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Tag: Public Assistance

Tag: Public Assistance

Exhausting Our Air: Environmental and Human Costs of Diesel Trucks

September 28, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Sierra Club

California’s mandates to replace diesel trucks with zero-emission electric trucks will bring cleaner air and better jobs – if they stay on track. Slow action by electric utilities and fierce opposition by trucking companies are real threats. Displacement of brick-and-mortar retail stores by online retailing and sprawling warehouses has come at the cost of climate change, bad air, low wages.

Demolishing Homes for Air Cargo: San Bernardino Airport Gateway Plan

June 19, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Sierra Club

The Inland Valley Development Agency plans to convert a 678-acre residential and mixed-use area north of San Bernardino International Airport into 9.2 million-square feet of warehouse and industrial space to create “a thriving jobs center.” This gesture at economic development has already been shown to create poverty-level jobs, economic hardship, and precariously housed workers.

Hungry Cooks: Poverty Wages and Homelessness in the Fast Food Industry

May 1, 2023 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Service Employees International Union (SEIU)

The fast food industry is a poverty employer, with a larger share of its workers in poverty than any other industry. All low-wage workers face some level of risk that they will become homeless. This risk is compounded in the fast food industry by the combination of low wages, part-time work and employee churn. These interlocking hazards undercut workers’ ability to pay their rent.

Breaking the Fall: Successful Homeless Interventions in the Covid Pandemic

December 14, 2022 / By Daniel Flaming, Seth Pickens and Patrick Burns / Economic Roundtable

Breaking the Fall – Covid Interventions Prevented Homelessness Struggling workers are either everyone’s responsibility now or everyone’s problem later. When poorly paid workers become jobless at the thin edge of the job market and then unable to pay rent, homeless destitution follows. In fact, we are equipped with the tools we need to protect workers from the sharper edges of joblessness and to combat homelessness.

Hungry at the Table: White Paper on Grocery Workers at the Kroger Company

January 11, 2022 / By Daniel Flaming, Peter Dreier, Patrick Burns and Aaron Danielson / United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 324, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770

A multi-state survey of Over 37,000 Kroger grocery store employees finds 78% food insecure and 14% homeless

Healthy Terminals: Assessing an Airports Healthcare Benefits Supplement in New Jersey and New York

April 5, 2020 / By Patrick Burns / Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ

Proposed Healthy Terminals Acts in New Jersey and New York would add a healthcare benefits supplement of $4.54 per hour, on top of the current PANYNJ minimum wage, for covered airport workers to use in purchasing quality healthcare. We estimate the legislation would affect 34,533 airport workers at Newark Liberty, LaGuardia and JFK Airports, helping many end dependence upon Medicaid.

Too Big to Govern: Public Balance Sheet for the World’s Largest Store

November 26, 2019 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / Los Angeles County Federation of Labor

Households in the Los Angeles metro region paid $7.2 billion for packages from Amazon.com in 2018. Less publicly visible was more than $790 million paid out in public subsidies and uncompensated public costs that supported Amazon’s profitability. It is time for Amazon to come of age and pay its own way. This means paying its full costs to the communities that host it and the workers who create its profits.

Flying Right: Giving U.S. Airport Workers a Lift

June 21, 2017 / By Patrick Burns, Halil Toros and Daniel Flaming / Service Employees International Union

Creating a $15 minimum wage at U.S. airports will provide transformative economic benefits for low-paid air transportation employees who work 24-7 in a fast-paced, noisy environment, providing essential services for airlines and the traveling public. The $15 wage will also generate job growth in businesses where airport workers spend their wages, lift many out of poverty, reduce dependence on public assistance, and boost tax revenues that pay for crucial government services.

Silicon Valley Triage Tool: Identifying and Housing High-Cost Homeless Residents

February 17, 2016 / By Halil Toros and Daniel Flaming / County of Santa Clara, Destination: Home

Why the Silicon Valley Triage Tool is Important: The number of homeless people needing housing far exceeds the available housing supply, and there is not a fair, objective system for prioritizing who gets to be housed. The triage tool addresses this problem by identifying individuals for whom the solution of housing costs less than the problem of homelessness.

All Alone: Antecedents of Chronic Homelessness

August 25, 2015 / By Daniel Flaming and Patrick Burns / the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation

Public assistance programs are Los Angeles’s primary interface with individuals experiencing homelessness and can be a catalyst for connecting at-risk and homeless recipients with crucial services and reducing the massive public costs associated with chronic homelessness. The vital role is to identify tripwire events among all recipients, particularly children and transition-age youth, and quickly connect at-risk individuals with needed employment, behavioral health and housing services.

Home Not Found: The Cost Of Homelessness In Silicon Valley

May 26, 2015 / By Daniel Flaming, Halil Toros and Patrick Burns / Destination: Home

This report identifies the characteristics of the most vulnerable, distressed and costly homeless residents of Santa Clara County to guide strategies for stabilizing their lives through housing and supportive services, improving their wellbeing and reducing public costs for their care. The county spent $520 million a year providing services for homeless residents over the six years covered by this study. Costs are heavily skewed toward a comparatively small number of frequent users of public and medical services. Individuals with costs in the top 5% accounted for 47 percent of all costs and had average costs of over $100,000 per year.

