Poverty Law News

Civil Rights

Race Equity Project
Legal Services of Northern California has launched a website for the Race Equity Project. The Project will digest, implement, evaluate and disseminate race-based advocacy resources and will facilitate a more efficient and effective delivery of race-based advocacy.

Employment

Undocumented Worker Who Was Injured on the Job Can Sue for Compensatory Damages
The Second Circuit has held that federal immigration law, as interpreted by the Supreme Court in Hoffman Plastic Compounds v. NLRB, 535 U.S. 137 (2002), does not necessarily preclude plaintiff, an undocumented worker, from recovering damages under New York State law for lost earnings.

Request for Comments on FMLA
The Employment Standards Administration, Wage and Hour Division, of the Department of Labor seeks information for its consideration and review of the Department's administration of the Family and Medical Leave Act and its implementing regulations. The Department held stakeholder meetings regarding the FMLA with more than 20 groups from December 2002 to February 2003. Many of the subject matter areas in this request are derived from comments at those stakeholder meetings. Comments are due February 2, 2007.

Food Programs

School Breakfast Scorecard
Participation in the School Breakfast Program continued its steady increase, with a record 7.7 million low-income children receiving free and reduced-price breakfasts on an average day during the 2005-2006 school year. The Food Research and Action Center’s School Breakfast Scorecard 2006 finds accelerating growth in school breakfast participation by low-income children--up by 622,000 children (8.7 percent) over the past two school years.

Health

Los Angeles Hospital Accused of Dumping Homeless Patient on Skid Row
The Los Angeles City Attorney has filed civil and criminal charges against Kaiser Foundation Hospitals in a case involving the dumping of a homeless patient on skid row. The 63-year-old patient, who had recently been discharged by Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center, was videotaped wandering in a daze in her hospital gown after being dropped off by a taxi. The criminal complaint charges the organization with two criminal counts, including false imprisonment and dependent adult endangerment.

Medicaid's Long-Term Care Beneficiaries
The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured has published analysis of spending patterns of Medicaid's long-term care users (LTC) revealing that the 7% of Medicaid beneficiaries using LTC account for over half (52%) of all Medicaid spending. Medicaid's LTC users not only use LTC services, but they also use the program's acute care services more intensively than non-LTC users. Three-quarters of the spending by these high-cost LTC users went towards LTC (community-based and institutional care) and the remaining 25% went towards acute care and other supportive services. These high-cost beneficiaries are among the most disabled and chronically ill of the Medicaid population, with over half being elderly, one-third being disabled and under age 65, and 11% being adults or children not classified as disabled.

Housing

Craigslist Not Liable for Discriminatory Housing Ads
The district court has held that Craigslist is not liable for allegedly discriminatory housing ads posted by its users. The Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law had alleged that, during a six-month period, the site published more than 100 housing ads in Chicago that violated the Fair Housing Act. The court found that the Communications Decency Act provided Craigslist with limited immunity from plaintiffs' claims.

Juveniles

The Dangers of Juvenile Detention
Despite the lowest youth crime rates in 20 years, hundreds of thousands of young people are locked away every year in the nation's 591 secure detention centers. This report from the Justice Policy Institute looks at the consequences of detention on young people, their families, and communities. The authors assert that, given new findings that detaining youth may not make communities safer, the costs of needlessly detaining young people who do not need to be there are simply too high.

Welfare

Suburban Poor Outnumber Urban Poor
A recent Brookings Institution report, Two Steps Back: City and Suburban Poverty Trends 1999-2005, finds that, for the first time, there are more poor residents of suburbs than central cities. Although in 1999 large cities and their suburbs had nearly equal numbers of poor individuals, by 2005 the suburban poor outnumbered their city counterparts by at least 1 million. Poverty rates rose significantly in midwestern and southern metropolitan areas, but remained steady in the west and northeast.

Poverty Law News
December 8, 2006