What would you say are the defining characteristics of the American eater?
If you look at our obesity rates, they'd suggest we’re mostly overeaters. But beyond that, the question is tougher.
It’s not so much that we lack a U.S. food personality — if anything, we have multiple, conflicting ones. At the same time, more consumers are demanding that their food be “natural,” organic and GMO-free, even as Taco Bell sells record numbers of Doritos Locos tacos. We seem more interested in celebrity chefs, cooking shows and recipe videos than ever before, and yet we’re also spending a record amount of money eating out and ordering in.
To address our nation’s diet-related concerns, it would seem necessary first to better understand what we eat, how we eat it and, of course, why.
In her new book, Devoured: From Chicken Wings to Kale Smoothies — How What We Eat Defines Who We Are, Culinary Institute of America program director and food writer Sophie Egan digs into these questions.
It turns out previous attempts to dissect our dietary schizophrenia have ignored some important pieces. Principal among those, Egan argues, are the ways in which Americans working longer hours than the rest of the industrialized world has impacted both their motivation — and ability — to make healthier food choices daily.
So how do we go about resetting our workplaces, cafeterias and the norms they help instill to a healthier default? The Huffington Post recently spoke with Egan about the challenges ahead and the reasons for hope.
What prompted you to explore this question of how we wound up with the food culture we have today?
I’ve been working in food professionally for a number of years and was thinking about how powerful a mirror food is for who we are at a much deeper level. I was tired of hearing that in the U.S. we’re so diverse and are such a huge country that we don’t have anything we could identify as a national food culture. I felt like, well, what can be said? I dug into that question of who we are as eaters, these core values we have as Americans -- these are things we don’t even see sometimes because they’re so deeply ingrained in how we think.
And that led you to this discussion of how the way we work impacts the way we eat. It almost seems so obvious now that I’m asking you about it, but we don’t really talk about that relationship. Why is that?
It really comes down to a reframing of how we look at the root causes of our eating choices. We typically center those conversations around individual willpower or these character accusations, if you will: That Americans don’t cook because they’re lazy or we just follow whatever we saw on TV. But I would say work is a root cause. In addition to a lack of financial resources [being a factor for many people], another important root cause of some eating behaviors that maybe aren’t as healthy as people would like is lack of time. If we’re working more than we used to, something is falling by the wayside.
What was stunning to me was seeing how technology has really blurred the lines between work and home for many people. This mindset of, well, if you can work, why wouldn’t you? Whether it’s on vacation, in the evenings or on weekends, all of it. So with the increase in the numbers of hours we’re spending working, we’re not focusing on food. We look at food as fuel. You squeeze in a sandwich if you have three minutes in between meetings, or grab a Kind bar when you’re racing to catch the subway in the morning. Eating is a secondary need as opposed to something people used to design their days around.
And this starts in childhood. Kids in K-12 schools usually don’t have enough time to eat, so they’re scarfing down pizza or hot dogs or whatever is being served in their cafeteria in 10 minutes. By the time you’re in college, it’s a grab-and-go, grazing mentality. So you’re trained from an early age to see food as secondary. This is a huge cultural norm that’s very difficult to reverse.
Credit: Seth Perlman/Associated PressStudents at many schools are rushed to eat their lunches quickly. The Culinary Institute of America's Sophie Egan argues this helps instill a mindset that food is principally fuel, rather than something to be savored or celebrated.
I’ve noticed that the “food as fuel” mindset is behind a lot of the marketing of Soylent and similar products. I tried one last year and thought it tasted just as joyless as you would think. Why is this sort of message at the heart of a lot of so-called “foods of the future” today?
Culturally speaking, Soylent is a huge step backward. There’s this sense that we can take food and improve on it, to take what nature gave us and say there’s got to be a better way. A life-hacking approach. A Silicon Valley approach. But [AOL co-founder] Steve Case has this great quote that food is not something disrupting the disrupting you have to do.
Soylent is an extreme, but I would say it represents a larger idea of reducing food to its nutrients. Food is so much more than that. It does nourish us and we need certain things to survive, but I hope that people are starting to realize that flavor and taste and joy are some of the greatest pleasures of life. I think in the U.S., we have a very related discomfort with leisure and with pleasure. It’s sort of unspoken that if you sit around and do nothing, you’re lazy and you’re lesser. I think similarly there’s this sense of taboo around pure enjoyment of taste and of eating food with other people.
There’s also an element of purity to utilitarian foods like that. In the book, you make a strong case for food — whether it be a particular diet or the practice of going to brunch — as a sort of "secular church." Is that a hypothesis you held going into this, or did it develop along the way?
I started with this question about the contradiction of why we’re willing to spend basically the whole day seeking out brunch when our typical mindset is to go to extreme lengths to minimize the time we spend obtaining, eating and cleaning up after food. So it was more of this question of what is so different about that. Very quickly, my research led me to this discovery about how different our weekday eating habits are from our weekend eating habits. We spend the least amount of time of any major developed country preparing and eating food. We’re hardwired in terms of that idea of efficiency.
But looking back, it’s very clear weekends are about indulgence and treating yourself after a long, hard week. These are also some of the only times we aren’t as scheduled, though many families have soccer games and a million other activities too.
Your book also discusses how Americans are so used to getting our food exactly the way we want it, and points out how companies are always pushing new flavors and innovations or “stunt foods” like Doritos Locos. How do you balance these trends with ideas that could push us in a healthier direction? The answer can’t be to go back to the “good ol' days,” right?
This is a really tough question. It’s not just that we all should return to the old ways, because there’s clearly some innovation or new ways forward that should be welcomed. But what kinds of pieces from our past do we really want to resurrect?
Everyone talks today about how people are paying more attention to food than ever before, but from a policy standpoint, a number of things are still missing. One is the amount of time in schools for lunch. I think, at a broad level, going forward what I’m hoping for is for us to collectively find ways to focus on food more. And what I mean by that is, if more employers could make the American lunch break the norm in office settings. I’ve heard of a handful of companies where they ring a cowbell and everyone knows to take a break. You can’t expect individual change in the midst of the same larger environment, not only the physical marketing environment, but the cultural environment. I’m calling for cultural change, and it has to come from the top down.
I think the piece most worth resurrecting from the past would be teaching people to cook. You don’t have to call it home economics. But it should be painted as essential life skills. What if, in order to graduate from college you had to demonstrate that you knew how to cook an omelette so that you could feed yourself? If it was considered the same way as learning a language or riding a bike?
We’ve outsourced the preparation of food to the professionals. Are we going to stop eating food that comes in packages? Of course not. But we would be wise to see for what it is the availability of real, whole foods and the power that comes with feeding yourself and preparing food yourself instead of being sort of over-reliant on new solutions.
Credit: Kevork Djansezian/Getty ImagesMany "Big Food" brands like Kraft have been altering some of their trademark packaged foods to contain fewer artificial ingredients and flavors in recent years.
Are you optimistic that we're moving in the right direction, toward getting back into the kitchen and eating more “real” food? Or are we too set in our ways at this point?
I am optimistic. I think our appreciation for novelty and innovation is a double-edged sword. We’re eating more foods from around the world than five years ago, which is a silver lining to how much more we’re eating out. But it’s really brought a world of flavors to the masses. It has tremendous potential for healthier eating habits, because some of those other cuisines taste amazing and happen to be good for you without being positioned as good for you. That’s the best way to go.
I’m also optimistic about how much consumer awareness can change Big Food, and we’re seeing that in food companies removing artificial flavors and colorings, or antibiotics. Consumers’ collective demands are really starting to make change happen faster. I think in some ways we’re more empowered than ever before.
It is only with this greater awareness that we can we collectively take more control over our food choices. And with that, we can celebrate the aspects of our food culture that we sometimes overlook, and change those aspects of our food culture that are hurting us so that we can end up with healthier, happier relationships with the food we eat.
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Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food and water. In addition, Erbentraut explores the evolving ways Americans are identifying and defining themselves. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email joseph.erbentraut@huffingtonpost.com.
The attorney general of New York filed a lawsuit against Domino's on Tuesday, accusing the pizza giant of systematically shorting workers' pay.
Fast-food restaurants are sued all the time for alleged wage theft. What makes this suit different is who's included among the defendants: Domino's itself, as opposed to just the franchisees who run Domino's shops.
"At some point, a company has to take responsibility for its actions and for its workers’ well-being," Eric Schneiderman, New York's attorney general, said in a statement.
The lawsuit claims workers at 10 Domino's shops in New York were underpaid by a total of at least $565,000. Schneiderman said that his office's investigation revealed "intensive involvement by Domino’s headquarters" in the alleged labor violations, and that Domino's should therefore be considered a joint employer alongside the franchisees.
“New York law -- as well as basic human decency -- holds Domino’s responsible for the alleged mistreatment of the workers who make and deliver the company’s pizzas, and it is incumbent upon Domino’s to fix the problems," Schneiderman said.
The fast-food industry is predicated on a franchise system, with the owners of individual outlets -- franchisees -- paying fees to the company in exchange for an established name and business model. The franchisees sign workers' paychecks and are typically considered the employers in this equation. When workplace laws get broken, they're usually the ones on the hook for the violation.
