has been prevented from working with troubled children and from serving as a home care worker because of the 30-year-old case.
• AA also was convicted of a single drug case in 1994. She too served five years’ probation and has avoided trouble ever since. She too has been threatened with loss of employment in a school because of her 20-year-old conviction.
• In 1997, PV was convicted by a federal jury of harboring and concealing a person from arrest (she was accused of not turning over her common law husband to police). The judge overturned the verdict after the trial and acquitted her. But her case also remains available to the public and adds to her difficulties in getting work at age 64, despite 23 years in a very responsible position in a university until she was laid off.

Because the circuit court in Philadelphia has ruled that our judges have no authority to expunge criminal cases, I cannot file an expungement petition for these three women.

Fortunately, the REDEEM Act is a vehicle for change. Introduced by Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Corey Booker (D-NY), it would permit all three of my clients – and hundreds of thousands more – to seek to seal their records. The bill is not perfect. It limits sealing to nonviolent cases, including nonviolent arrests. All cases that have not resulted in conviction should be permitted to be sealed. But enactment of the REDEEM Act would be a very important step forward.

Judge Gleeson concluded, “[Jane Doe’s] case highlights the need to take a fresh look at policies that shut people out from the social, economic and educational opportunities they desperately need in order to reenter society successfully.” Amen to that. Let’s pass the REDEEM Act and provide the federal expungement remedy that is so desperately needed by people across the country like Jane Doe.

In a rare moment of good news, New York City has decided to remove one of these barriers by limiting the use of credit checks for employment screening. Last month, the City Council voted overwhelmingly to pass the strongest measure in the country on this issue, joining ten states. This measure, which Mayor DeBlasio is expected to sign on Wednesday, is a major step forward to rein in a practice that does little for employers while filtering out good employees who run into financial trouble.

Nearly half of employers check credit histories for at least some positions, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. This means that before receiving a job offer, the employer has the ability to comb through your financial history to see if you’ve paid your bills on time, and can choose not to offer you a job if you haven’t. Of course, if you’re having trouble paying your bills—because of a job loss, an illness, an irregular work schedule, or other risks that working families face—being turned down for a job isn’t going to make it easier to pay your bills or improve your credit. And so the cycle continues.

Meanwhile, credit reporting itself has its limitations. Roughly one in five credit reports contains errors, according to an analysis by the Federal Trade Commission. And the information in credit reports only reflects part of a family’s financial situation—the part that tends to reflect better on upper-income folks. Mortgage payments count toward a positive credit history—very significantly—but on-time rent payments don’t. And when low-income families pay their regular bills on time—such as rent and utilities—this positive information generally doesn’t go on credit reports, even though negative information such as late payments, nonpayments, and collections ultimately does get reported. So even when families are trying hard to pay bills on time, these bills don’t count in the same way credit cards and loan payments do.

That’s slowly starting to change. There are efforts underway to improve credit reporting to more accurately reflect credit risk and help more deserving borrowers get affordable loans, including a recent pilot where thousands of low-income families living in affordable housing were able to have their rental payments applied to their credit reports and scores. But in the meantime, families are needlessly hurt by a system that misuses financial information to make hiring decisions that hurt those who are already struggling.

To be sure, New York City’s law does have some exceptions for jobs in government, law enforcement, certain finance and tech jobs, and jobs where the employee is in charge of major financial decisions. For these jobs, one can argue that the fears of theft cited when credit screening tools are pitched to companies are more legitimate. (When I worked at the Treasury Department, for example, a credit check was required.) But the City’s new law goes well beyond other states where, for example, handling a certain amount of cash could be considered an exception. And it comes close to two bills introduced in the last Congress: one bill by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) limiting credit checks to jobs requiring a security clearance, and a bill by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) with added exemptions for some government and banking jobs.

The federal government has been catching on as well. Last fall, the US Department of Labor issued new guidance warning employers that the use of credit reports may be discriminatory. Policies designed to screen for people working in high-level positions shouldn’t apply to most jobs, never mind that even Bernie Madoff probably had a stellar credit history for most of his career.

We should follow New York’s example to keep credit reports where they belong—in the financial marketplace—and not as another barrier to hold people back from jobs and financial security because of past decisions or financial distress.

Mrs. Parks was trained in civil disobedience; her action was calculated and planned in coordination with local leaders. She was one of hundreds of community members who had come together at a specific moment in history when African Americans across the country, after decades of living under oppressive Jim Crow laws, had reached a tipping point and were thirsty for change.

Today, we find ourselves at another tipping point.

With more than one in three Americans living beneath 200 percent of the poverty line, and more than 17 million people who want full-time employment unable to find it, families across the country are falling into economic crisis.

At the same time, income inequality has steadily increased over the last three decades. Since 1979, wages for the top 1 percent have increased an astounding 138 percent, while wages for the bottom 90 percent have increased just 15 percent over the same period.

These statistics are even grimmer for women and people of color. While unemployment among whites has dropped to just 4.4 percent, the rate for African Americans living in metropolitan areas is an astounding 11.3 percent. Likewise, women are still making just 78 percent of what men make. For black and Hispanic women, these numbers drop to 64 percent and 54 percent, respectively.

And just as occurred in Montgomery, when civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and E.D. Nixon were ready and willing to organize an eager public to participate in the 381-day bus boycott, we too are now surrounded by palpable energy for change.

Just two weeks ago, the Fight for $15 movement held a national day of action—reported to be the largest mobilization of people with low-incomes in history—that furthered the national public debate about low wages and job quality.

Other social movements are making connections to income inequality and jobs as well. In an effort to end employment barriers for people who were formerly incarcerated, criminal justice reform advocates are working to “ban the box” that asks about conviction history on initial employment application forms.

Likewise, the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the immigrant rights movement have begun to link their fights with the fights of low-wage workers, connecting the dots between human and civil rights, and improving the lives and working conditions of people in low-wage jobs.

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With so many families struggling to get by and so much energy for change, the Center for Community Change (CCC) has joined forces with a coalition of national, state and local organizations in 41 states dedicated to building a new economy from the ground up that actually puts American families first.

This morning, CCC, Working Families Organization, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Center for Popular Democracy, and Jobs With Justice are unveiling a bold new agenda called Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All. This initiative takes the major crises of our time and turns them into opportunities for change. The following are the five focus areas of the campaign:

• Decades of stagnant wages, the erosion of labor-market standards, and attacks on unions have left millions of working people without enough to get by. By raising employer standards, setting higher wage floors and restoring workers’ bargaining power, we can ensure that all working Americans have enough to provide for their families.

• As mothers and fathers struggle to find quality, affordable childcare, and families are forced to make difficult decisions every day about taking care of elderly or disabled family members, a major investment in the care economy would not only create and improve jobs in childcare and in-home care, but would also support families in need of quality care for loved ones.

• Historic disinvestment in communities of color has created concentrated areas of high poverty. By reinvesting in these communities, we can level the playing field and give millions of Americans the opportunity to advance and unleash their talents for the benefit of everyone.

• Global climate change may very well be the single greatest challenge facing humanity in this century, but it is also an opportunity to create sustainable jobs that reduce carbon emissions.

• Lastly, as millions of Americans struggle to provide for their families, the top 1 percent own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth and they continue to be showered with tax cuts. It’s time we fix this system and invest revenue in an economy that works for all of us.

Less than a week before Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, he spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. about the Poor People’s Campaign – an initiative that sought to unite Americans, rich and poor, into a movement to end poverty.

King told the crowd, “This is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”

Today, our country is more aware than ever before that our entire economic system is out of balance. We have reached a time in history where the need, the opportunity, and the energy are all here to create an economy that works for our families—now we need the will and the dedication of the American public to make it happen.

To learn more about Putting Families First: Good Jobs for All, and to join our campaign, visit PutFamiliesFirst.org.

The quick and obvious answer to the question of how to address homelessness is to provide permanent housing to those who need it. A New Yorker article published last fall about Utah’s wildly successfully policy of giving housing to people who are homeless went viral on social media. Last month, Seattle officials announced plans to open three “tent cities” to provide shelter to people who are homeless. In addition, President Obama’s plan to end homelessness among veterans has had success, in part, because of its focus on immediately placing people who are homeless into permanent housing without requiring them to first complete an alcohol or drug treatment program.