Dividends of a Hand Up: Public Benefits of Moving Indigent Adults with Disabilities onto SSI

March 1, 2011 / By Daniel Flaming / the Health Consumer Alliance of California

Counties bear large hidden costs for individuals with disabilities who are indigent or homeless. This includes costs for health care, jails and probation in addition to readily identifiable county costs for public assistance. A large share of this cost is health related – costs that the federal and state governments would pay through Medi-Cal if the individuals were receiving Supplemental Social Security Income (SSI).

Ebbing Tides in the Golden State: Impacts of the 2008 Recession on California and Los Angeles County

June 8, 2009 / By Daniel Flaming, Patrick Burns and Michael Matsunaga / Economic Roundtable, the California Endowment

The most concrete characteristic of a recession is that demand disappears for some of the commodities produced by workers and unwanted unemployment is imposed on a large segment of the labor force. With growing job losses in the current recession it is important to know, whose boat falls when the economic tide recedes?

10-Year Strategy to End Homelessness

June 1, 2006 / By Daniel Flaming and Paul Tepper / The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority

A comprehensive strategy with 25 actions, accountable agencies, timelines, and performance benchmarks to prevent and end homelessness in Los Angeles County. From 2002 through 2004 the Economic Roundtable and the Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty at the Weingart Center carried out research, listened to ideas from community stakeholders, and met with public officials in order to prepare this strategic plan for ending homelessness in Los Angeles County.

Photograph by Nebojsa Mladjenovic, "1693 Leave this prison and be free.... ~ Rumi~." Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on December 20, 2013, taken on February 26, 2009. Protected under the CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED license.

Prisoners of Hope: Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

July 1, 2003 / By Patrick Burns, Mark Drayse, Daniel Flaming and Brent Haydamack / Economic Roundtable

Why aren’t more welfare parents becoming economically self-sufficient after participating in the LA County Welfare to Work Program, GAIN (Greater Avenue for Independence)? What has happened to these parents since entering the labor market after GAIN? The answers to these and other questions are presented in “Prisoners of Hope,” a report originally requested by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on December 19, 2000.

Photograph by the Greens MPs, "Laurel Tree House Childcare Centre." Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on May 23, 2013, taken on May 23, 2013 in Glebe NSW 2037, Australia. Protected under the CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED license.

Running Out of Time: Voices of Parents Struggling to Move from Welfare to Work

July 1, 2002 / By Daniel Flaming, Patricia Kwon and Patrick Burns / Economic Roundtable

How do people change their lives? What kinds of help do working poor parents need to lift their families out of poverty? What obstacles do they face in trying to get a sustaining job? More than eight thousand people answered these questions through a survey undertaken to learn directly from working welfare parents and other poor families about the problems they face and the kinds of help they need to become self-sufficient.

Photograph "P1060350-Edit.jpg [Poverty is a Cage]" by Neil Ballantyne. Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on May 29, 2011, taken on May 28, 2011. Protected under the CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED license. The Economic Roundtable has not changed, remixed, transformed, or built upon the material, and is not using it for commercial purposes.

The Cage of Poverty

September 1, 2000 / By Daniel Flaming, Mark Drayse and Peter Force / Economic Roundtable

In his 1963 letter from the Birmingham jail Martin Luther King, Jr. described the despair of people “smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.” It is important to understand the extent to which this image of entrapment still describes the wage-earning lives of the working poor as they try to support their families.

Los Angeles County, Department of Public Social Services, 2014.

On the Edge: A Progress Report on Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

January 1, 1999 / By Daniel Flaming, Mark Drayse and Peter Force / Economic Roundtable

The loss of a welfare safety net for most adults for most of their lives makes the quality of jobs available to the working poor and their success in finding and keeping jobs increasingly important. The economic and civic life of the Los Angeles region will be shaped by connections that are made, or fail to be made, between the growing ranks of working poor and opportunities for steady, sustaining, productive employment.

By the Sweat of Their Brow: Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

January 1, 1998 / By Daniel Flaming, Peter Force, Julie Henly-UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research and Mark Drayse / Economic Roundtable

Welfare reform raises the prickly question of what mix of understanding, support and pragmatic pressure is needed to move welfare recipients into employment. Many workers are scrambling to keep the wolf from their own doors in the face of industry restructuring, rapid technological change, and intense pressures to increase corporate profits.

Photograph "Clondalkin dole protest" by The Workers Party of Ireland (no individual photographer mentioned). Uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons on August 15, 2010, taken on September 10, 2009 outside the Social Welfare Local Office, Clondalkin (County Dublin), Ireland. Protected under the CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED license.

Survival Skills: Welfare to Work in Los Angeles

January 1, 1998 / By Mark Drayse, Cher-Amie Inocentes, Daniel Flaming and Peter Force / Economic Roundtable

Recent welfare reform legislation mandates that aid recipients become employed and economically self-sufficient. The allowable interval of continuous assistance is limited to 24 months for current recipients and 18 months for new recipients, with a lifetime limit of five years on welfare. At least 150,000 current welfare recipients in Los Angeles County must move into the workforce, securing at least partial employment by December 1999.