But in this case, New York alleges that Domino's really controls the work inside the pizza shops, and therefore should be held accountable for any violations of the law. The lawsuit claims that Domino's headquarters directed franchisees to discipline certain employees, dictated staffing levels and hours at the shops, and even tried to scuttle a union campaign by workers.
In a statement, Domino's said the lawsuit "disregards the nature of franchising and demeans the role of small business owners." The company said it worked with Schneiderman's office for three years to help franchisees understand and comply with the different wage and hour laws.
"It’s unfortunate that these steps were not enough, and that the Attorney General now wants the company to take steps that would not only deprive our independent business owners of the opportunity to make their own employment decisions, but could impact the viability of the franchise model, the many opportunities it offers to those looking to start their own businesses, and the millions of jobs those franchised businesses create," the company said.
According to its most recent annual report, Domino's has more than 4,800 franchised locations in the U.S., owned by 841 franchisees who each have an average of six locations. Domino's itself only owns 384 stores.
According to Schneiderman's office, Domino's required franchisees to purchase an online software system called PULSE, and encouraged them to use it for payroll reports. The lawsuit alleges that PULSE routinely miscalculated workers' gross wages, and that these mistakes led to workers being shorted on their paychecks. Domino's headquarters, the suit claims, was aware of the problems, but deemed the miscalculations a "low priority."
The sale of PULSE, Schneiderman contends, amounted to "fraud" perpetrated on the franchisees by Domino's.
Domino's isn't the first fast-food company to be sued alongside some of its franchisees. In 2014, workers in three different states filed lawsuits against McDonald's, saying the company violated minimum wage and overtime laws. As in the Domino's complaint, the plaintiffs in that suit argued that McDonald's steered in-store work policy and was therefore liable for the alleged violations. The cases are pending.
Schneiderman's office has aggressively pursued criminal cases against fast-food operators, and Domino's stores have been in the attorney general's crosshairs in the past. In 2014, a group of Domino's franchisees agreed to pay workers nearly a half-million dollars to settle wage theft claims brought by the attorney general.
This story has been updated with comment from Domino's.
A little more than a year ago, when Hillary Clinton officially launched her history-making campaign for the presidency, she did something else unprecedented. She hired Bernard Coleman as the campaign’s chief diversity officer.
The 36-year-old is responsible for helping Clinton -- the first woman with a real shot at the White House -- build a staff more reflective of the voters she hopes to win over, beyond the usual scrum of white guys who run political campaigns.
Coleman, who says he is the first chief diversity officer ever employed by a presidential campaign, briefly held a similar role at the Democratic National Committee where he was director of human resources for six years.
Clinton desperately needs Coleman, who is also the campaign's head of human resources, to succeed. A diverse staff is key to helping her understand an increasingly diverse electorate, where whites represent a declining percentage of voters. Without votes from people of color, Clinton likely cannot win the presidency -- a lesson she learned in 2008.
“We want to have the most representative staff,” Coleman told The Huffington Post. “We’re always trying to crush it."
And by all accounts they are: Thirty percent of the 700 or so people on the Clinton campaign staff are non-white and 52 percent are women, according to data provided to The Huffington Post by Inclusv, a group that finds diverse candidates for political campaigns, advocacy groups and policymakers and also is pressing for candidates to report their staffs demographic data. (Former Obama campaign staffers founded the group last year.)
Senior leadership on Clinton's staff is 54 percent women and 34 percent people of color, according to the latest data available, from March 31. The campaign won’t break down those figures any further to show what percent of staff are Hispanic or African-American. And, worryingly, the numbers haven't grown since the last time the campaign reported its diversity data in February.
Yet it’s fairly clear -- just on the gender stats alone -- that in terms of staffing, this is likely the most diverse serious presidential campaign in U.S. history. (The smaller Bernie Sanders campaign hasn't yet reported its March data to Inclusv. But in February, a report revealed that, though 31 percent of the campaign's staff are people of color, all of its top paid staff are men.)
There is not an official account of the Obama campaign staff's demographics -- nor of any campaign's prior to this year -- but Clinton 2016 is probably out ahead, Alida Garcia, executive director and cofounder of Inclusv, told HuffPost.
"The [Clinton] headquarters in Brooklyn is likely more diverse than the 2012 operation in Chicago," said Garcia, who worked on Obama's 2012 campaign helping turn out the Latino vote. (Garcia also works with FWD.us, the immigration reform group founded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.)
Clinton's achievement is the result of a deliberate strategy spearheaded by the candidate herself, burned by her loss in the Democratic primaries in 2008, when her campaign seemed targeted mainly to white voters. She's of course spurred forward by the rapidly changing demographics of the country.
“Clinton is really hitting diversity and it’s not by accident,” said Erikka Knuti, a political strategist who’s worked on Democratic campaigns and currently is a communications director for the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union. “The fact that she is doing it speaks to who she is and lessons learned,” she told HuffPost.
Clinton campaignBernard Coleman is the first chief diversity officer to staff a presidential campaign.
Hiring a chief diversity officer is a tactic straight out of corporate America's playbook. Sixty percent of Fortune 100 companies employ a chief diversity officer, according to a 2012 analysis from executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles.
Clinton's campaign has far surpassed the business world in diversity, though. The country’s biggest businesses still are remarkably homogenous -- particularly at the highest levels. Fewer than 4 percent of the chief executives who run S&P 500 companies are women, and the number has been falling. For African-Americans the numbers are even more grim. According to data cited by Fortune, black men and women make up 4.7 percent of executive team members in the Fortune 100. There have only been 15 black CEOs on the Fortune 500 -- ever.
There’s plenty of evidence that a more diverse company will see a higher stock price and profits. And it's clear that the demographics of the nation -- i.e. consumers -- require a change. But companies have been slow to move, Billy Dexter, a partner at Heidrich & Struggles, told HuffPost.
“If corporate America wanted to do this, they could,” he said. “Some organizations have.”
The companies that have made inroads have approached the need to diversify as a business imperative, not just a moral one. The idea, Dexter said, is to make hiring diverse people as important as hitting profit goals: assign your best people to the task and look at the numbers quarterly. And the CEO must play a key role in driving the strategy.
As diversity has clearly become a political imperative -- particularly for a Democratic candidate -- Clinton has done just that. In November, one-third of eligible voters in the U.S. will be Hispanic, black, Asian or belong to another racial or ethnic minority group, according to a report out from the Pew Research Center earlier this year. Democratic voters are even more diverse: 40 percent of Democrats identify as nonwhite, compared with 11 percent of Republicans, according to Gallup data from 2012.
Women, of course, are not a minority -- though they seem to get treated as one. We comprise 52 percent of the voting population.
Whites, meanwhile, are a declining interest group. This is well evidenced by the obvious racial panic behind Donald Trump's campaign, and in the data: In 2016, whites are projected to make up 69 percent of eligible voters, down from 78 percent in 2000.
Clinton learned all of this the hard way. She lost her bid for the Democratic nomination in 2008 in part by running a campaign that seemed to position her as the mainstream (read: white) candidate in contrast to Barack Obama.
In a tactic the New York Times and others decried as “race-baiting,” she downplayed the amount of white support her opponent had.
“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she told USA Today in 2008. “Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.”
Obama's path to the nomination and the presidency came with the help of record black and Hispanic turnout. Now, turning out the African-American and Hispanic vote is recognized as critical to a Democratic victory in 2016.
Given these realities, Coleman's mandate to diversify the campaign comes straight from the top, he said.
“If she didn’t say this is important, then no one would move,” he told HuffPost. “The country is evolving and changing. Having diverse voices helps us message. It helps almost every facet.”
The pressure to hire diverse staff is “constant,” Coleman said. “We talk about it with senior staff every week.”
Just this week, the Clinton campaign hired Jess McIntosh, vice president of communications for EMILY’s List. She is known for being skilled at bringing in women and diverse voices, Knuti told HuffPost before the hire was announced.
Coleman said a big part of his job is simply helping the campaign find good people -- and not allowing anyone to take “shortcuts” in hiring. Campaign hiring moves at lightning speed and the temptation is to just quickly bring in people you know well. Unfortunately, that's the easiest way reinforce a culture of sameness. It's how tech companies, which have also grown quickly, wind up hiring bro after bro after bro. One guy knows another guy who looks just like him.
One thing Coleman's learned is if his colleagues take a little more time to think of good candidates, they find they actually know a pretty diverse group. People just need to focus, he said. “You need people to sit down in a room, get off their phones, open a Rolodex and say, 'Who do you know who does this?' You actually know a lot of people. It has to be deliberate.”
After six years with the DNC, Coleman knows a lot of people. The bonus, he said, is people really want to work for the campaign, so they take his calls -- and help him find good candidates.
Even the private sector wants to help. Coleman mentioned that the “open a Rolodex” strategy came from “a guy at Google,” whom Coleman declined to name, who wanted to help the campaign. Google, notably, has a large diversity team, as well as a chief diversity officer, though it hasn't seen much progress.