There is no question that one of the keys to reducing homelessness among individuals and families is to provide them with housing. But much like health reform advocates known as “upstreamists” want to see health insurers pay for prevention initiatives that will keep people healthy, those working to end homelessness know that the ultimate solution must include reforms that will prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place.

For example, a veteran who is able to find employment is much less likely to experience homelessness than one who can’t land a job in the first place. A single parent with two school age children needs to earn at least $29.30 an hour (in Massachusetts) in order to dramatically lessen the likelihood of experiencing homelessness or housing instability that that same parent would face earning minimum wage. And a person trying to find housing after a period of incarceration is unlikely to succeed unless he or she is also able to find employment, a task that may prove difficult due to the common practice of potential employers discriminating against applicants who have criminal records.

In order to achieve longer-term success in reducing homelessness, we should focus on three areas:

Community support for those trying to live independently after a period of incarceration.

People with criminal records face barriers to employment due to discrimination. It’s hard to think of anyone better situated to make the successful transition from prison than Piper Kerman, author of the memoir Orange Is the New Black upon which the successful Netflix series is based. When Kerman sought to rebuild her life after her release from prison, she enjoyed the support of family and friends, and had the advantage of past career accomplishments. Yet in multiple interviews, she cites one factor as being the most important in her post-incarceration success: the job that a friend had waiting for her, and which she was able to begin just one week after leaving prison. Very few of those emerging from prison have a job waiting for them. As they seek employment, many will need intensive skills training, as well as support connecting them with health care providers and, if needed, substance abuse programs. Further, we need reforms that address the many barriers formerly incarcerated people face, with regard to employment, housing, public assistance, education and training, building good credit, and more.

 Job skills training for the long-term unemployed.

It takes marketable skills in local, growing industries to land a job that will lift someone out of homelessness―and keep them housed. Such training must run the gamut from classroom-based instruction in computer and customer service skills to actual employment via internships or social enterprises focused on providing real world work experience. Robust training programs will also support job seekers throughout the employment application and interview process, offer meaningful references and networking opportunities, and provide ongoing support during the inevitable ups and downs of employment.

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Support for those who are disproportionately likely to experience homelessness.

Veterans, single mothers living in poverty, and individuals dealing with substance abuse, particularly those who are also living in poverty, are all disproportionately likely to become homeless, while at the same time facing multiple barriers to employment. To reduce their risk, we need more targeted outreach with services tailored to meet the needs of these groups, which can help them stabilize their lives so that they never become homeless in the first place. These services include assistance accessing health care, including mental health care and substance use recovery programs; legal assistance with collecting financial support from estranged or divorced partners; and affordable daycare.

While it is critical that we provide housing to reduce homelessness among individuals and families, the ultimate solution to ending homelessness must involve preventing it from occurring in the first place. That means reliable employment that pays decent wages—it means talking jobs as well as homes.

 “Front-line staff won’t take on a formerly incarcerated person’s debt; that’s outside their job description.” – program manager

 “Job developers can’t be expected to have the skills to take on jobseekers’ banking relationships.” – executive director

We often hear service providers suggest that people in crisis can’t afford to focus on their personal finances—that building financial security only makes sense after a person’s basic survival needs have been met. Many community-based organizations also say that financial empowerment is beyond the scope of what they can or should do.

These assumptions are not only outdated, they’re counterproductive.

Nearly 25 years ago, Dr. Michael Sherraden proved wrong those who doubted that poor people could save. His book Assets and the Poor, in which he called for Individual Development Accounts (IDAs)—matched savings accounts that would help low-income families build assets—went on to become a seminal body of work. It gave birth to a field and a new way of thinking about how to fight poverty. It also reminded us that a strengths-based approach to human and social services—one focusing on future outcomes and an individual’s self-determination and strengths—is not only empowering, it also produces results.

The Financial Clinic’s “New Ground Initiative” builds on Dr. Sherraden’s work by taking a broader look at how we think about financial empowerment. For many people struggling on the brink, financial security is about much more than home ownership or retirement planning; it requires tackling complicated challenges not often viewed as “financial”—such as barriers to rejoining one’s community after incarceration.

The New Ground Initiative seeks to increase the capacity of re‐entry programs—which serve individuals returning to their communities after incarceration—to address barriers to financial security. Formerly incarcerated individuals face many significant obstacles to economic security—such as barriers to employment, housing, public assistance, and education and training. Many of these barriers are the result of “collateral consequences”—penalties embedded in public policy that prevent people with criminal records from accessing basics such as a job, an apartment, or vital public assistance programs such as food stamps.

The New Ground Initiative trains re-entry service providers on how to tackle these and other financial obstacles. These efforts have created powerful and inspiring achievements in the areas of employment, housing, and education.

For example, after returning home from incarceration, John (name changed) was worried about starting work and opening a bank account; he was afraid that his child support arrears would cause his new wages to be garnished. He is far from alone—unaffordable child support obligations are a major driver of post-incarceration debt. In fact, many formerly incarcerated individuals are released only to find that their child support debts have accumulated into the tens of thousands of dollars while they were behind bars. However, because of the training he did with New Ground, a job developer was able to help John modify his child support order to an affordable amount and then helped him open a bank account. The job developer also helped John set up direct deposit on his first day of work.

New Ground has also enabled re-entry programs to help their clients’ access housing opportunities. For example, Sarah was having trouble securing an apartment after returning home from incarceration. She had her credit report pulled by a re-entry service provider and they found that she was a victim of identity theft. The program referred Sarah to a financial coach, who was able to support her in getting the fraudulent debt removed, which in turn enabled her to rent an apartment.

Another re-entry program—focused on helping people achieve their educational goals after exiting jail or prison—reported that training with New Ground was fundamental to the program’s ability to help participants negotiate old student loan debt. Lowering monthly student loan payments allowed these individuals to make ends meet and return to school.

These successes confirm the Clinic’s model that strategies to build financial security in turn reduce barriers to basic needs. They also demonstrate that projects like the New Ground Initiative can help programs that serve justice-involved individuals achieve even better results.

You can stay informed about the Financial Clinic and help spread the word about its services by signing up here.

Job applicants with criminal records, especially men of color, face a high hurdle to employment.  Studies have shown that black men without criminal records get callbacks for job interviews at rates below those of white men with criminal records; and for a black man with a record, the callback rate is almost negligible.

Arrests that never led to conviction shouldn’t affect employment—innocent until proven guilty is a fundamental principle of American justice, after all.  Because there is a presumption that arrests without convictions don’t hinder employment opportunities, this issue has received far less media and political attention than the employment obstacles created by past convictions.  But the fact is that when it comes to getting jobs, a mere arrest can be just as bad as a conviction for millions of people like Tyrae and N.R.

Many companies conduct pre-employment background checks using FBI rap sheets, which are notoriously hard to read: employers often can’t discern whether the charges resulted in conviction, were withdrawn, or dismissed.

State-level databases can be equally confusing.  In Pennsylvania, if an item turns up when an employer runs a background check through the state police, the system immediately responds with a generic code, indicating that details will follow within four weeks.  If someone only has arrests on his record, the report eventually comes up clean, but many employers won’t wait that long for the clarification—they simply move on to the next job applicant.

Other employers use unofficial court records, often available online for free.  In Tyrae’s case, two arrests—one seven years ago, the other fifteen—were visible to employers with just a few mouse clicks, and the mere existence of the arrest reports cost him multiple job opportunities.  As for N.R., the companies interested in hiring her didn’t give any weight to her recent bachelor’s degree—once they learned she was arrested on a misdemeanor four years ago, they stopped calling back.

