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October 2022

Housing Justice on the Ballot

Overview

Increasingly, localities are playing a leading role in changing the housing landscape to create just housing futures. Campaigns across the country have used a myriad of tools to change policy—ballot initiatives, ordinances, legislation, or court orders. But each pathway has challenges and benefits that are unique to each jurisdiction. Below we describe recent housing justice wins achieved through the ballot, and upcoming campaigns that are building the momentum for housing justice in November 2022 and beyond.

Just Released: A Blueprint for Workforce Equity in Metro Detroit

Dear Atlas users,

While top-line measures indicate that the US economy has largely bounced back from the Covid-19 pandemic, millions of workers and families across the nation are still reeling. In Detroit, Michigan, local leaders are working across sectors to co-create solutions that advance equity for workers and ensure that families can thrive. The National Equity Atlas remains committed to providing actionable insights and support to those working to ensure racial equity is at the forefront of recovery efforts. Here are more updates:

New Research Reveals that Black Workers Have Borne the Brunt of Metro Detroit’s Inequitable Labor Market and Uneven Economic Growth

In the years following the Great Recession, Metro Detroit showed promise of a strong economic rebound. But our report, produced in partnership with the Detroit Area Workforce Funders Collaborative, illustrates how long-standing racial gaps in income and employment have impacted the region’s workforce and economy: The region has a shortfall of good jobs that do not require a college degree and only 29 percent of the region’s workers hold good jobs. And despite the growing diversity of the region's workforce, workers of color remain crowded in lower paying and lower opportunity occupational groups, while white workers are overrepresented in many higher paying professions. Our research indicates that eliminating racial inequities in employment and wages could boost Detroit’s regional economy by about $28 billion a year. Download the full report — and explore the other regional analyses in our Advancing Workforce Equity project.

Prop 22 Undermines the Pay, Benefits, and Autonomy of California Rideshare Drivers

In their campaign for Prop 22, rideshare companies promised drivers good pay, benefits, and flexibility. But our analysis of real driver data — developed in partnership with Rideshare Drivers United (RDU) — reveals that the law has given these companies a free pass to deny their drivers critical rights and protections. As a result, the average net earnings of rideshare drivers in California are just $6.20 per hour under Prop 22. If rideshare companies were forced to respect drivers’ labor rights, they would earn an average of three times more per hour. Explore more findings in the report.

Atlas in the News

Over the last month, our study with RDU received significant media coverage, which was featured in MarketWatch, WIRED, Tech Times, Mission Local. For more, explore the archive of our news coverage.

- The National Equity Atlas Team at PolicyLink and the USC Equity Research Institute (ERI)
 

September 2022

Advancing Workforce Equity in Metro Detroit: A Blueprint for Action

Overview

In the years following the Great Recession, Metro Detroit showed promise of a strong economic rebound. But new research shows that the region’s recovery was racially uneven, and persistent racial inequities in housing, income, and other key measures of well-being have constrained the region’s economic growth. This report, produced in partnership with the Detroit Area Workforce Funders Collaborative and Lightcast, with support from JPMorgan Chase illustrates how long-standing racial gaps in income and employment have impacted the region’s workforce and economy: The region has a shortfall of good jobs that do not require a college degree and only 29 percent of the region’s workers hold good jobs. Despite the growing diversity of the region's workforce, workers of color remain crowded in lower paying and lower opportunity occupational groups, while white workers are overrepresented in many higher paying professions. These persistent inequities cost the region an estimated $28 billion in lost economic activity per year. The report concludes with a strategic roadmap for the region to advance workforce equity, which was developed in partnership with a local advisory group of policymakers, employers, educators, training providers, community-based organizations, and advocates. Download the report.

Additional resources:

Media: New Research Reveals that Black Workers Have Borne the Brunt of Metro Detroit’s Inequitable Labor Market and Uneven Economic Growth (Press Release)

A Power Analysis of Platforms: Expression, Equitable Governance, and Participation

Overview

Author: Jasmine McNealy (University of Florida)

Justice Thomas acknowledged the extreme concentrations of power in social media organizations in the recent US Supreme Court case Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute in which the Court determined that a case — meant to decide whether the blocking of critics of the presidential administration from a Twitter account used by that administration for official business, was unconstitutional — was no longer worthy of discussion. Justice Thomas was especially concerned that there seemed to be no specific regulatory framework that could mitigate the enormous consequences of the concentration of power in tech organizations as it related to expression and governance. He noted that we could look to public accommodation and common carriage laws for routes toward regulation. But both areas of law fall short of being either applicable or resolving tech-specific issues. There must be a new route for more adequately regulating tech organizations. This essay recommends using a power analysis in creating policy for tech firms, and in brief, offers a way of examining platform power dynamics and how we should proceed in regulating interactions in order to mitigate the consequences of unchecked power on expression, governance, and participation.