It is easier to build a diverse campaign staff than a diverse company staff. Coleman has had the benefit of hiring a team from scratch. An established corporation cannot get rid of all its workers and start all over -- it can only hire so many new people every year. And the sense of urgency in a campaign, which comes with a built-in expiration date, is absent from a company.
Chris McGrath via Getty ImagesClinton seems to have learned a lot from her failed bid in 2008.
As Nov. 8 looms closer and the pace of hiring picks up, the Clinton campaign’s challenge will be to maintain its diversity, Garcia, of Inclusv, told HuffPost. There’s still room for improvement, she said, noting that the most recent data showed the campaign had stalled out in its push to diversify and that the percent of people of color on senior staff fell slightly to 34 percent from 36 percent.
Inclusv wants to make sure thosenumbers rise as staffing scales up for a national campaign. It has been working with the campaign since last year, helping find candidates.
“Quite honestly, based on our prior experience [with Clinton] we anticipated pushback,” said Garcia. “In reality, what we found was a willing and welcoming partner in Bernard Coleman to build upon an accessible ongoing conversation.”
The end goal, of course, is a diverse White House. “At the end of the day, a lot of campaign staff ends up in government managing key policy initiatives for elected officials,” Garcia said.
Coleman is aware of this. “Being White House chief diversity officer,” he said. “That would be pretty cool.”
Detroit’s historic bankruptcy was complex and unique -- but it offers some surprisingly universal lessons for anyone who struggles with money.
When the city announced it was broke in 2013, its budget was crippled by declining revenue stemming from population loss, the financial crisis and disinvestment from the state. At the same time, officials made avoidable mistakes, according to Nathan Bomey, author of Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back.
Bomey, a USA Today reporter, covered the bankruptcy trial for the Detroit Free Press. Released last month, his book takes a behind-the-scenes look at how major players engineered an agreement that cut pensioner benefits, settled with creditors, and secured hundreds of millions in aid from foundations and the state. The city emerged from Chapter 9 bankruptcy in 2014, shedding $7 billion in debt.
While the bulk of Detroit Resurrected tracks the dramatic bankruptcy trial and tense closed-door negotiations, Bomey also clearly charts the financial missteps from the previous decade that helped put Detroit on a path to insolvency.
He occasionally puts them in familiar terms. One deal is compared to putting monthly expenses on a credit card; another to “a toxic mortgage that could not be refinanced.”
Detroit Resurrected isn’t intended to be a personal finance guide. But it reminded me of some of the financial mistakes I’ve made, and the difficult task of getting one’s finances back on track.
Here are a few of Detroit's money mistakes to avoid, and a couple decisions worth emulating.
Bloomberg via Getty ImagesThe skyline of Detroit on July 19, 2013, the day after it became the largest city to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The city's financial missteps have similarities to mistakes individuals make with debt and managing personal finances.
There are no simple fixes for financial shortfalls, and borrowing now can can cost big later.
The “point of no return” for Detroit was an inventive and irresponsible borrowing scheme the city cooked up in 2005, according to Bomey. Under then-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, the city borrowed $1.44 billion to plug a huge hole in the pension funds. Only a few years later, the city risked defaulting and negotiated an even worse deal.
The one-time fix let political leaders avoid making unpopular but necessary cuts at the expense of the city’s future financial health, Bomey argues.
“What they did in 2005 was refuse to make the tough decisions that they needed to make to protect the city's retirees and to ensure that the budget was balanced,” he said.
Likewise, financial experts discourage individuals from taking on long-term debt for anything other than big expenses that have a potential return, like a mortgage or student loan.
Just because you qualify for a loan doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
While the Kilpatrick deal looks like a terrible bet in hindsight, at the time it was heralded by city officials and Wall Street. Banks were all too willing to help Detroit borrow exorbitantly, whether or not it was fiscally responsible.
Bomey sees parallels to banks’ loosened restrictions for homeowners.
“In that era, Wall Street was lending money to homeowners who couldn’t afford to borrow, so it should come as no surprise that they were also willing to lend to a city that couldn’t afford to borrow,” Bomey said.
“This was like a subprime loan on steroids,” he writes in Detroit Resurrected.
You can’t fix financial problems until you own up to them.
The way Bomey tells it, Kilpatrick’s borrowing scheme was a way of hiding the extent of Detroit’s financial problems.
“Kwame Kilpatrick refused to tell [pensioners] the truth, which is that they couldn’t afford to pay certain benefit levels anymore, and instead we just lied to retirees for years,” he said.
When the moment of reckoning came, the problem had only gotten worse and pensioners were shocked by the proposed cuts -- the equivalent of a woman finding out her husband had racked up to $80,000 in credit card debt to keep up their lifestyle after he took a pay cut.
It’s not uncommon for people to hide their money troubles from their family. A third of people with combined finances admitted to lying to their partner about money, according to a 2014 survey of 2,035 adults conducted by the National Endowment for Financial Education.
Paying only the minimum on debt exacerbates the problem.
It might seem responsible to faithfully pay the minimum on a credit card balance each month, but you’re actually losing money and keeping yourself trapped in debt. According to debt management site Ready for Zero, it could take over five years to pay off $1,000 if you're just paying the minimum, and you’d spend $566 on interest alone.
Detroit took a similar approach. After borrowing $1.44 billion, the city only made payments on the accumulating interest for years.
“That deferred the pain temporarily but only made things worse when the city finally went broke,” Bomey said.
Plan for the future -- and expect the worst.
Detroit made a smart move during bankruptcy when it determined what return rate to expect from pension fund investments, Bomey said. They settled on 6.75 percent, one of the lowest rates in the country.
“A responsible family is going to manage their budget with relatively conservative expectations, and if you have a surplus at the end, great,” Bomey said. “If you take an irresponsible approach and expect more money to come in than eventually comes in, then you have to adjust your budget. And that can be very painful.”
Balance paying debt with investing in the future.
If you’re trying to eliminate debt, it can be tempting to cut expenses to the bone and put every penny possible toward your balance. But in many cases, it’s smart to continue saving money for emergencies and retirement to guarantee future financial well-being.
Until bankruptcy, Detroit was putting little money toward maintaining or improving city conditions -- four out of every 10 budget dollars were going toward debt, pensions and health care benefits for retirees, and that figure was set to rise to seven out of 10 by 2020.
Joshua Lott / ReutersA man walk past graffiti in Detroit on Dec. 3, 2013.
The city was beset with problems like the fire department’s malfunctioning emergency alert system. Bomey describes one station where firefighters rigged a replacement system using a fax machine that would print notifications, knocking a soda can over. A lack of basic services was one of the factors driving out residents: Garbage collection was irregular, 40 percent of the city's street lights were out and police response times were nearly triple the national rate.
The bankruptcy agreement was designed to allow Detroit to spend money on the essentials that allow residents to have a decent quality of life -- and will stabilize the city in the future.
“They are reinvesting in raises for police officers, new fire equipment, new buses, basic technology like software systems in the city that they need to improve tax collections,” Bomey said. “Bankruptcy is the first moment Detroit finally put its people before its creditors.”
Kate Abbey-Lambertz covers sustainable cities, housing and inequality. Tips? Feedback? Send an email or follow her on Twitter.
The Chicago-based international law firm Winston & Strawn LLP announced Wednesday that it is creating a gender-neutral parental leave policy, as well as a broader policy intended to help lawyers with the often hectic process of taking parental leave and then returning to work.
The policy includes 20 weeks of paid parental leave for associates and of counsel attorneys. It applies to parents of any gender and in any country, and the leave time can be taken in either one or two separate chunks within the first year of a child's life. Parents also aren't required to designate a "primary caregiver."
This is a pretty big deal in the legal industry, even if it falls somewhat short of the policies offered in other professions, according to Vivia Chen, a senior columnist at The American Lawyer. "Law firms are a bit behind other industries, especially the financial and other professional service industries, when it comes to more innovative family measures," she said.
Many tech firms, including Netflix, Facebook and Spotify, have introduced generous gender-neutral parental leave policies in recent months. Just a few weeks ago, the consulting firm EY announced a 16-week paid leave policy that will start in July. But Winston & Strawn is the first law firm to have a policy this expansive -- or at least the first to announce it publicly.
Getting women back to work after having kids -- and allowing men to take time off as well -- is a way for firms to help women ascend the career ladder. Currently, only 18 percent of equity partners in American law firms are women, even though women account for 47 percent of the country's J.D. degrees.
In addition to the 20 weeks of leave, the firm is also creating a few different ways to ease the transitions of taking leave and returning to work. There will be a "parental leave liaison" to assist people coming back to work, as well as career coaching services and lower billable-hour requirements for people who are just about to take leave or are just coming back to the firm.
"Traditionally for women, if you take a long leave, easing back in can be difficult. You might have hesitation about going back," Chen told The Huffington Post. Having someone act as a sort of coach, encouraging people to come back from leave, just might be the nudge new parents need to get back into the swing of things after having a baby.
