T askRabbit.com markets itself as a Web service that matches clients seeking someone to do odd jobs with “college students, recent retirees, stay-at-home moms, [and] young professionals” looking for extra income. The company website calls it “a marketplace dedicated to empowering people to do what they love.” The name Task Rabbit doesn’t exactly suggest the dignity of work, and the love often takes humble forms. Customers hire Task Rabbits to clean garages, haul clothes to the laundry, paint apartments, assemble Ikea products, buy groceries, or do almost anything else that’s legal. The San Francisco–based company, which has raised $38 million in venture capital since it was founded in 2008, makes its money by tacking on a 20 percent surcharge to the fees paid by clients. The firm performs criminal background checks on aspiring Rabbits, who then get access to chore requests posted by customers. Using the familiar metrics of the Internet, the more than 10,000 approved Rabbits are rated...

“Education was where my heart was,” says Tyrone Sinclair in Growing Fairness , a documentary showcasing the impact restorative-justice programs can have in our nation's schools. Sinclair says he was expelled from school at 16, became homeless, and then ended up in jail. Now, he organizes young people in Los Angeles. “I knew that wasn’t the place for me,” he says of prison. “I love to learn every day.” Growing Fairness was screened at the Thurgood Marshall Center in Washington, D.C., this Wednesday, at an event hosted by Critical Exposure, a local youth group that trains high-school students in photography so they can document problems in their communities. The audience included mostly high-school students and people in their 20s, most of whom were interested in or researched education reform, though a few older community members and attorneys for civil-rights organizations were also present. The event was part of the fourth annual Week of Action organized by the Dignity in Schools...

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor L ast week, House Republicans passed a bill that would cut the food stamp program by about $40 billion over the next ten years. They’re drawing on headline numbers—the program serves about 47 million people each year and has the biggest price tag of any program in the farm bill, $80 billion—to drum up support. The aid, technically known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, is still known as food stamps to nearly everyone who receives it. There’s little chance that the bill will be enacted, given the more moderate makeup of the Senate, although it’s likely that some cuts will end up on the president’s desk. (The Senate is cutting $4.4 billion from the program.) Still, food stamps are one of the most robust federal entitlements for the poor we have left, so it’s always going to be a target for cuts. It’s worth looking beyond those bold-face numbers in the news to see how the program is performing—and why it’s...

AP Photo/The Columbus Dispatch, Chris Russell A number of policymakers on both sides of the aisle cheered when, in April, the Arkansas Legislature passed a law both expanding Medicaid and transforming it into a service available in a marketplace of insurance options, a move known as the “private option.” Similar cheers erupted in June when Iowa Governor Terry Branstad approved a similar measure. The legislation marked a major accomplishment—not because the policies are necessarily improvements over traditional Medicaid but because they establish politically palatable paths for conservatives who want to increase access to health care. In Pennsylvania, GOP Governor Tom Corbett—who was against Medicaid expansion and this week announced he is is tepidly for it—has pointed to the these new plans as a model he might consider (among other, more controversial changes.) The private option may be a way to make comprehensive health-care coverage viable in other Republican states—but that depends...

I t’s been a good week for the nation’s numerous poverty-wage workers. They’ve been way overdue for a good week. On Tuesday, the Labor Department issued a much anticipated and delayed extension of the federal minimum wage and overtime regulations to the nation’s 2 million homecare workers. Last Thursday, the California legislature passed (and Governor Jerry Brown pledged to sign) a bill that raised the mega-state’s minimum wage from $8-an-hour to $10. Taken together, these two measures limiting poverty-wage work underscore a host of significant changes to the political economy. The Labor Department’s extension of the minimum wage recognizes the growth of homecare as an industry increasingly like any other, with agencies big and small, many relying on partial government subsidies, employing millions of workers. It also signals the continuing extension of federal work standards beyond those that originally covered white men disproportionately. When the Fair Labor Standards Act (which...

AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File I n June, six former employees of Bank of America's loan-modification department testified in court that since 2009, they had been instructed to lie to struggling homeowners, hide their financial documents, and push them into foreclosure. In the most egregious example, the employees said they were offered Target gift cards as a bonus for more foreclosures, which generated lucrative fees for the bank. The employees, who were in charge of implementing the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) at the bank, described the same deceptive practices across the country. Two weeks ago, U.S. District Court Judge Rya Zobel dismissed the case , denying class-action certification to 43 homeowners in 26 states who suffered because of similar conduct. “Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that Bank of America utterly failed to administer its HAMP modifications in a timely and efficient way,” Zobel agreed, adding that vulnerable homeowners had to wade...

The AFL-CIO Convention concluded Wednesday, having made some major structural changes in the way labor will operate—though nowhere near so major as the changes that the Federation’s top leader was advocating in the weeks leading up to the convention. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka iterated and reiterated that labor would no longer limit its members to those who had successfully convinced their employers to recognize their union. With employers able to flout labor law with impunity, illegally firing workers who sought to organize and refusing to sign contracts with those whose unions had won recognition elections, the number of workers who actually emerge with a contract grows smaller with each passing year. So the Federation’s unions would welcome workers who had tried to organize their workplace but didn’t prevail. It would welcome workers such as cab drivers, who were misclassified as independent contractors and legally proscribed from forming a union, though they were actually...