Family and Social Policy

Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute free webinar on Friday August 23, 2019

August 9, 2019 Leave a Comment

Please join us for a free webinar “Building a Better Understanding of Texas Low-Income Communities and Energy” hosted by the Texas Energy Poverty Research Institute (TEPRI) on Friday, August 23rd at 11am CST. RMC’s Dr. Heath Prince is one of the four featured speakers, and the webinar focuses on the results the Texas Low-Income Community Profile Series first installment, The Texas Overview (details below). Heath’s Policy Research Project class at the LBJ School of Public Affairs contributed to the research for TEPRI’s project. You can register here.

Details:
Understanding dynamics at the intersection of poverty and energy affordability is critical to designing strategies to effectively develop lasting energy solutions for low-income communities. In this webinar, we will discuss the interplay between energy poverty and economic hardship, demographic traits, quality of life, energy behaviors, housing type, and household composition. Our speakers will present the results of the Texas Low-Income Community Profile Series first installment, The Texas Overview. The objective of this series is for data and insights to be utilized by members and stakeholders to increase effectiveness of low-income energy programs and reduce barriers to outreach and education.

Key discussion items:

Owner-occupied households are a meaningful energy poverty reduction target
Low-income customers are engaged with energy, just not with programs
Low-income Texans make difficult trade-offs to balance the disproportionate amount that they spend on energy
Energy burden is a useful metric, but not a sufficient signal of energy poverty

Featured Speakers:
John Hall, Director of the Texas Energy Program at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF); Dana Harmon, Executive Director of TEPRI; Jacqui Moss, Research Fellow at TEPRI and the lead author on the Texas Overview Report; and Heath Prince, Director and Research Scientist at RMC.

To view the report being discussed during the webinar, go here. You can also view the PRP class report here.

Ray Marshall interviewed for The College of Labor and Employment Lawyers’ Video History Project

February 15, 2019 Leave a Comment

In 1999, The College of Labor and Employment Lawyers embarked on a video history project to develop a video library dedicated to creating a repository of oral histories of distinguished individuals who played a significant role or who had an opportunity to observe milestone events relating to labor and employment law. All of the full-length video interviews and transcripts are archived at Cornell University’s Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives, Martin P. Catherwood Library.

On November 29, 2018, the College’s producer (Carol Rosenbaum) and crew videotaped an interview with Former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall at the Center. Ana Avendano, Vice President of Labor Engagement for United Way Worldwide, interviewed Secretary Marshall, who spoke animatedly for 4 hours, and never seemed to tire! An excerpt from the interview can be seen below.

Interview topics included:

His childhood in the orphanage
The role of the Labor Secretary
His role in President Carter’s policy-setting
Ensuring OSHA worked as it should
Management attitudes towards safety and health regulations
Programs he developed to assist women and minorities entering the workforce in large numbers for the first time – especially those who wanted to work in male-dominated industries (like coal mining)
Outreach apprenticeships and affirmative action
His efforts to bring African-Americans into construction apprenticeship programs
International matters under Carter
His involvement in international work, including pulling the United States out of the International Labour Organization (because of a disagreement with the Russians)
His work on immigration, including during the Carter administration and with the AFL – CIO 30 years later
The role independent trade unions play in a democracy – and how authoritarian governments are the enemy of labor movements
Strikes during his tenure
Labor unions today
President Trump’s policies

You can view the transcript of the full interview here , and a summary of the transcript can be viewed here. Credit for the video excerpt, transcript, and transcript summary go to The College of Labor and Employment Lawyers.

Principal Investigator:	Daniel Schroeder, PhD
Sponsor:	Texas Workforce Commission
Project Duration:	May 2019 – April 2022
Description:	Researchers from the Ray Marshall Center (RMC) will conduct a study of the cost of providing quality child care in the state of Texas, the purpose of which is to provide estimates of how much more additional funding, in terms of daily rates, should be paid to providers who meet quality standards to care for children, relative to how much providers who do not meet such standards are paid. The study will be done in conjunction with the Texas Institute for Child and Family Wellbeing (TICFW), who will be responsible for consulting on the design of a pair of surveys to capture important quality factors and pricing information, and fielding the surveys to carefully selected samples of home- and center-based child care facilities.
Reports Available:	The reports for this project are published through the Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing at the University of Texas at Austin’s Steve Hicks School of Social Work. The following reports are available on their website. 2021 Texas Child Care Cost of Quality Modeling Report

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