To be clear, Winston & Strawn isn't acting altruistically here: The firm's move is intended to attract and retain high-level attorneys. Practice attorneys, who are low-level attorneys usually brought on for specific projects and who are outside the traditional partner-track framework of the firm, won't get the same 20-week benefit. Neither will the firm's other staff members, such as paralegals and office assistants.
However, it's relatively common for benefits in big law firms to be stratified, according to Chen. Winston & Strawn says its U.S. employees in lower positions will get increased paid leave time and an extra two weeks of paid time off.
Claire Underwood certainly would not stand being paid less than a man for the same work -- and neither did her real-life counterpart, Robin Wright.
The actor, who plays the formidable first lady on Netflix's "House of Cards," opened up about demanding higher pay in an interview at The Rockefeller Foundation on Tuesday.
Until recently, Wright was paid less than her co-star Kevin Spacey, who was reportedly making $500,000 per episode on the show. The fourth season of the drama was just released on Netflix in March.
“I was looking at statistics and Claire Underwood’s character was more popular than [Frank’s] for a period of time. So I capitalized on that moment. I was like, ‘You better pay me or I’m going to go public,’” Wright said, flashing her trademark smile. “And they did.”
Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin had asked her about the barriers women face in getting ahead, and Wright mentioned the gender pay gap. In 2015, women still make just 79 cents for every dollar earned by a white man. The gap is worse for women of color.
Their conversation was part of a series called “Insight Dialogues,” discussions with thought leaders and activists hosted in New York. The Huffington Post is a media partner with The Rockefeller Foundation on the series.
The pay gap is so pernicious that women earn less than men in 439 major occupations, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Watch Wright's interview here (she mentions her demands for equal pay around 7:15):
Wright said that one of the things holding women back is the time out they take to raise children, mentioning that her career took a hit after she had her kids in the '90s -- just as she was gaining fame after starring roles in "The Princess Bride" and "Forrest Gump."
“Because I wasn’t working full time, I wasn’t building my salary bracket. If you don’t build salary bracket with notoriety and presence, then you’re not in the game anymore," Wright said.
Her kids are apparently doing their part to help her catch up. Last year, Wright's daughter, Dylan Penn, told Marie Claire that it was "crazy" her mother wasn't making the same as her co-star: "They both equally grab the attention of the audience."
Women in Hollywood have been speaking up more about equal pay ever since Patricia Arquette called for equality in her acceptance speech at the Oscars last year. Arquette, who was accepting an award for her role in the film "Boyhood," has since lost out on a couple of roles for taking a stand, she said earlier this year at a dinner in Beverly Hills, California, that The Huffington Post attended.
Still, since she spoke up, others have followed, including Jennifer Lawrence and Gillian Jacobs.
And judging from the Twittersphere, a lot of women are excited about this turn of events. Many were celebrating Wright's salary win on Tuesday and Wednesday.
That's what I'm talking about Claire Underwood. https://t.co/6xZwOmwIMQ via @EmilyRPeck @HuffPostBiz pic.twitter.com/FS7UASSkst
GOOCHLAND COUNTY, Virginia — Ever since Curtis Brown Jr. got his first Star Wars toy as a toddler, he has been fascinated by action figures. So much so that he has built a business customizing action figures for clients worldwide. But what could be a lucrative career has turned into an exercise in futility that traps Brown and his family in poverty.
That’s because Brown struggles every day with miserable Internet service. The only choice where he currently lives is an $80-a-month satellite connection. It’s slow and comes with such a low data cap that he exceeds it within a week or two. So Brown’s business comes to a halt. He can’t afford to buy more data. He can’t use his smartphone because the service is so bad he has to go outside to get a signal, and it’s too cumbersome to update the many websites he uses to conduct his business.
The constant interruptions limit Brown to about $400 a month in profit. Even with his wife Ashley’s income from an administrative job with the state's education department, Brown and his three stepchildren have to rely on help from relatives and food stamps to make ends meet. Brown would move if he could, but houses with fast Internet connections are in areas where the rent is too expensive.
An isolated case? Not at all. An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that even though Internet access has improved in recent years, families in poor areas are almost five times more likely not to have access to high-speed broadband than the most affluent American households. That means no access to online jobs, and no access to health care advice, education, government services and banking — everything needed to be a full participant in today’s society. This harsh reality has led to a new kind of segregation.
“Internet access,” says James Lane, superintendent of Goochland County Public Schools, “is the civil rights issue of our time.”
A Rope Ladder
Brown sells his custom action figures — Gamorrean Guards, Luke Skywalkers and Skeletors — out of his living room in a compact one-story brick house at the end of a dirt driveway just off Stokes Station Road in the western part of Goochland County. The neighborhood is about 20 miles west of the tony suburbs and manicured golf courses adjacent to Richmond — but it is worlds away. Next door to the Browns: an abandoned trailer home with broken windows and rusted siding.
Nearly every house in the area has a satellite dish bolted on the roof or perched on a pole in the yard. A satellite connection, like the one Brown gets from HughesNet, is the only option for Internet here. But it is expensive and doesnot provide what the federal government defines as “advanced telecommunications capability” or high-speed broadband, a download speed of 25 megabits per second or higher. That’s the speed both the feds and application developers say is the minimum needed to support both the numerous devices in a household today and the future applications that will create digitally interconnected homes and businesses.
Allan Holmes/Center for Public IntegrityCurtis Brown Jr.'s home in Goochland, Virginia.
Other Internet connections like DSL — offered by companies such as AT&T Inc., CenturyLink Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. — rely on telephone lines but typically don’t offer broadband speeds. Americans can get Internet on their smart phones, but the faster connections on those phones aren’t widely available and come with data caps that most people use up quickly. Cable and fiber connections, those offered by Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc. and Verizon’s fiber-optic cable service mostly in cities, offer the faster speeds. But they aren’t available everywhere either — especially in low-income areas.
It’s that sort of fast cable or fiber connection that Brown says he needs to earn thousands of dollars more a month like he used to when he lived in another part of the county that had a fast connection —before a family matter caused financial difficulties and he had to move.
“It would be like when you are in a hole, it would be that nice rope ladder being lowered down to you so you can get yourself out,” Brown said. “That’s exactly what it would feel like for us.”
For now, though, that ladder lies just out of reach, less than five miles away on River Road, one of the main thoroughfares that roughly follows the James River, which flows east to and through Richmond. That’s where Comcast, the high-speed broadband provider for much of Goochland County, ends its high-speed Internet service. It also happens to be almost exactly where the median household income drops by more than a third and the poverty rate triples, according to the Center’s analysis.
That’s not the only place Comcast ends service at the doorstep of this low-income area. The same happens on Riddles Bridges Road just another two miles away. And again farther north on Forest Grove Road, where Comcast serves neighborhoods with $300,000-plus homes: service stops a few thousand feet before the line where poor neighborhoods start — such as a low-income black community a little more than a mile away. Here Internet access “is nonexistent,” said a young resident who declined to give his name. “It’s primitive out here.”
Internet providers say they don’t consider demographic data such as income levels and poverty rates when deciding where to hook up neighborhoods. Who gets a wired Internet connection and who doesn’t is one mostly based on population density, they say. Areas like where the Browns live are too sparsely populated for telecommunications companies to make a return on the high cost of wiring rural neighborhoods, they say. Comcast officials add that they are following a specific franchise agreement the company negotiated with Goochland County officials, which requires them to lay cable down streets only where there are 30 houses per mile.
Even so, it’s hard for Manuel Alvarez, a county supervisor who represents the district where the Browns live, to look at where Internet service ends and not wonder if Comcast purposefully avoids providing broadband to Goochland County’s poor.
“I can't believe that they wouldn't look at people's ability to pay before they run cable,” said Alvarez, who won a seat on the board in 2011 running on a platform to improve Internet access countywide. “I do believe that they run cable where they will get their money back.”
Not Even a Choice
Nationwide, families in neighborhoods with median household incomes below $34,800 — the lowest fifth of neighborhoods nationally — are five times more likely not to have access to broadband than households in areas with a median income above $80,700 — the top fifth, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation. The Center, which analyzed Federal Communications Commission and Census Bureau data, specifically looked at households that didn’t have access to wired broadband, which is fast Internet service that is readily available, as opposed to adoption, when a household has access to service and can choose to purchase it or not.
In Houston, high-speed Internet service becomes patchy between Interstate-69 and the Westpark Tollway, skipping clusters of apartment complexes where the median household income is less than $30,000 a year. Wealthier neighborhoods to the north, south and west enjoy more consistent coverage. Low-income residents in an area in East Cleveland don’t have access while wealthy areas just two miles away to the south do, according to the Center’s analysis. And in San Bernardino, California, people living in areas that have the lowest fifth of household income are about three times as likely to not have access to broadband as families living in areas where the household income is in the top fifth.
In all, in excess of 30 million Americans, more than half in areas with a median household income below $47,000 a year, do not have access to broadband, according to the Center’s analysis. That means difficulty streaming video or downloading or posting large files such as graphics and photographs, as Brown experiences. If more than one person in a household is online, interruptions can occur. And these families won’t be able to take advantage of future applications, such as home health care apps, that may require fast speeds to work properly.