Courts will sometimes order the expungement of arrests from criminal records, but even that doesn’t always solve the problem.  Private consumer reporting agencies—which sell background reports to employers—often maintain databases that include outdated court records; so arrests which were expunged are sometimes still reported to employers.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission notes that excluding applicants based on arrests-only has a disparate impact on black and Hispanic workers, and thus constitutes employment discrimination.  Therefore, under federal law, “an arrest record standing alone may not be used to deny an employment opportunity.”  In Pennsylvania, state law also says that employers may only consider convictions if they are relevant to an applicant’s suitability for a given job.  However, as Tyrae, N.R., and thousands of other people have discovered, these laws are widely and routinely violated.

The good news is that advocates can employ a number of strategies to lessen the burden of arrest records.  In many states, legal services attorneys can petition the courts to expunge or seal arrests.  In Philadelphia, Community Legal Services (CLS) did just that for N.R. and Tyrae, so their records are now completely clear.  When black and Hispanic workers are rejected as job candidates due to arrests, advocates can help them file discrimination charges with the EEOC or state and local fair employment practices agencies.  People denied jobs due to arrests may also be eligible to collect back pay, and offending companies can be forced to change their policies.  Finally, when consumer reporting agencies tell employers of arrest records that the courts had ordered expunged, workers who are denied jobs can sue the reporting agency, and also demand a correction of the background report.  CLS has successfully brought cases for our clients in all of these areas.

States should now adopt fair chance hiring laws that include reforms like “Ban the Box”—which precludes employers from inquiring about criminal records on job applications—and implement other important protections such as not considering non-conviction arrest records.

But perhaps the single most effective legislative change would be to expand opportunities for the expungement and the sealing of records.  Advocates can push their states for automatic expungement whenever possible—such as when charges are dropped after an arrested individual completes a pre-trial diversion program—and for a clear legal right to petition for expungement of all other non-conviction data.

A clean slate is the best pathway to employment and equal opportunity.

Two misdemeanors.  I did no jail time, and my probation was terminated early.  I’ve had no incidents at all since then.

A lot of people think of me simply as an ex-offender, but I refuse to let that define me. Ronald Lewis is a father, a son, a friend, and a very ambitious person who is righting my wrongs. It’s been so long since I made those mistakes and second chances are very important—for me and millions of other Americans.

I have a building engineer license, and I am presently in school so I can start my own company and give second chances by teaching the trade that I went to school for.  It was hard for me to get work even after I trained for my trade.  So many doors have been shut in my face I know what wood tastes like.

The first time was gut-wrenching. I worked at a job for maybe a month, then they called me to the office—Human Resources. And they said, “You are no longer able to work here because of your criminal background.” I told them I was the same person they fell in love with at the interview—until that paperwork from the background check came back. Once the paperwork came back, it was like—“Security get this guy out of the building fast.”

It’s so embarrassing. It’s hard. You finally start to see you’re turning the corner and you’re getting a sense of purpose. Your life is starting to mount and your family is going to be proud of you. But then you have to tell them, “I failed again,” or you just feel like a failure.  It was the worst feeling of my life. The worst.

Since then, there have been numerous times when the background check stopped me from getting a job.  The employer says, “You’ll be great. Your skill level is exactly what we are looking for.” But then there’s that question. It’s like the elephant in the room—I hate that question: “Do you have anything on your background?” And when you tell them, they’re gone.

So we need to shed light on this now—the way things are—and the fact that people need second chances. A lot of people that I run across in school now—there are a lot of people who are ex-offenders in my class.  So on the first day, everybody walked around with a bravado—nobody is talking to anybody else. It’s almost like the jail house mentality. So, the second day of class I stood up and said, “Listen, jail is not going to define us.   Obviously you want a second chance or you wouldn’t have come to school.”

At first they thought I don’t get it.  Because I don’t walk around like jail is a badge of honor. It’s shameful. My mother was shamed, my family name was shamed.  But then when I talk to the other students, we sit down and we have a conversation, and I let them know some of the things that I’ve been through—then they are like, “Okay, I understand. He made it; I can make it.”

My class now has the highest average in school—a 90 average.  And I think my leadership and being able to relate to some of the other students has played a role in that.  And it starts with knowing that people really do want second chances, but they come home with no hope. There’s no hope. So then you resort to what you resort to in order to feed your family. You understand? It’s bad. My community is sad.  And it’s all about hope.

You want to know Ronald Lewis?  Don’t focus on some piece of paper that says I made mistakes ten years ago. Look at all of the positive things I’m putting right in front of you right now.

Unfortunately, stories like J.B.’s are all too common in Pennsylvania and across the nation. As a new report and web tool released by the Juvenile Law Center in partnership with CLS reveals, the vast majority of states do not thoroughly protect juvenile records from public view. Furthermore, expungement or sealing of juvenile records does not happen automatically when young people leave the jurisdiction of the juvenile court or reach a certain age. Youth are often not advised of their right to petition for expungement, and many states limit the types of offenses that are eligible. The result is that hundreds of thousands of young people are burdened by juvenile records, unable to move forward with their adult lives and escape poverty.

Even within the legal advocacy community, many people are surprised to learn that juvenile records are so widely available. There is good reason for their surprise – allowing the public to access juvenile record information runs completely counter to the very purpose of the juvenile justice system.

The system was created in order to provide treatment and rehabilitation to young people. Experts ranging from neuroscientists to Supreme Court justices have acknowledged that youth are less able than adults to understand the consequences of their actions, make sound decisions, and resist the pull of peer pressure. But because their brains are still developing, they are also particularly capable of significant transformation. So it makes good sense—both for youth and society as a whole—to maintain a separate system for rehabilitating youth and then to support them as they transition to adulthood.

Yet despite the original purpose of the juvenile justice system, during the “tough on crime” era many states rolled back the rehabilitative aspects of their systems in favor of a more punitive approach. As a result, confidentiality protections for juvenile records were weakened, and there is now a tendency to view juvenile adjudications as equivalent to adult criminal convictions. This era also ushered in a period of criminalizing youth for many behaviors that in the past would have been handled in school or at home. For example, one CLS client was issued several criminal citations for disorderly conduct because she had gotten into verbal arguments in the school hallway with a male student who was harassing her. This over-criminalization has disproportionately impacted low-income youth, youth of color, youth with disabilities, and LGBT youth, making it even more difficult for these already vulnerable and underserved young people to connect with meaningful economic opportunities.

The time is ripe for change. Cities and states around the country are struggling to address a youth unemployment crisis—the youth unemployment rate is as much as four times the unemployment rate for adults. As policymakers seek to connect low-income youth with the education, job training, and employment opportunities they need in order to be successful in today’s economy, it is also time for states to revisit their juvenile records laws.

In particular, states should ensure that juvenile records are rarely, if ever, accessible to the public; that youth are given information about their rights and how to get their records expunged; and that records are either automatically or easily expunged when youth leave the supervision of the juvenile court.  These three reforms would ensure that youth who have been rehabilitated are able to move forward with their lives.

There are countless young people like J.B. around the country who have the potential to move out of poverty and want desperately to work.  We as a society just need to let them.

Work not only reinforces an individual’s sense of pride, purpose and identity – and, of course, allows an individual to earn a living – but also contributes to strong communities and a thriving economy.  When one in four Americans faces the very real prospect of being locked out of the labor market because of a criminal record, then we all suffer a great loss in productivity and human capital.  However, if we seize on promising solutions, we can change this reality and create new opportunities for people who are struggling against significant odds to turn their lives around.

As featured in the CAP report, multiple strategies must be pursued in order to address the collateral damage caused by the proliferation of criminal background checks for employment. It starts with aggressive enforcement of federal civil rights and consumer laws that are already on the books to strictly regulate employers and the background check industry, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Credit Reporting Act.  Reform must also include broader sealing and expungement of misdemeanor and felony records, correcting faulty criminal records databases, and strengthening appeal protections that allow workers to navigate the thousands of occupational licensing laws that require criminal background checks.  Ultimately, we must create a process that allows people to compete for employment based on their merits instead of being stigmatized by their criminal records.

