At the blog
On Monday, Yiran Zhang explained how recent changes to the The Child Care and Development Fund have privileged formal childcare centers over informal, home-based care. As a result, the majority of small home-based providers have exited the subsidy system, with devastating impacts on the working families that they serve. As she writes, “the current subsidy regime fails to support modes of care that most benefit low-income families and women, as both users and providers. Rather, CCDF promotes a market standard of quality that reflects experts’ evaluation of child well-being, which does not adequately reflect low-income parents’ needs for flexible childcare or the relational dimension of child well-being.”
On Wednesday, Sara Sternberg Greene explained that “many legal cases that have a profound effect on poor families, such as whether they will lose their home to eviction or whether a parent will go to jail, are argued in courtrooms where no one, not even the judge, knows the law.” Her recent research reveals that thirty-two states allow for at least some low-level state court judges to adjudicate without a law degree, and with little to no training. This institutional fact, she writes, “is an explicit and unavoidable inequality embedded within the rules and laws that direct the structure of our state courts. An entirely different adjudicatory system, a system that does not call for a legally trained adjudicator, is in place for some cases—cases that disproportionately involve poor and racially marginalized communities.”
And on Thursday, Elora Lee Raymond continued our symposium on decommodifying urban property, arguing that, under financialized capitalism, corporate investors value homes not primarily for rental income, or even as assets that can be bought and sold—but rather because they serve as collateral. She discusses three episodes of institutional change in housing markets that underscore the importance of not only decommodifying land and housing, but decollateralizing it.
In LPE Land
From the page to the stage: three members of Rideshare Drivers United (along with the awesome folks at Towards Justice) are suing Uber and Lyft on antitrust grounds.
On Wednesday, June 29th at 8:00 P.M. ET join the DSA Fund’s virtual event How We Win: Local Worker Rights Campaigns, where panelists will provide an inside look at worker rights campaigns in Portland, Maine; New York City; and Austin, Texas. More information and a registration link here!
Need a job? The Fiscal Policy Institute is currently hiring a policy analyst to help shape their research agenda and influence debates over state tax and budget policy in New York. The job description and application instructions can be found here: https://fiscalpolicy.org/fpi-career-opportunities.
Finally, if you’re a rising second- or third-year law student from a New York City law school, and you haven’t applied to the first ever Summer Academy on Law, Organizing, and Power Building, there’s still time: applications due June 28.