“Internet access is the civil rights issue of our time.”James Lane, superintendent of Goochland County Public Schools
The Center’s findings closely match the FCC’s conclusion in its Broadband Progress Report, released in January. (The Center used more recent data that was released after the agency published its findings.) The FCC’s report was the basis for a commission ruling the same month that Internet providers weren’t deploying broadband in a reasonable and timely fashion, as required by law, opening up the possibility the agency may impose regulations to require providers to upgrade and expand their networks faster.
Compounding Difficulties
Many broadband experts and analysts say the real explanation for the difference in Internet access between the rich and poor is that providers can’t afford to wire rural areas, which have a larger proportion of low-income families than urban areas. Wiring rural areas is expensive, and providers can’t get enough return on investment because there are too few households to support the cost. Low-income households also tend to sign up for Internet service at less than half the rate of wealthier families, with the high cost of broadband connections the primary deterrent, according to the Pew Research Center. The providers are businesses, after all, goes the argument, and those businesses have the right to make money, and choose where to do business based on whether they can make a profit there or not. Last year, Comcast earned almost $12 billion in net operating income on its cable communications business.
The Center found that even controlling for population density, the rural poor are still in excess of one-and-a-half times as likely not to have high-speed broadband as rural wealthy families. Even in urban areas where 94 percent of households have access, low-income families are three times as likely not to have access as the wealthiest urban families, the Center found.
Eleanor Bell Fox/Center for Public IntegrityJames Lane, superintendent of Goochland County Public Schools.
Tanisha Fletcher is one of the nearly 7 percent of city residents who don’t have access. Fletcher, 36, is a resident of Juniper Gardens, one of the oldest public housing projects in Kansas City, Kansas. Time Warner Cable provides service for the buildings all around her block, but not for her apartment building, according to the FCC broadband database. Fletcher, 36, has to rely on a wireless connection that she said freezes so often that “it might as well be non-existent.”
Even though Fletcher earns just $1,100 a month as the office manager at Connecting for Good, a nonprofit that works with Internet providers to connect low-income areas, she said she would be willing to pay $20 or more a month for a connection so she could finish her college degree and stay in touch with family and friends.
“We kind of get looked over here, and I don’t really know why that it is,” Fletcher said. “It makes us feel like the cable company and the city just don’t care about us.”
Time Warner Cable did not respond to a request for comment.
The FCC maintains that disproportionate access between low- and high-income Americans is a top concern. The FCC said policies directed toward improving access in rural areas, like its rural healthcare fund, and a fund to connect schools and libraries are aimed at reducing the wealthy-poor divide. The FCC additionally says it imposes conditions in mergers between telecommunications companies that typically require a purchasing company to provide better access to the poor, such as with AT&T’s purchase of satellite provider DirectTV last year. And the FCC also has acted to reduce barriers to broadband expansion into unserved areas, as it did in preempting two state laws that prevented cities from expanding municipal-owned Internet networks, arguing the statutes limited broadband’s reach to rural areas and the poor.
“A lot of people say, well life is unfair, but I feel like there's a difference between unfair and the necessity of it.”Crystal Ware, mother of a fifth grader who doesn’t have Internet access at home
But not explicitly focusing on the digital divide between the wealthy and the poor can have significant adverse circumstances, said Sharon Strover, director of the Technology and Information Policy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, who studies broadband’s impact on economic growth. .
In a 2013 study, Strover and her co-authors found that poverty rates in areas with a high-speed connection were significantly lower than those that didn’t have broadband. Median incomes also were higher in counties where adoption rates were above average.
“I think some of the difficulties that lower-income folks have now will just be compounded” if they don’t have access to high-speed broadband, Strover said.
The Digital Dividing Line
In Goochland, county leaders and residents are well aware that broadband access ends at the same place where incomes drop, and the poverty rate and percentage of minorities increase.
The wealthy area starts in the eastern part of the county, which abuts some of the most luxurious Richmond suburbs, where the median income is above $100,000 a year. Million dollar-plus estates with waterfront views sit close by to the exclusive private Kinloch Golf Club, with its Tudor-style clubhouse. Capital One Financial Corp., the eighth-largest U.S. bank, operates a sprawling 316-acre business campusabout a five-minute drive away. Residents here have a choice of buying Internet service from Comcast or Verizon, with speeds reaching as high as 500 Mbps, among some of the fastest available nationwide.
Eleanor Bell Fox/Center for Public IntegrityManuel Alvarez, a Goochland county supervisor.
But travel west and cross the halfway point of the county — past the recently built Goochland High School and just beyond Dogtown Road — and broadband mostly stops. No longer can you get Comcast’s fastest connection of 150 Mbps, and Verizon’s fastest speed drops from the 500 Mbps in the east to a sluggish 3 Mbps, to eventually no service at all. For sure, the county is more rural here, making it more costly for providers to lay cable or fiber, acknowledges Lane, the school superintendent.
At the same time, he says, “We know that in our community the fiber stops right at the moment where our low-income students are living.”
And the effects, he says, are profound. Three years ago, the school system began giving a laptop or iPad to each student. Teachers incorporate the devices into classroom exercises; in one recent class students searched the Internet to find requirements for their chosen careers. Teachers also would like to assign homework that requires accessing online resources when students leave school. But because many students have no broadband at home, the school has implemented a rule that teachers can’t assign homework that depends on the Internet. Even so, students without Internet are falling behind, Lane said.
“The kids who have access are learning anytime, anywhere they want to,” said Lane, who will become the superintendent of schools for neighboring Chesterfield County in July. “But the kids who don't have access at home, basically their learning stops at the moment they leave the school house.”
Like Cody Ware. A 12-year-old fifth-grader at Goochland’s Byrd Elementary School who likes science, Cody said the lack of Internet makes him nervous because he is afraid he may miss an assignment. “If I forget to take a picture of my homework on the iPad, then I can't do it on the iPad later that night because I don't have it,” he said. “And then I have to explain to my teachers why I didn't have it.”
Cody’s mother, Crystal, 38, said the family can’t afford to move to the part of the county with broadband access, even though it’s just a couple miles away. She recently had to make the hour-long, round-trip drive to the closest library so her son could download a study guide for an upcoming science test.
“A lot of people say, well life is unfair, but I feel like there's a difference between unfair and the necessity of it,” Ware said.
‘Bent on Regulating’
The FCC has the authority to determine if providers are deploying Internet service in a “reasonable and timely fashion,” as outlined in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. When the agency sees barriers to deployment, it has argued it can act in the public interest, as it did when it preempted the state laws barring cities from expanding their networks.
But the market for Internet service remains close to a monopoly in many places, and at best a duopoly in most areas. About 75 percent Americans have only one or two choices for providers, according to the FCC. And many providers tend to avoid competition that could lead to expansion of the networks, according to an earlier Center investigation.
When the FCC ruled that broadband wasn’t being deployed fast enough, it reported that “deployment, competition, and adoption [are] concepts that we continue to recognize are tightly linked.” But Internet providers such as AT&T and Verizon argued the opposite. They said the FCC’s own reporting showed the percentage of Americans without wired broadband access dropped from 28 percent in 2011 to 10 percent in 2014.
AT&T said in a filing that the FCC was “ignoring that this percentage was declining rapidly.” Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, one of two Republicans on the five-member commission, voted against the FCC’s finding that broadband was not being deployed fast enough. He said the FCC’s report “continues to show steady progress in connecting unserved Americans” and that “apparently no amount of progress will ever be good enough for a Commission that is bent on regulating broadband at all cost.”
Verizon claimed in a filing that the FCC should include wireless access in its assessment of broadband access, arguing the failure to incorporate “all broadband options that are available to and used by consumers was a persistent flaw in methodology.”
But the FCC also ruled in January that satellite and wireless connections were not a substitute for wired connections.
And back in Goochland County, most folks seem to agree. Superintendent Lane called O’Rielly’s assertion “ridiculous” and said Verizon’s claim that wireless should be considered in the broadband-access calculations isn’t feasible.
“Do you think that you could do your entire job on your cell phone?” asked Lane. “Because I can tell you that most people would say that you cannot.”
“We want to service as many people as possible.”Comcast Corp. official
Comcast officials said they do not use Census Bureau income or poverty data to determine where the company lays cable. Comcast conducts periodic surveys of the county to check where they need to provide service. Officials also said the company’s program to provide low-cost Internet connections is aimed at increasing adoption, although it doesn’t improve access to broadband. By serving urban areas, “arguably we provide service to more families in poverty or near poverty,” a Comcast official said. “We want to service as many people as possible.”
In Goochland County, similar to other areas, the company is obligated to follow a franchise agreement it negotiated with the county in 2011. These agreements, which number in the thousands nationwide, are typically renegotiated every several years. In Goochland County, that is a time when residents fill up the room where the board of supervisors meet to complain about lack of service, Alvarez said, but local boards typically don’t have a lot of power to negotiate expanded service into areas that are high-cost, which frequently also means low-income.
AT&T and Verizon, as well as Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink and Charter Communications Inc., didn’t respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for Cox Communications Inc., which provides service in more than a dozen states from Rhode Island to California, said in an email that “100% of the residents in the markets we serve have access to Internet service if they choose it” and that the company follows agreements negotiated with local governments.