Significantly, organizations and elected officials from across the ideological spectrum have rallied around fair chance hiring reforms.  Fair chance hiring incorporates “ban the box” policies, which remove the criminal history question from the job application and delay the background check until later in the hiring process.  Fair chance hiring also incorporates the criminal background check guidelines adopted by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which require employers to take into account the age of the offense, whether the offense is related to the individual’s job, and whether the individual has been rehabilitated.  And finally, fair chance hiring calls for strong standards of accuracy and transparency to maintain the integrity of the background check and protect workers against unfair and arbitrary treatment.

In just the past two years, eight states passed fair chance hiring laws, which increasingly extend not just to government employers but private sector employers as well.  Most recently, Republican Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey signed fair chance hiring legislation, stating, “We are banning the box and ending employment discrimination.”  There are now 13 states and over 80 cities and counties that have adopted ban the box and other fair chance hiring reforms.  And three of the top five U.S. retailers – Walmart, Target and Home Depot – have also joined the effort by delaying criminal history inquiries until later in the hiring process.   Meanwhile, 2015 promises to be another big year, with fair chance hiring campaigns already underway in Ohio, Texas, New York City, and Los Angeles, to name just a few places.

These reform policies can have a measurable impact on employer hiring practices.  For example, in the four years since Durham implemented its fair chance hiring policy, city officials have documented a seven-fold increase in the hiring of people with criminal records.  Progress has also been demonstrated in Minneapolis and Atlanta since the enactment of their fair chance hiring policies.

While fair chance hiring is not a panacea for all barriers associated with a criminal record, it is a strategy that resonates deeply with communities severely impacted by over-criminalization.  It provides a platform to engage elected officials in a serious debate about the devastating legacy of the War on Drugs and its effect on struggling families and communities.  In fact, “ban the box” was the brainchild of a membership organization of the formerly incarcerated, called All of Us Or None. Together with faith-based leaders, including the PICO Network, the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement, and other allied organizations, All of Us Or None is fighting to restore the full rights of people with criminal records to access employment, housing, education, public assistance, and the vote.

Now is the time for the federal government to act boldly, building on the wave of fair chance hiring reforms at the state and local levels.  The Obama Administration should require fair chance hiring by federal contractors and clean up the flaws in the federal hiring process, which unfairly disadvantage people with criminal records.  The recommendation of President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Task Force resonates loud and clear:  “Our youth and communities suffer when hiring practices unnecessarily disqualify candidates based on past mistakes.  We should implement reforms to promote successful reentry, including encouraging hiring practices, such as ‘Ban the Box,’ which give applicants a fair chance and allows employers the opportunity to judge individual job candidates on their merits as they reenter the workforce.”

Given the bi-partisan support for criminal justice reform, backed by organizations like Right on Crime, the new 114^th Congress will also be well-positioned to enact fair chance hiring legislation.  The new Congress should immediately take up the REDEEM Act, co-sponsored by Senators Corey Booker (D-NJ) and Rand Paul (R-KY), as well as legislation sponsored by Congressmen Bobby Scott (D-VA) and Keith Ellison (D-MN)  that would correct the millions of faulty background checks for employment  generated each year by the FBI.

These are challenging times for the nation. But if ever there were a time to seize momentum and make lasting change in the lives of people with criminal records, this is it.

Alyssa Peterson: Can you explain the mission of D.C. Central Kitchen (DCCK)?

Mike Curtin: We run a whole portfolio of social enterprise programs including catering and a locally-sourced, scratch-cooked school [meals] service here in D.C.

We also run culinary job training classes for men and women with histories of incarceration, addiction, abuse, homelessness, and chronic unemployment. We work with them intensely for 14 weeks, and empower them to find employment in the hospitality sector. If we have openings available, we will hire job training program graduates [for our social enterprise] programs… One of the beautiful things about [DCCK] is that 45% of our 150 employees are graduates of our program.

Our basic model is using what’s existing around us; whether that’s food that’s going to be thrown away, or people that have been marginalized, or kitchens that aren’t being used, or produce from farms that isn’t commercially viable because it’s aesthetically or geometrically challenged– it’s too big, or too small, or too skinny, it doesn’t fit in the right box.

We prepare 5,000 meals a day out of our main kitchen, using predominantly food that would have otherwise been thrown away from restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, food wholesalers, food producers, and farms. We then send the meals we prepare to agencies [(non-profits and shelters)] that are working to empower and liberate their clients. We are very intentional about this model. Our goal isn’t to simply pass out food in the hopes that someday that will end hunger. We’re never going to feed our way out of hunger.

Alyssa: In terms of empowering and liberating clients, do you have an example of that?

Mike Curtin: The goal is to help people get to the place of self-sufficiency so that they have a job that pays a good wage that hopefully has benefits. One of the things that we often forget when we talk about civil rights leaders in the past, such as Dr. King, Gandhi, Chavez, or Bobby Kennedy, is that these folks were not just talking about physical inclusion.

Dr. King was not fighting and ultimately dying for the right for anyone to walk into any restaurant and sit at any table; [it] was for the right for anyone to walk into any restaurant, to sit at any table, and to be able to afford that meal. So it’s the economic freedom and the economic inclusion that we’re looking for.

For example, a student comes from a shelter into our training program. They’ve been incarcerated, maybe in a halfway house, maybe in prison for 30 years. Maybe this person is in their 50s and has never had a job. Maybe this person has children. And they come to us, and they go through the training program, and they get a job. And they get out of the halfway house. They get their own apartment. They support their families. That’s empowerment. That’s liberation. It’s a small start, but it’s a start.

Some of the most rewarding times for us are when graduates come in and show a gas bill or a lease they just signed. Someone may come in with a new set of keys to a house, and the only people that they’ve known that have had keys for the last 30 years were prison guards.

Alyssa: What separates your training program from others and also contributes to its success?

Mike Curtin: I think one of the things that makes the program different is that it’s part of this larger enterprise. People that work here in the kitchen are graduates of [our training] program. The woman who’s the director of that program was a heroin addict for 20 years. She got clean and went to culinary school and then eventually ended up coming here.

Even if some of us don’t have those particular stories, all of us come here a little broken, including myself. But I’ve been lucky to live in safe communities, go to good schools, and have a stable family life. I made a lot of mistakes, but I always had someone put me back on track.

A lot of the folks that come to us didn’t have those privileges. For that reason, we meet people where they are. In the old charity model in America, there’s one group—typically the wealthier, white group— saying, “Thank goodness that we’re here for you poor, uneducated, and formerly incarcerated people. Now we’re going to save you. Now we’re going to help you.”

In contrast, we really try to create this environment where we’re all around this same table. [It] will only work if we work together, regardless of whether a person is a felon, an addict, or homeless. We’re all cutting the same carrots, and we’re all learning how to do this together.

Alyssa: Does DCCK do a lot of advocacy in D.C.? Were you involved in the Ban the Box fight, for example?

Mike Curtin: We were. We are not an advocacy organization per se, [but] we work very closely with other organizations in town that are advocacy organizations.

Ban the Box was a big thing for us. We’ve been banging that drum for at least ten years. We know that the majority of people who get out of prison reoffend and go back again mostly because they can’t get a job. At DCCK, our recidivism rate is less than 2.5% because people get jobs, and they feel like they’re part of something bigger. They want to be part of the community. Nobody wants to be in prison, [and] nobody wants to live in the shelter.

Alyssa: It seems like your business model differs markedly from companies that don’t necessarily share your purpose. Why do you pay good wages and benefits as a company?

Mike Curtin: I don’t think we can expect other employers to provide benefits and pay living wages if we don’t do it ourselves. What we want to do is act as a model for what’s possible.

We start everyone at a living wage. We paid 100% of health insurance long before the ACA [(Affordable Care Act)] was ever around. Everyone has short-term and long-term disability insurance and a life insurance policy. We make a 50% match to every dollar that someone contributes to our 401k plan. We have a very liberal, very generous paid vacation and time off policy. Everyone who works here…from the newest hourly employer to myself has the exact same benefits.

However, in many ways we have an advantage. We are a mission-motivated business. We’re in business not to make dollars, but to make change in both senses of that word. We’re okay if we run our businesses, and we break even because the act of running that impact-oriented business has accomplished many of our goals.