Data: Power or Pawn? Advancing Equity by Reimagining the Consumer-Data Relationship

Overview

Author: Amina Kirk and Mae Watson Grote (Change Machine)

Tech’s ability to accumulate and wield power is unquestionable. The dominance of the Big Four tech firms — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — has commoditized consumer data in unprecedented ways, subjecting all of our online activity to search, analysis, and constraint. These dynamics not only perpetuate existing forces, making products and payments accessible to white consumers who are ready adopters, but intentionally exploit and prey upon low-to-moderate income consumers with product placement and ads for targeted services such as payday loans. Without reform, we run the risk of exacerbating inequities — the racism and sexism so hardwired in our society — leading to even further financial insecurity. We must hold all of fintech accountable to wield its power in ways that challenge and change the policies, practices, and beliefs that keep Black and Brown women navigating financial insecurity from achieving their financial goals, much less acquiring or leveraging wealth for economic mobility. We must reform the financial system to intentionally and surgically reverse digital redlining one practice at a time.

The People vs. the Algorithmic State: How Government Is Aiding Big Tech’s Extractivist Agenda, and What We Can Do About It

Overview

Author: Ulises Ali Mejias (State University of New York at Oswego)

This paper focuses on forms of discrimination, including racism, that are produced and replicated when the state uses biased algorithms, and when the state fails to regulate corporations that use biased algorithms. The paper specifically asks what happens when the state—whose purpose is to guarantee the rights of citizens—becomes a political and business partner with corporations whose profit model hinges on exploitative data-driven advertising, platform services, and gig work. The framework of “data colonialism” (Couldry and Mejias 2019) is used to examine the historical roots of these new forms of extractivism. Suggestions are reviewed for how the public can help prevent the deployment of discriminatory algorithms, and hold states and corporations accountable when this happens.

Technology, Fissuring, and Race

Overview

Author: Veena Dubal (University of California, Hastings College of the Law)

Technology platforms may be understood as the symbolic “cotton mill” in today’s rapidly growing digital economy. Just as the capital-intensive nature of unregulated factory production amidst the industrial revolution expropriated and exploited human labor, today’s platforms—with their venture capital-facilitated business models, monopoly and monopsony-guided ideologies, and resistance to regulation—create and rely upon profoundly immoral economies of work. In this article, I argue that firm fissuring practices across the tech economy have created a two-tier system of workers. This two-tiered system has undermined possibilities of labor intervention in the broader, racialized injustices produced through and with digital capitalism. In the face of this, the most vulnerable, racial minority, and immigrant workers—often relegated to temporary labor or independent contracting—have organized to claim both labor power and to produce friction in the production of racially unjust automation technologies.

Supporting Black Businesses Online with Federal Policies and Recommendations

Overview

Author: Fallon Wilson (#BlackTechFutures Research Institute)

Black businesses have been disadvantaged due to racial inequalities, as outlined in what Kapor (2018) refers to as the “Leaky Tech Pipeline,” which examines how intersecting racial tech disparities, such as the lack of access to the high-speed internet, business mentors of color, and non-dilutive capital, affects Black tech businesses’ ability to scale. The lack of digital infrastructure (e.g., access to high-speed internet) to support the growth of non-tech Black businesses into e-commerce further amplifies these disparities while the monopolistic tendencies of corporate giants like Amazon, Apple, and Google use their algorithms to absolve competition from smaller Black firms. Further, by outlining federal policy solutions by which Black businesses can scale and thrive in a competitive online marketplace, including federal policies and recommendations from the Small Business Administration, Federal Communications Commission, and pending antimonopoly legislation (e.g., Ending Platform Monopolies Act), we can exemplify how to help “level the playing field” (e.g., reduce racial tech disparities) for the growth of Black tech businesses in the United States.

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