The Cost of Access
In many areas where Comcast runs cable, residents don’t have broadband access. Under its agreement, Comcast isn’t obligated to run a line from the street down a homeowner’s or renter’s driveway if the house sits more than 150 feet off the road.
The provision keeps even wealthier Goochland residents from getting connected. When Alvarez, the county supervisor, moved in 2004 to a Goochland neighborhood where many of the homes are valued at more than $500,000, he didn’t have fixed Internet, even though a cable ran down the road a few hundred feet from his driveway in the Mill Forest subdivision. Alvarez said local Comcast officials told him it would cost $2,300 to run a cable to his house and $250,000 to wire the entire neighborhood of more than 120 homes. Eventually, Comcast came down to $47,000 for the subdivision, or about $450 a house, Alvarez said. Most of the neighborhood residents paid the fee to get connected.
Alvarez, whose district he says includes “houses with dirt floors to houses with marble floors,” said Comcast and other providers should pay to connect homes where lines are readily available because the companies will eventually recoup their costs. He says the lack of Internet is also hurting job growth in the western part of the county, as businesses can’t get the fast speeds needed to compete in the modern economy.
Center for Public Integrity
What it all means, Alvarez asserts, is that high-speed Internet is really a “must have” in today’s world, not a luxury. The Internet is becoming a utility that is as much of a necessity as electricity, and that means the federal government may have to regulate it as one, he said.
“Then you can push for more coverage,” Alvarez said. Otherwise, he says, “Everybody who doesn't have high-speed Internet is going to fall behind.”
A Lifeline?
Last month the FCC passed reforms to a program that officials said should encourage providers to expand broadband to low-income areas. In a party-line vote, the agency voted 3-2 to expand the Lifeline program, which previously had subsidized the cost of cell phones for low-income individuals, to include fixed Internet service. Eligible participants can receive a $9.25 a month discount off their fixed broadband bill, paid for by the FCC. Officials hope the $2.25 billion program, funded by the existing universal service tax on customers’ Internet bills, will create a market in poor areas that Internet providers will want to reach.
FCC officials note that the agency’s $4 billion-a-year “high-cost” universal service program also includes subsidies to encourage wiring areas underserved by providers. The $1.7 billion Connect America Fund requires providers who accept money to offer a speed of at least 10 Mbps download as well as follow other requirements. But not all providers have accepted the cash. Verizon was offered $29 million in federal funds to expand service in Virginia, including about $265,000 in Goochland, but it didn’t take the money, according to the FCC. Other providers did, such as CenturyLink. Verizon didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“I can't believe that they wouldn't look at people's ability to pay before they run cable.”Manuel Alvarez, member of Goochland County’s Board of Supervisors
But some are skeptical of how much these programs will help. It is unlikely Lifeline will provide a big enough incentive to providers to upgrade networks or to expand wired service to poor areas.
Lifeline’s individual subsidy “is unlikely to make a dent in the under-supply of broadband in sparsely populated rural areas,” said Richard Bennett, who studies technology policy at the American Enterprise Institute, in an email. “Solutions to the extreme rural coverage dilemma are more likely to come from advances in technology and investment by public-private partnerships to bring new technologies … to market.”
Bennett said wireless broadband companies such as Bluebird Broadband, which offers service with no data caps, are likely one option for low-income households going forward. Bluebird Broadband, which services Northwest Louisiana and neighboring parts of Texas, offers a 20 Mbps package for about $89 a month, including a $9 router rental fee. That’s still more costly than most wired connections with faster speeds.
In Virginia, Last Mile Broadband LLC has begun to deploy an advanced wireless LTE technology to serve portions of Hanover County, just north of Goochland, that it says is faster and more reliable than current wireless technology. The company plans to cover Goochland County by the end of 2017. The company will offer speeds of 10 Mbps at about $80 a month, after a $199 fee to install equipment on a customer’s home, without any data caps.
“We’re going where no other company serves,” said Keith McMichael, Last Mile’s chief operating officer, who grew up in the area. “We’re trying to solve everyone’s problem. Low income or high income, everyone gets it the same way.”
But the cost may still be out of reach for low-income families, and the service doesn’t include TV or phone, requiring families to pay for a TV or satellite package with another company. Most providers that offer a wired broadband connection of 25 Mbps or more charge less per month and include phone and TV. Besides, the wireless companies are still in startup mode and have yet to spend the money to expand coverage.
Back in Goochland, Brown, the toy maker, says he can’t wait much longer.
“Our kids need this,” Brown said. “If wealthy people have better access, they're going to have more opportunities, which will increase their potential for wealth. While if you are in poverty and you have reduced access, you're going to basically fall further behind.”
CORRECTION, May 12, 2016, 4:22 p.m.:An earlier version of this article identified Ashley Brown as working for the Goochland County department of education. She works for the Virginia Department of Education.
The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative reporting organization. Verizon is the parent company of AOL, which owns The Huffington Post.
Parental leave hit a tipping point last year, as numerous big-name firms expanded paid time off for new moms and dads. But top-notch benefits are still far from becoming the norm.
Just 21 percent of companies offered paid maternity leave in 2015, and 17 percent offered paid paternity leave. That same year, Netflix, Facebook and Goldman Sachs made headlines when they announced generous packages for employees seeking to spend time with their new families. So did Microsoft, Credit Suisse and Adobe, as the tech and finance industries continued to beef up their already above-average leave polices.
Tech and finance workers seem pretty happy with their benefits -- and why shouldn't they be? Employees in those two sectors give high ratings to their maternity and paternity leave options, according to career site Glassdoor, which recently analyzed data on corporate benefits across various industries.
Finance workers rated their parental leave benefits 3.77 out of 5, and tech employees followed with a 3.71 rating -- the best scores of any sector examined by Glassdoor. The lowest-rated leave policies were in health care (3.36), retail (3.41) and business services (3.42).
Of course, tech and finance workers are well-compensated even before benefits kick in. Base salaries in the banking industry are around $80,000, and those for software engineers start from around $100,000.
When an employee's income “gets beyond a certain level, they look for things beyond a paycheck,” Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor, told The Huffington Post. “They start to worry about maternity and paternity leave, vacation time and bringing their dog to work.”
That's not to say people who are paid less don't value parental leave options. And as more companies rally in support of working parents, it may give a boost to parental leave policies across the corporate world.
“There’s pack mentality in terms of benefits,” Chamberlain said. “Visible players have taken a lead and made parental leave a standard benefit, and it’s really put a flag in the sand.”
However, as wages stagnate, it’s become more common for employers to instead dole out perks and benefits. Benefits increased by 60 percent over the last 15 years, compared to wage growth of just 40 percent. The move reflects a changing workforce that increasingly values flexibility and health insurance, but it also suggests that companies are still reluctant to hand out bigger paychecks to their employees.
For examples, having free snacks at the office is one of the best-rated perks across industries in Glassdoor's survey. Tech employees rated their snack options a 4.06, followed by high ratings from business services (3.94) and manufacturing (3.90).
“It has become a hot perk in certain quarters,” Chamberlain said.
As abundant and appetizing as they may be, though, free green juice and snacks shouldn’t replace benefits that are actually substantial. Those perks are ultimately much cheaper than health care, paid time off and dollar-for-dollar 401(k) matching.
The findings from Glassdoor’s study, however, seem to indicate that many companies are still successfully luring employees with free food. And that, sadly, is consistent with a recent report that found young workers are more likely to get free food from their employer than medical and dental insurance.
Self-driving vehicles are already hitting highways and city streets around the world.
Now Volvo wants to put them underground.
The Swedish automaker on Monday announced plans to test a fully autonomous construction truck designed to navigate subterranean mines.
“We are delighted to have already developed a solution that we believe will ultimately revolutionize the mining industry,” Torbjörn Holmström, the chief technology officer of Volvo’s truck group, said in a statement. “We expect to be able to significantly increase our customers’ productivity while at the same time improving fuel efficiency and safety.”
The vehicle looks like a regular dump truck and includes a cab section where a driver could sit and take over the wheel. The project is a joint venture between Volvo and its fellow Swedish carmaker Saab, which owns the software firm, Combitech, that helped develop the technology.
The truck travels a preprogrammed route with no human oversight, using sensors and GPS to navigate around fixed and movable obstacles and communicating data it gathers to a transport system hub. That system is the real thing Volvo seems to be selling. In theory, a commercially viable product wouldn’t be the vehicle itself but a network that controls a fleet of vehicles that work in tandem.
Volvo spokesman Fredrik Klevenfeldt did not respond to a call and email requesting comment.
The announcement comes amid a push, largely by European automakers, to develop autonomous vehicles for commercial use. Last month, the Dutch government held the European Truck Platooning Challenge, a weeklong competition that sent about a dozen semi-autonomous trucks driving across Europe. While companies such as Tesla Motors, Uber and Google have pioneered technology for personal self-driving vehicles, autonomous construction and shipping trucks, as Quartz’s Joon Ian Wong notes, “have been quietly putting the concept to work in a business setting.”