We want business in general and others to think more like we do. A lot of people are saying now that non-profits need to think and act more like businesses. To a certain degree, yes. We have payroll to make just like everyone else. We have bills to pay, gas to put in our trucks, uniforms to buy, and food to purchase. But I think the role of non-profits—particularly non-profits who are operating social enterprises—is to get businesses to think more like non-profits and to recognize the value of these multiple bottom lines.

When I got out of prison 30 years ago, the only job I could get took me right back inside the gates of San Quentin, where I helped inmates through the prison’s law office. What I witnessed 30 years ago is still happening now: that small box on job applications that asks have you ever been convicted of a crime continues to make it tough for formerly incarcerated folks to get a job.

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However, Ban the Box is much more than just the removal of the dreaded question about conviction history from employment applications. Ban the Box is actually a larger effort to dismantle structural discrimination. For example, we demand the right to return to our families upon release. Research shows our families are a strong source of support and may live in public housing, from which we are often banned. With the kind of pervasive discrimination we face—not only with jobs but also housing, professional licenses, and school applications—it’s time to consider laws that protect Formerly Incarcerated People from discrimination.

Today, there are an estimated 11.3 million undocumented immigrants living in the US. Under current immigration law, these individuals are barred from working legally and, as a result, regularly self-select into jobs that minimize their risk of detection and deportation. Most undocumented workers ultimately find themselves in low-wage jobs where they are susceptible to exploitation and unable to exert their labor rights. In fact, researchers have found that undocumented workers are nearly three times more likely to experience wage theft than legal workers. It’s a simple fact: our broken immigration system is forcing families to live under precarious financial conditions.

Thankfully, there are smart and much needed policy changes on the horizon.

As Republican House Speaker John Boehner refuses to hold a vote on immigration reform, President Obama is expected to take administrative action.  While the President’s action would be limited and temporary, it would greatly improve the financial security of undocumented immigrants.

Through executive action, the president can focus enforcement resources on high-priority targets, such as criminals and those who threaten national security, while permitting a specific group of people to apply for a temporary work permit and a reprieve from deportation. This process is known as deferred action and would likely be extended to undocumented immigrants who have been in the U.S. for a significant number of years and have family ties here. But what does this immigration fix have to do with poverty?

Everything.

The acquisition of temporary work permits would allow undocumented workers to apply for jobs that best match their skills, thereby maximizing their earning potential. Equally important, the ability to work legally decreases the likelihood that these workers will be victims of labor abuses, ranging from wage theft to unsafe working conditions.

A recent report by the Center for American Progress estimated that greater labor market mobility and stronger workplace protections would increase the average undocumented immigrant’s earnings by 8.5 percent, or an additional $1,872 each year.  This increase in income is equivalent to 37 percent of average food expenditures—or 27 percent of average transportation costs—for families earning between $30,000 and $39,999 annually (which is the average income bracket for families with an undocumented immigrant).

It’s clear that the fiscal benefits of deferred action would pull some immigrant families out of poverty, keep others from slipping into it, and strengthen the financial security of all of these families.

But it’s not just the families of undocumented immigrants who would benefit from deferred action, all Americans would be better off. As undocumented immigrants receive temporary work permits, they will transition from the informal to formal economy and begin paying taxes legally. In fact, allowing undocumented immigrants who have been in the U.S. for at least 10 years to apply for work permits would increase payroll tax revenues by an estimated $33 billion over five years—that means more resources for vital programs like Social Security that benefit everyone.

Only congressional action will completely fix our broken immigration system. And it’s only through permanent reform that the US will fully realize the fiscal benefits of bringing undocumented immigrants out of the shadows. But until Congress takes up immigration reform, executive action would begin the process of fixing our system.

As Americans wait for President Obama to announce which executive actions on immigration he will take, they should remember that a step toward fixing our immigration system is a step toward greater financial security for everyone.

Disability is both a cause and consequence of poverty.

It’s critical to note the progress that has been made in the past several decades. The Americans with Disabilities Act, enacted nearly 25 years ago, prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability and guarantees that people with disabilities have “equal opportunity” to participate in American life. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), enacted the same year, requires that students with disabilities be provided a “free, appropriate public education” just like all other students. The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act expands access for people with disabilities to education and training programs, programs for transition-age youth and young adults transitioning to adulthood, vocational rehabilitation, and more.

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Today, a critical, but often invisible source of human capital committed to this purpose are AmeriCorps members, and the volunteers they lead.  People like Deenie Espinoza, who came to Pima Family Literacy as a GED student and then worked there as an AmeriCorps member in 1994.  A year later, she was hired as an AmeriCorps staff member and led advocacy efforts for Arizona adult education and family literacy programs.  Today, while pursuing her master’s degree, Deenie serves as Online Academic Advisor and Success Coach for The Learning House, where she mentors students to help them reach their goals.

Or Dayna Long, who served at the LA Free clinic and went on to become a pediatrician.  As a result of witnessing the ramifications of poverty and trauma on children, Dayna founded the Family Information and Navigation Desk (FIND) to addresses the social and environmental factors that profoundly impact health.

“I am still trying to tackle the upstream causes of inequity that lead to health disparities,” notes Dayna.

Deenie and Dayna, winners of the AmeriCorps Alums National Leadership Award, are not lone cases.  Hundreds of thousands of people like them gave their time and talent through AmeriCorps early in their careers and changed their own paths as a result.

When President Clinton proposed AmeriCorps two decades ago, he imagined it would transform America in a few important ways: by providing needed services, creating opportunity for people who serve, and knitting together community.

And it has.

AmeriCorps members serving through programs like JumpStart, City Year, Citizen Schools, and College Possible are succeeding at helping low-income students start school reading-ready, stay on track, graduate, and go on to college.

Others serving through LISC AmeriCorps provide financial counseling, employment and skill training, and job placement, along with home buyer counseling and foreclosure prevention services.  Because many members come from the neighborhoods where they are serving, the program builds strong community leadership.

Just last year, we worked with Maria Shriver and LIFT to develop Shriver Corps, which engages AmeriCorps VISTAs to connect eligible low-income families with the educational opportunities, job training, and access to public benefits that can help them get on firm economic footing.

AmeriCorps also offers service opportunities through youth corps, which are designed to enable youth to learn while serving; tens of thousands of young people who were out of school and out of work found pathways back into education and the workforce through this program.

By allowing flexibility in program design, national service has fueled social innovation as organizations pursuing new strategies can make use of AmeriCorps members as ground troops.

And by enabling young adults to try on new careers — and opening their eyes to the challenges facing poor communities — AmeriCorps has grown a generation of nonprofit professionals, educators, and leaders committed to ending poverty through opportunity.

These programs build on the legacy of VISTA, which for fifty years has built the capacity of agencies on the front lines of the war on poverty and is now part of AmeriCorps.  VISTA has created lasting change by helping to establish programs in adult literacy, microfinance, health services and more.

The bad news:  together, AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps VISTA are less than one-third of their authorized size; they cannot engage even one-tenth of the young people who want to serve, according to polls.

Last week, President Obama and President Clinton joined together to celebrate the swearing in of this year’s class of 75,000 AmeriCorps members.  President Obama recognized the value of AmeriCorps when he ran for office.  As he put it, “Your own story and the American story are not separate — they are shared. And they will both be enriched if we stand up together, and answer a new call to service to meet the challenges of our new century.”  He was right.

The President also pledged to “ask for your service and your active citizenship when I am president of the United States. This will not be a call issued in one speech or program; this will be a cause of my presidency.”

He still has time to make that happen by putting necessary political capital behind AmeriCorps and working with Congress to make this program the priority it ought to be.

The workplace stress and uncertainty that Jannette faces day-to-day is also felt by low-income working families across the US. Fluctuating work hours and limited resources make the daily demands of family life and trying to get ahead in the economy a constant challenge, creating anxiety as families simply struggle to stay afloat.

Through its research, Children’s HealthWatch, a national nonpartisan network of pediatricians and public health researchers, has documented that job security isn’t just an economic and lifestyle issue – it affects our physical health as well.  In our brief published today – Steadying the Foundation: Maternal Job Stability, Safety Net Programs & Young Children’s Health – we describe how job instability (defined as maternal job loss or reduced work hours) increases the risk of poor health for mothers and their young children.

In urban hospitals across the country, we interviewed more than 14,000 low-income working mothers with children under age four.  We found that 38 percent of these women had experienced job instability in the past year. Compared to stably-employed mothers and their children, mothers with job instability were more likely to have poor mental and physical health, and their children were significantly more likely to be in poor health and have developmental delays. Our research also found that job instability is linked to higher levels of material hardships such as housing insecurity (living in overcrowded conditions or moving frequently) and family food insecurity (when families lack sufficient food for all members to lead active, healthy lives).

While financial loss due to job instability can end up harming the health and development of young children, our research suggests two of the largest federal safety net programs – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Unemployment Insurance – can blunt the impact. The rate of child food insecurity – a severe level of food insecurity where children have to skip meals or go without eating for an entire day – was significantly lower for children whose mothers experienced job instability but also received SNAP, than it was for the children who did not receive SNAP.  In other words, SNAP helped to buffer children from the worst effects of job instability.

Unemployment insurance (UI) had a similar positive effect, stabilizing the housing of children whose mothers had lost a job. Families experiencing job loss who received UI were 27 percent less likely to be housing insecure than those families that did not receive UI.

Of course, no one wants to have to rely on public assistance as they juggle the demands of raising a family and inconsistent work hours or job loss. As Tianna Gaines-Turner, a member of Witnesses to Hunger in Philadelphia, puts it, “No one wakes up in the morning saying, ‘I think I want to lose my job today and go apply for government assistance and wait weeks for my unemployment to go through.’ No one wants that. But food stamps and other government assistance programs are important to help families who, through no fault of their own, end up unemployed and need a little extra help.”  She and her husband both work to support their three children but have struggled to escape poverty.

In response to the New York Times article, Starbucks has announced it would change the way it schedules its baristas in order to improve “stability and consistency.” Shifting towards a more manageable and family-friendly work environment is a good first step. However, there are other actions that policymakers should take to promote job stability and improve the health and self-sufficiency of low-income families.

First, increase the minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hour, and index it to inflation to ensure its value does not erode in the future; also expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit to provide a critical boost to low-wage working families’ incomes. Second, ensure that the SNAP benefit is calculated based on the real cost of a healthy diet to help eligible families put more healthful food on the table.  Right now, it’s based on a plan that doesn’t match the costs of living for today’s working families. Third, permit “good cause” as a qualified reason for leaving a job under UI regulations.  Currently, many workers are ineligible for UI even if they have an unavoidable and justifiable cause for resigning, such as health problems or child care issues.  Lastly, strengthen the Family Medical Leave Act so that qualified workers receive up to 12 weeks of paid leave each year for the birth or adoption of a new child, serious illness of a family member, or a worker’s own medical condition.

This Labor Day, we should recognize the kinds of workplace practices and policies that allow families to lead healthy, productive lives with stability for their children.  The solutions are within reach – employers and policymakers can strengthen economic security for all working families.

To change all that, Paul completed a construction apprenticeship program. Less than two weeks after he graduated, Paul had strong prospects with a construction company and a major utility company. Amidst all this good news, however, Paul received a letter that brought his forward momentum to a halt.

A “Notice of Proposed Revocation” informed Paul that his driver’s license could be revoked because of overdue child support payments. Paul had known about the child support order, but it simply wasn’t something he could afford to pay. The amount was based on his salary at a job he had lost more than a year before the order was set. Paul made cash payments directly to the child’s mother whenever he could, not realizing that those payments “didn’t count” because he was supposed to make them through the District government. After months without income he ran out of money to make any payments. But if Paul lost his license, none of the positions for which he now qualified would be available to him, and he’d be right back where he started – unable to pay his child support. Now what?

We must break the underlying legal barriers to employment.

It is no secret that getting and keeping a stable job, let alone a job that pays a living wage, is already a challenge for far too many people living in poverty in D.C. and across the nation. Black workers and young workers were hit particularly hard by the recession, and unemployment rates for several groups of workers remain high today, including those without a college degree. While the overall unemployment level in the District is 7.5%, unemployment levels in Wards 5, 7, and 8 hover in the 15 to 20% range, with poverty rates as high as 25% (Ward 7) and 34% (Ward 8).

D.C. residents and advocates have improved the pathway to jobs with decent wages in part through successful efforts to raise the minimum wage, strengthen wage theft laws, remove criminal history questions from job applications, and develop employment training programs like the construction apprenticeship sought out by Paul. But, as Paul’s story reveals, these efforts aren’t always enough.

Among the legal barriers to employment are: criminal or arrest records, poor or inaccurate credit reports, child support arrears and suspended drivers’ licenses, domestic violence, prior homelessness or lack of stable housing, and other issues that may appear unrelated to employment. These barriers may distract even the most dedicated job seekers from their search, prevent a skill-based assessment of their application, threaten the credentials that make them eligible for sought-after positions, and hinder their ability to keep employment once it is secured.

As Paul’s story shows, overdue child support payments can cause job seekers to lose their driver’s licenses, contribute to negative credit reports, and ultimately can lead to jail time. Prior arrests and convictions may cause employers to reject an applicant without ever assessing whether that conviction is relevant to job performance. Ongoing domestic violence, custody disputes, unstable housing, and financial instability due to debt and predatory lending can all cause significant disruption to job searches and job retention.

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For example, how does someone who is homeless or couch surfing receive information from potential employers? Or complete an application form that requires an address? Or maintain appropriate clothing for an interview?  How can a mother whose children are chronically ill from sub-standard housing conditions avoid absenteeism?  The longer these issues persist, the more likely they are to affect job seekers and workers who lack other resources to help them cope with financial stress.  And what happens when these vulnerable workers do not receive the wages they are due or are subject to excessive garnishments?

These concerns do not need to be faced alone. In many cases, civil legal services can help remove these barriers by:

• Securing the restoration of driver’s licenses
• Overcoming problems associated with arrest or conviction records, including record sealing, improper employer inquiries, mistaken identities or other inaccuracies
• Providing information about credit records, correcting inaccuracies, and advising how to respond to prospective employer inquiries
• Advocating for individuals whose child support payments are set unreasonably high or have become overdue, particularly when the individual is threatened with incarceration or loss of a driver’s license
• Securing protection or resolving problems associated with domestic violence, child custody disputes, and child support
• Improving and stabilizing housing and addressing health problems affecting family members, including those caused by dangerous living conditions
• Recovering unpaid wages and remedying other forms of workplace mistreatment

Not long after Paul received notice that his driver’s license might be revoked, his apprenticeship program hosted attorneys from Neighborhood Legal Services Program (NLSP).  The attorneys informed the trainees about the civil legal underpinnings of common hurdles facing job seekers. After participating in the presentation, Paul sought NLSP help.  An attorney prevented the suspension of Paul’s license and is now helping him secure a child support payment plan that more closely matches the amount he is currently able to pay. Shortly after he found out his license was safe, Paul got the flagger job on a construction crew, his first full-time position since 2011.

Advocating for a living wage and job training is necessary, but is also insufficient for many people who are seeking to enter or stay in the workforce.  That’s one reason why access to civil legal aid is so critical to workforce development and anti-poverty efforts. Working closely with community groups, social service agencies, and job training programs, civil legal aid programs can help job seekers identify and break these legal barriers to employment.

This idea was a frequent refrain—repeated yesterday by Republicans and Democrats alike—at a hearing convened by Congressman Dave Reichert, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources.

As my colleague Rachel West put it in a column published yesterday:

“It is high time for Congress to re-examine the evidence on subsidized jobs… an effective tool for increasing economic security—and ensuring that those who have been left behind by the labor market have access to job opportunities.”