Indeed, there’s a strong business case for adopting fleets of self-driving trucks. Autonomous vehicles travel in a pack -- called a “platoon” -- communicating with each other via WiFi, which allows them to drive closer together at algorithmically calculated speeds. Platooning can slash fuel use by up to 15 percent and prevent accidents caused by human error, according to a study by the research firm TNO.
Autonomous trucks could obviate the need for human participation in one of the world’s most difficult industries. Factors like irregular hours, stress and limited access to healthy food or opportunities to get up and move around all combine to degrade truck drivers’ health. Long-haul truck drivers have greater risks of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and obesity compared to average U.S. workers, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Industry incentives to get cargo to its destination as quickly as possible leave drivers fatigued, turning their big rigs into giant high-speed weapons if they drift off behind the wheel. And in the United States, at least, watered-down regulations only seem to be making things worse.
Mining can be even more disastrous than trucking. Though mining deaths have plummeted in the U.S., in part because mining jobs have decreased, catastrophes periodically capture headlines around the globe. Two years ago, Turkey suffered its worst industrial accident ever when 301 miners in Soma died, some of them burned alive. Last year, a harrowing 2010 Chilean mining disaster was dramatized in a Hollywood movie. Just last week, at least 13 people were killed in an accident at a jade mine in Myanmar.
“It’s a shifting and upgrading of skills; we’re moving from primitive work to advanced work,” Philip Kirchlechner, who spent years in the iron mining industry, told Australia’s ABC last year after a local mining company rolled out about 30 robotic trucks at two of its locations. “By eliminating those mundane, often dangerous jobs, you create safer and more sophisticated jobs.”
AUSTIN, Texas, May 9 (Reuters) - On-demand ride companies Uber and Lyft suspended their services in Austin, Texas, on Monday after a stinging loss in a weekend vote where they had spent heavily to repeal a city ordinance requiring them to conduct fingerprint background checks for their drivers.
The defeat in Austin could encourage other cities to back the fingerprint-based criminal background checks, knowing they can survive a bruising political battle, analysts said. Voters in the city of about 900,000 people said by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent they wanted fingerprint checks to stay.
In their efforts to repeal the requirement approved by the City Council in December, Uber and Lyft contributed about $9 million to a political action group called Ridesharing Works for Austin, finance reports showed.
Their spending, about 85 times larger than their opponents', worked out to more than $200 for each vote they received in support of their losing position.
Uber and Lyft have said their existing background checks are thorough and ensure safety, seeing the fingerprint checks as an unnecessary regulation.
After the results of what was called Proposition 1 in Austin, Lyft said it would halt service on Monday and Uber threatened to do the same. On Monday, both had suspended services, the City of Austin said.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler, who opposed the move by Uber and Lyft to get rid of fingerprinting, said the city "remains open to talking with Lyft and Uber whether they are operating in Austin or not."
The Austin election marked the first time a major U.S. city has put the regulations to a vote. The vote was conducted after a petition drive by Ridesharing Works, the political group underwritten by Uber and Lyft.
Uber said it may look for changes in state law after the loss in Austin.
In Iowa, Governor Terry Branstad on Monday signed into law a measure setting up new statewide guidelines for ride-hailing companies, requiring them to conduct driver background checks and for drivers to carry liability insurance.
Other places where the company is battling over fingerprints include Atlanta and Houston.
In April, Uber threatened to leave Houston unless the city dropped the regulation. The city has not backed down, and a study it conducted found background checks by Uber and Lyft often missed felonies, including sexual assaults.
New York is the only other major city requiring the fingerprint checks where Uber operates. Chicago and Los Angeles are considering the checks. (Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Additional reporting by Justin Madden in Chicago; Editing by Frances Kerry and Alan Crosby)
In December of 2015, a group of women started to get together over dinners and coffees to talk about diversity in the tech industry.
Over time, they formalized their ideas and on Tuesday launched Project Include, a website aimed at helping executives in the tech sector diversify their workforces. It's essentially a one-stop shop for solutions to the industry's diversity problem.
Eight women, all with impressive tech-related day jobs, signed on to the project. The headline name is Ellen Pao, who has been, willingly or not, a public face of the fight against homogeneity in the tech industry in recent years. She sued the venture capital firm she worked for, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, for gender discrimination in 2012 and lost in a very public trial in 2015. She was also the CEO of Reddit for a brief period in 2014 and 2015, but resigned after the site's users initiated a harassment campaign against her.
Some of Project Include's other members are senior Slack engineer Erica Joy Baker, engineer and startup advisor bethanye McKinney Blount and venture capitalist Freada Kapor Klein.
Project Include encourages such teams to think critically about where their company could do better and to focus on the recommendations that apply to them. The site includes a set of 60 or so recommendations for how company management teams can approach diversity.
These recommendations fall into seven categories: defining culture, implementing culture, employee lifecycle (which includes everything from hiring to compensation to promotions), training, resolving conflicts, measuring progress and leading as VCs.
"You can't keep shoving people into companies but not building a culture that helps them be successful," Baker told The Huffington Post. "Our project focuses on all aspects of the diversity and inclusion issues that need to be addressed."
One major Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Chris Sacca, has already expressed interest publicly on Twitter.
@EricaJoy @blackfounders I just filled out the form! Heard about this yesterday from my pal @ekp. And I love @triketora. Whoa team.
— Chris Sacca (@sacca) May 3, 2016
The site's information is based on a combination of the groups's own experiences and available research on how to best avoid things like bias in the workplace. Recommendations that appear on the website offer footnoted links to research supporting each point and include tips like "define and share clear compensation bands" and "write inclusive job descriptions."
Inclusive job descriptions are important, the site notes, because they can communicate to applicants subtle information about who the ideal candidate is. For example, listing perks like ping-pong tables and game rooms give the implication that the target is young, white men. On the other hand, the site says that "including 'salary negotiable' in a job description reduces the gender wage gap by 45 percent."
The goal is to help Silicon Valley better represent the rest of the country.
"At this point there is rigorous research, and rigorous analytics, that point to increased profitability that comes from diversity [at a company]," Kapor Klein told HuffPost.
People often think of Silicon Valley as the closest approximation of a libertarian utopia. It doesn't matter if you graduated college or want to wear sweats to work: If you're smart and work hard, you can succeed.
"If they really believe that, what is keeping them from acting on rigorous data that says they are shooting themselves in the foot?" asked Kapor Klein, who says she would like to see companies get to a place where their workforces reflect the diversity of their customers.
Baker goes even further than Kapor Klein in describing her goals for the project: "There are a lot of companies whose customer bases aren’t very diverse. I would like to see companies reflect their environment," she told HuffPost.
The women behind Project Include say they realize that the tech industry has a unique way of doing things, and it's important to think about diversity in a way that is congruent with the quick-paced, always adapting ethos of the industry.
"We're doing it the way tech does, which is fast and accessible," said Pao.
The website is minimalist and could be read in its entirety in a couple of hours. And in its simplicity, Project Include is also trying to be different.
"You see tech companies now trying to do a lot of things that finance and banking companies did in the '90s," said Baker. "If you don’t learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it."
There are two things that set this new push for diversity apart, says Kapor Klein.
First, America is simply getting less white. That means a more diverse customer base, more diversity (hopefully) in the applicant pool and a relatively easier path to a diverse workforce.
Second, there's been more psychology and management research about how bias works. We have a better understanding of how hidden biases affect everything from hiring to mentorship to promotion. And knowing about these things means being able to invent ways around them.
In that way, Kapor Klein thinks tech can also be a big part of the diversity solution.
(Reuters) - No one won the multi-state Powerball on Wednesday as the jackpot grew to at least $415 million, vaulting it into the top 10 highest U.S. lottery prizes in history, officials said.
The winning numbers from Wednesday's draw were 30, 47, 57, 66, 69 and the Powerball number was 3, lottery officials said.
The Powerball jackpot has grown past $300 million for the first time since January, when three tickets for the game split $1.6 billion, a record for any U.S. lottery.
Seventeen consecutive drawings have produced no winner, lottery officials said.
The odds of winning at Powerball are one in 292 million, which according to statistics experts is equivalent to flipping a coin 28 times and getting heads every time.
According to the Powerball website, no one matched all six numbers and won the jackpot on Wednesday as the prize reached about $415 million. The amount placed it in the top 10 of U.S. lottery prizes ever, California lottery spokesman Alex Traverso said. The next drawing would be on Saturday.
Powerball is played in 44 states, including California, which is the nation's most populous state, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Even as lottery officials gear up for this latest drawing, they are still waiting for one ticket holder to come forward from the record $1.6 billion Powerball drawing in January.
Lottery officials still have no idea who bought the ticket, sold in Chino Hills east of Los Angeles, Traverso said. Under the rules of the game, the holder has a year from the time of the drawing to claim a prize.
The two other winning tickets were sold in Tennessee and Florida, and those winners have come forward.
The Obama administration thinks the Department of Education division responsible for overseeing colleges, managing the student debt crisis and policing loan contractors has done such a good job that it secretly reappointed its chief to a new five-year term.