My appreciation for the power of subsidized jobs has its roots in North Philadelphia. Fresh out of law school in the Fall of 2009, I was a new attorney at Community Legal Services (CLS) and the Great Recession was in full swing. Nationally, unemployment was approaching 10 percent. In Philly, unemployment was nearly 11 percent—and fully a quarter of the city’s residents were living in poverty.

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka, the stimulus package), federal funding was made available for states to establish subsidized jobs programs. In partnership with the Philadelphia Unemployment Project, we at CLS drafted a plan for what ultimately became Way to Work Pennsylvania—a statewide, subsidized jobs program that created 20,000 jobs for adults and youth around the Commonwealth.

While short-lived—the program ran from May 2010 through the funding’s expiration in September of that same year—Way to Work was by all accounts a great success. A partnership between Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor and Industry and the Department of Public Welfare, Way to Work connected low-income Pennsylvanians with private, nonprofit and public sector jobs paying up to $13 per hour. Per federal guidelines, priority populations for jobs placement included the long-term unemployed, low-income youth, welfare recipients, and people with criminal records (even people with minor records, such as a summary offense or an arrest without a conviction, can face significant barriers accessing jobs).

From the start, Way to Work was a win for both struggling Pennsylvanians and employers. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on small businesses that were able to expand by taking on Way to Work employees, alongside profiles of people like Barbie Izquierdo, a mother of two who had been been out of work for more than a year before getting a subsidized job at the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger.  Izquierdo then obtained a permanent position with the organization when one opened up. “This job has given me stability,” she told the Inquirer. “I’m living proof that Way to Work works.”

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In all, 39 states and Washington, D.C. launched programs, using $1.3 billion in federal funding to place some 260,000 workers into subsidized jobs—which comes to $5000 per worker.  If you think the numbers are compelling, watch the personal testimonials of workers and employers who benefited from Pennsylvania’s program.

But the clock was ticking. The federal funds were set to expire at the end of September 2010. Workers and employers banded together and lobbied Congress to extend the deadline so that the programs could continue. Governors of red and blue states alike—including then-Governor of Mississippi Haley Barbour (R)—joined the chorus calling for the funding to be extended. In Pennsylvania, people felt so strongly about Way to Work, that a large group—including several employers—hopped a bus down to Washington in the July heat to tell members of Congress what Way to Work meant to them.

Despite bipartisan support, reauthorization of the federal funding failed to advance when the Senate couldn’t muster 60 votes, and the funds expired on schedule. Most states scaled down their programs as the funding dried up.

But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center on Law and Social Policy point out, the legacy of these programs is a blueprint for how subsidized jobs can serve as an effective tool for boosting economic security and mobility.

As West notes, subsidized jobs do not lessen the need to raise the minimum wage and pursue job creation, but:

“…when job opportunities remain elusive for whole groups of workers—even as economic conditions improve—these workers are denied the chance to protect their families from poverty and hardship, and chart a path to the middle class. As Congress evaluates the evidence on subsidized jobs programs, our lawmakers should consider subsidized jobs as an important strategy to increase economic mobility for those workers who need to get a foot in the door.”

Let’s hope Congress takes a serious look at an idea backed by something so rare it is now considered an anomaly: strong bipartisan support.

Over the years, these protections have been what safeguards the right to a minimum wage, overtime pay, health and safety protections, and the right to form a union. Without them, low-wage workers—the very people on whom we rely on a daily basis—are disempowered and often trapped in poverty.

These excluded sectors have banded together to create worker centers—non-profit, community organizations representing specific occupational sectors—mostly made up of “immigrant workers and African-Americans who labor in jobs that do not pay a livable wage.” The first crop of worker centers emerged over two decades ago in response to the waning power of traditional labor organizing and the unique needs of laborers of color.  They provided a critical community touch point in advocating and organizing for just workplace practices. Since then, they have grown to create national bodies representing all major sectors, and include: the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, National Domestic Workers Alliance, National Guestworker Alliance, and the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United, among others. By one estimate, there are now over 200 worker centers across the United States fighting for fair wages, paid leave, and other workplace protections.

Today, low-wage industries employ 1.85 million more workers than at the beginning of the 2008 recession and represent some of the fastest growing sectors in the economy. These industries include restaurant work, retail, and caregiving, all of which have high volumes of immigrants, people of color, and women in the workforce. When we see that these same people also make up a disproportionate amount of working Americans living in poverty—earning a fraction of the wages of their white, male counterparts—we should look to their employers for answers.

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The $600 billion restaurant industry, specifically, is the largest employer of people of color in the United States. Thirty-nine percent of all workers making the minimum wage or below work in this industry, making it the largest low-wage employer. Simply raising the minimum wage to $10.10 would increase the combined incomes of people of color by $16.1 billion—nearly 300,000 of those affected would be workers of color in the restaurant industry. Additionally, 2 in 3 tipped workers are women, and the tipped minimum wage has been stuck at $2.13 per hour since 1991. All of this points to the fact that at the frontlines of the gender and racial wage gap, workers making poverty wages are bravely taking on giant, moneyed interests like the restaurant industry. This is truly the David and Goliath story of our time.

In some cases, workers are winning. Last year, ROC United was instrumental in securing paid sick days for tipped workers in Washington, D.C. The National Domestic Workers Alliance also successfully fought to provide minimum wage and overtime protections for homecare workers.

In many ways, worker centers are a contemporary economic necessity. Since people of color are the rising majority, it is imperative that we improve job quality in sectors that currently employ these workers at high rates. Worker centers become even more needed as traditional labor organizations and workers’ rights are threatened in Congress, in individual states, and in the Supreme Court with the recent Harris v Quinn decision.

Nearly 51 years ago, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, activists called for not only desegregation, but also dignified jobs and decent wages.  And tomorrow at 10:00am ET, the Center for American Progress marks the 50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act—which included historic protections at the workplace—with an event: “Passing the Baton: The Next 50 Years of Civil Rights and Economic Justice”.  Watch live as an intergenerational group of civil rights activists offers ideas about how to renew and invigorate a movement focused on civil rights and economic security.

Many low-wage workers are already leading the way.  This is an opportunity to find new ways to get involved.

Caregivers like Sara should not have to sacrifice dignity in their own retirement to take care of family – be it an aging parent, a child, or a relative with disabilities.

Today, New York Congresswoman Nita Lowey is introducing a bill in Congress that would address this injustice.  Groups across the country like the Center for Community Change Action, the National Council of Women’s Organizations, and others, are rallying around the bill which would provide an earnings credit in the Social Security benefit calculation while an individual is caring for a child under a certain age, a disabled family member, or a senior in need of care.

Tonight you can hear from Rep. Lowey and others about this important issue by joining a teletown hall that starts at 7:30pm ET.

Family comes first – whether it’s your aging Mom who gets more opinionated every day or the newborn you swear already smiles, providing for your family is not negotiable.  When it becomes necessary to stay home and care for someone then our Social Security system should honor family by taking into account some of that lost time from the paid work force.

We are long overdue to recognize the largely female workforce of caregivers for the time, energy and effort required to care for loved ones outside of the paid workforce.  The hidden cost of caregiving is in the impact it has on working families who have to struggle to survive without a wage.  Millions of Americans like Sara Moore are doing the essential work of caregiving, and that number is growing. A caregiver credit is about honoring the time, effort and love that people put towards caregiving as work.  As more and more people in our country step up to do right by family as caregivers, it’s only right that their work be recognized in our Social Security system through a caregiver credit.

Even in a fractured Congress, Rep. Lowey’s bill should be something that garners supporters from both sides of the aisle.  Every one of us knows someone who has sacrificed to care for a loved one.  It’s time to truly honor those caregivers by lifting up women’s issues, expanding Social Security… and sponsoring Rep. Lowey’s bill.

UPDATE: Click to listen to Representative Lowey’s tele-town hall on this topic.

Those numbers make it seem like a pretty intractable problem. After all, it’s literally millions of our children—living without adequate shelter, without healthy food, without adequate opportunities to play and learn and grow. If we’ve let things get this bad then surely child poverty must be nearly impossible to solve.