James Runcie, chief operating officer of the department’s Federal Student Aid office, received the reappointment on Dec. 23 from former Education Secretary Arne Duncan, department spokeswoman Dorie Nolt said. It was one of Duncan’s final acts in office before he left the administration at the end of last year. Because Runcie’s term by law has to be between three and five years, he’s likely to outlast the Obama administration and continue into the next one.
But Runcie’s tenure has been marked by a series of notable debacles -- from the collapse of for-profit college chain Corinthian Colleges Inc. amid a wave of allegations it systematically deceived students about their future job prospects to preliminary findings by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that student loan borrowers are routinely mistreated by loan companies Runcie’s division pays and oversees.
Earlier this month, a group of 29 state attorneys general confidentially alleged that one Runcie-overseen contractor, student loan giant Navient Corp., violated state laws banning unfair or abusive practices by paying call center workers based on how quickly they could get struggling borrowers off the phone. Breaking state consumer laws would constitute a violation of Navient’s lucrative contract with Runcie’s division.
At least 1.2 million Americans last year defaulted on federal student loans serviced by Runcie-overseen contractors, federal data show, despite the fact that every one of them was eligible to make monthly payments based on their earnings. More Americans defaulted on the most common type of federal student loan during the final six months of last year than began making payments under White House-promoted income-based repayment plans.
The department didn’t publicize Runcie’s reappointment, unlike his initial hiring in September 2011. Nolt didn’t explain why he was rehired or provide any additional details, despite several requests from The Huffington Post, and Runcie was not made available for an interview. Duncan didn’t respond to messages seeking comment sent to his new employer, Emerson Collective, or the talent group Creative Artists Agency, for which he commands a $40,000 speaking fee. College lobbyists, student advocates and congressional aides active in higher education matters said they weren’t aware of Runcie’s reappointment.
Runcie's division "has made significant strides" in helping borrowers and improving customer service, Education Undersecretary Ted Mitchell said in a prepared statement after this story was published. "Even one default is too many, and much work remains. That’s why Jim’s continued leadership -- especially across a period of transition between administrations -- is so crucial."
Yuri Gripas / ReutersPresident Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in 2012. One of Duncan's last acts before leaving office in 2015 was reappointing James Runcie, despite various student loan issues during his tenure.
Runcie helped shepherd the federal government’s transition from the old bank-based federal student loan program to one in which only the government itself lends directly to students and their parents, saving taxpayers billions of dollars. And his division simplified the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, helping millions of students.
Runcie's division "has made significant strides" in helping borrowers and improving customer service, Education Undersecretary Ted Mitchell said in a prepared statement after this story was published. "Even one default is too many, and much work remains. That’s why Jim’s continued leadership -- especially across a period of transition between administrations -- is so crucial."
But over the past few years, lawmakers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) have joined consumer groups in severely criticizing Runcie’s division for a variety of reasons, from missing contractors' allegedly pervasive abuse of federal student loan borrowers to ignoring claims that some giant for-profit colleges were defrauding students and taxpayers.
Meanwhile, Runcie and his top lieutenants receive lavish bonuses and relatively handsome salaries, with one bonus totaling $75,000 last year, nearly double the top bonus three years earlier, federal records show. The typical Federal Student Aid employee is paid more than $100,000 annually, close to 33 percent more than the typical federal employee.
Lawmakers and student loan experts have also assailed Runcie’s division for fostering a culture that ignores criticism and resists oversight.
Federal Student Aid suffers from “deep-seated culture issues” that don’t prioritize supervision and enforcement, said Suzanne Martindale, a staff attorney at Consumers Union who advises the Education Department on student loan issues. “The department has a long way to go to actually consider students as the people they are supposed to protect, rather than colleges,” she said.
Under Runcie’s watch, the federal consumer bureau sued two giant for-profit college chains alleging they misled students about their success at placing graduates in their fields; hundreds of debtors publicly declared they’d stop making payments on their federal student loans; and government investigators from other agencies routinely slammed Runcie’s division for failing to aid distressed borrowers and protect students, or they unearthed evidence of mistreatment that Runcie’s deputies missed.
David Goldman/APShane Satterfield, a roofer who owes more than $30,000 in debt for an associates degree in computer science, holds his Everest diploma in March 2016. "I graduated in April at the top of my class, with honors," he said. "And I cant get a job paying over $8.50 an hour." Corinthian Colleges operated the Everest chain before it filed for bankruptcy in 2015.
Earlier this year, Runcie conceded that even though his division has long had subpoena power to compel dodgy colleges to turn over documents, “we haven’t leveraged that.”
The Education Department has a “see no evil, hear no evil” philosophy toward its loan contractors, said Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
“You are harming the people you are supposed to be helping, and that has to stop,” Foxx told Runcie in November.
Take Federal Student Aid’s relationship with Navient, the nation’s largest student loan company which formerly was known as Sallie Mae. In contrast to the state attorneys general group, and the federal consumer bureau, which already has told Navient it has amassed enough evidence to indicate the company violated federal law, Runcie’s division has gone out of its way to maintain its relationship with the company.
After federal prosecutors in 2014 accused Navient of breaking the law by intentionally overcharging active-duty servicemembers on their federal student loans, Runcie’s division cleared it of wrongdoing. The department’s inspector general later determined that Federal Student Aid’s findings were based on a bogus investigation, and that the Education Department misled the public when it proclaimed the company didn’t cheat troops.
Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesStudents hold placards as they stage a demonstration at the Hunter College, which is a part of New York City University, to protest ballooning student loan debt for higher education and rally for tuition-free public colleges in New York on Nov. 13, 2015. At least 1.2 million Americans defaulted last year on federal student loans.
In that case, Federal Student Aid concluded that Navient committed no wrongdoing without listening to recordings of calls between the company’s customer service representatives and troops who had tried to assert their right to a cheaper loan under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act. State attorneys general based their still-confidential allegations against Navient in part on a review of call recordings.
“How many borrowers do they have to hurt before we shut down the gravy train?” Warren said in a heavily shared Facebook post last week in reference to state prosecutors’ allegations against Navient and the company’s contract with the Education Department. “It’s long past time for the department to hold Navient accountable for routinely ignoring the law.”
State prosecutors’ allegations against Navient are inaccurate, Navient spokeswoman Patricia Christel said. “The facts are that Navient has a long public and well-documented record of assisting borrowers to successfully manage their student loans.”
Education Department spokeswoman Kelly Leon said the department “won’t hesitate to take action if any servicer is mistreating loan borrowers.” The department has promised to again revamp its contracts with companies such as Navient -- a 2014 fix was supposed to correct bad behavior -- and increase its scrutiny of colleges and loan contractors.
Even the White House has implored Runcie’s division to do more to help student loan borrowers. “We can and should do much more to give students affordable ways to meet their responsibilities and repay their loans,” Obama wrote in a memorandum last year.
The White House is in a “mad scramble to clean up a years-long mess,” Martindale said.
This story was updated with a comment from Education Undersecretary Ted Mitchell.
Many of the largest U.S. investment funds, including pensions, are doing nothing to protect their investors' savings from the financial risks posed by climate change, according to an analysis by the Asset Owners Disclosure Project, a nonprofit. At least 117 American funds, with a combined $4.6 trillion in assets, have taken no action to mitigate the risks associated with a warming planet.
“It simply isn’t professional for the funds to do nothing,” Julian Poulter, the group's CEO, told The Huffington Post.
Indeed, there have been warning signs for quite some time that big investors, from a purely financial perspective, need to think hard about fossil fuels. The S&P 500 stock index is up around 50 percent from 10 years ago. Oil stocks over the same period are up just over 1 percent.
And business is arguably only going to get harder. Global financial regulators are starting to work out a standard system for companies to voluntarily disclose climate risks, the governor of the Bank of England has warned insurance companies that they're at risk of being wiped out by climate change, and Saudi Arabia wants to kick its oil habit.
A 2013 report from England's Institute and Faculty of Actuaries found that under business-as-usual policies, resource scarcity associated with a changing climate could stall the global economy and cause pension funds to be unable to pay out benefits.
So what should a prudent pension fund manager do? “There are many ways to skin the climate-risk cat,” Poulter said. Funds can engage with fossil fuel companies and try to push companies to deal with the climate-related risk they face. Or they can choose to screen out companies that haven’t come to grips with that risk. They can invest in renewable energy firms and other companies that will prosper in a low-emissions world. And since the funds we're talking about are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, they could realistically do a little bit of all of the above.
The point of the analysis isn’t to be prescriptive or legalistic in telling pension funds what they should or shouldn’t do. It’s to push them to understand the reality of the climate risk embedded in their investments, and explain to their members -- whose retirements are on the line -- what they are doing (or not), and why.
What Poulter wants is for pension fund managers to realize that they can’t ignore climate change. When oil is at $43 dollars a barrel, the Paris agreement is striving to keep global temperatures from rising and “you’ve the likes of Saudi Arabia selling their main asset because they see an oil-free world,” it’s just not acceptablefor pension funds to act like nothing is happening.