But the fact is it isn’t difficult to end child poverty, or at least to dramatically reduce it. As Austin Nichols, an economist at the Urban Institute, wrote last year:

If the United States offered cash benefits to children in poor families, we could cut child poverty by more than half. According to calculations using the 2012 Current Population Survey, poor children need $4,800 per year each, on average, to escape poverty. That’s $400 a month for each child.

If we issued a $400 monthly payment to each child, and cut tax subsidies for children in higher-income families, we would cut child poverty from 22 percent to below 10 percent. If we further guaranteed one worker per family a job paying $15,000 a year, and each family participated, child poverty would drop to under 1 percent.

A child benefit is now common across developed countries, with amounts of about $140 a month in the UK, $190 in Ireland, $130 in Japan, $160 in Sweden, and $250 in Germany.  A smaller child benefit of $150 per month would chop child poverty from 22 percent to below 17 percent. Adding the job guarantee would lower child poverty to 8 percent.

So the fact is we could end child poverty, but we’d have to give poor families money to spend on their children—and there’s a lot of evidence that simply giving poor people money works. But it would be expensive, and in these economic times surely we can’t afford it, right?

That’s actually not so clear. It would be expensive in the short run—about $76 billion annually—to spend $4,800 a year on every poor kid. But what if it’s really expensive in the long run not to?

Empirical evidence suggests that the economic costs of child poverty each year in the U.S. are about $550 billion, or 3.8 percent of GDP.

Rigorous evidence is also mounting that being born into poverty makes it much likelier that a newborn will have a range of physical ailments, and that she’ll spend significant time in poverty during her childhood. That same body of evidence shows how much likelier it is that children who spend significant time in poverty will be poor as adults. And that effect compounds: the more time in child poverty, the worse the outcomes when the child reaches adulthood—including outcomes for health, education, economics, and criminal justice.

In other words we know—when a baby is born—if she’s likely to be poor as a child and therefore poor as an adult. And we know that if she’s poorer as an adult, she will have worse educational outcomes and less productivity in the job market. Her kids will likelier be poor and unhealthy, and the family as a whole will rely more on the social safety net.

Put that all together and it gets awfully expensive fast—up to $550 billion a year, compared to $76 billion or less a year to dramatically reduce poverty.

So what if instead we spent some of that money now—up front—to help children break out of the cycle? While it’s expensive, future savings stemming from higher productivity and lower safety net spending are great. That makes it sound a lot like—wait for it—an investment! You invest money now because you expect strong returns in the future.

Dramatically reducing poverty is in fact the financially prudent thing to do, and helping 16 million American children out of poverty is the moral thing to do as well.

There are three separate channels through which a reduction in the unemployment rate is likely to benefit low-income people. The first is simply by increasing their probability of finding jobs. Unemployment is not evenly distributed throughout the workforce; the less-educated and disadvantaged see the sharpest rises in unemployment when the economy goes into a downturn.

In the year prior to the beginning of the recession, the unemployment rate for workers without a high school degree averaged just over 7.0 percent. Its average for 2010 was 14.8 percent, an increase of 7.8 percentage points. For workers with high school degrees the unemployment rate went from 4.3 percent to 10.3 percent, a rise of 6.0 percentage points. By contrast, the unemployment rate for college grads rose by just 2.7 percentage points, from 2.0 percent to 4.7 percent. While everyone got hit by the downturn, clearly those with less education saw the greatest increase in their risk of being unemployed.

There is a similar story about race. The unemployment rate for whites rose from 4.1 percent in the years before the downturn to 8.7 percent in 2010, a rise of 4.6 percentage points. The unemployment rate for African Americans rose from 8.2 percent to 16.0 percent in 2010, a rise of 7.8 percentage points. The unemployment rate for Hispanics went from 5.6 percent before the downturn to 12.5 percent, an increase of 6.9 percentage points.

There are various explanations as to why less educated and African American and Hispanic workers see the sharpest rise in unemployment during downturns, but there is little debate about this outcome. Also, there is no evidence of any change in this pattern as the economy has recovered, despite the claims of some analysts.

For the first five months of 2014 the unemployment rate for workers without high school degrees averaged 9.5 percent, a drop of 5.3 percentage points from 2010 levels.  The unemployment rate for college grads averaged 3.3 percent, a decline of 1.4 percentage points from recession peaks. This means the least educated workers have actually made more progress in getting back to pre-recession unemployment rates than the most educated workers. If the unemployment rate were to return to pre-recession levels for the population as a whole, it would almost certainly fall back to pre-recession levels for the less educated and minorities as well.

In addition to the unemployment channel, workers at the bottom of the income ladder are also likely to benefit from low unemployment as a result of having the opportunity to work more hours. In my book with Jared Bernstein, Getting Back to Full Employment (free download available), we show that the late 1990s boom was associated with an increase of 17 percent in the total number of hours worked for households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution. By contrast, the increase in hours worked for households in the top two income quintiles was just 1.0 percent. There are many low-income people who would like to be able to put in more hours on the job. The low unemployment of the late 1990s, which bottomed out at 4.0 percent as a year-round average in 2000, provided this opportunity.

Finally, low unemployment provides workers at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution with the bargaining power they need to get a share of the economy’s growth. Hourly wages have been largely stagnant for these workers for most of the last three decades. However, in the years from 1996-2000, workers at the middle and bottom saw substantial wage gains. According to our analysis, a sustained 1.0 percentage point drop in the unemployment rate translates to a 9.8 percent increase in the wages of a worker at the 20^th percentile of the wage distribution. It would lead to a wage gain for a worker in the middle of the wage distribution of 4.2 percent. It has little effect on the wages of workers at the top of the income distribution.

For these reasons, a full employment policy is an effective way to increase the opportunities and income of people at the bottom. If full employment of the sort that we saw at the end of the 1990s could be sustained for a long period of time, it would almost certainly lead to a substantial reduction in poverty rates and a large improvement in living standards for low-income people.

When the unemployment rate was falling to thirty year lows in the late 1990s the press had accounts of suburban hotels and restaurants chartering busses to pick workers up in the inner cities and drive them to their jobs in the suburbs. There were stories of employers providing day care facilities and even making arrangements to accommodate elder care for workers caring for aging parents. Some firms actively sought out workers with disabilities. In a tight labor market, firms will make extraordinary efforts to recruit employees who at other times they would never likely hire.

Full employment is also a desirable policy because it goes directly against the “makers versus takers” line that many conservatives push. Full employment is about giving people at the bottom the opportunity to work. In this same context, not pursuing full employment is effectively a policy of not offering people an opportunity to work.

This is a crucial point. We can talk about a policy to promote full employment—by investing in infrastructure, spending on retrofitting buildings or solar paneling to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or subsidizing pre-K education; but accepting a higher level of unemployment is also a policy decision. We know that we can get more growth and lower rates of unemployment with more government spending. There is enough research on this topic that it should no longer be a debatable point.

We can also get lower rates of unemployment by reducing the size of the trade deficit. If we can increase our exports and replace imports with domestically produced goods and services, it will increase output and lead to more jobs. If we were to eliminate the trade deficit altogether and have balanced trade, it would create almost 6 million jobs. The trade deficit is also the result of policy decisions, most importantly ones pertaining to the value of the dollar. A dollar that costs less in foreign currencies makes our goods cheaper for the rest of the world to purchase, and makes imports more expensive. We could make deals with foreign countries to raise the value of their currency against the dollar as President Reagan did with the Plaza Accord in 1985, but our trade policy has taken a different direction.

There may be reasons why people want smaller budget deficits, but pushing for deficit reduction in the current economic environment is ultimately a policy of denying people jobs. In the same vein, supporting a high dollar, and therefore a large trade deficit, is also a policy of denying people jobs. And, since higher unemployment reduces the bargaining power of workers and leads to lower wages, a high unemployment policy is a policy that provides employers with low-cost labor, exacerbating economic inequality.

In short, a full employment policy is a tremendously effective way to increase the income and opportunities available to the poor and near poor. But the high unemployment policy we currently have in place is one that redistributes income upward and denies people the jobs they need to escape poverty.