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    Once an Evangelist for Airbnbs, She Now Crusades for Affordable Housing

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    Precious Price ditched her profitable business of renting home stays to tourists to combat the mounting housing crisis.“Making It Work” is a series is about small-business owners striving to endure hard times.When Precious Price bought her first home four years ago in Atlanta while working as a marketing consultant, she took advantage of her frequent business trips by renting out her house on Airbnb during her absences. “I knew I wanted to use that as a rental or investment property,” she said. “I began doing that, and it was honestly very lucrative.”For Ms. Price, 27, and other young entrepreneurs of color, online short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo represented a path to building wealth on their own terms. With an excellent credit score and minimal start-up capital — a primary barrier for people in this demographic — a professional Airbnb host could amass a stable of apartments on long-term leases, then turn around and rent those properties on a nightly basis to vacationers.Some of these entrepreneurs see it as a more equitable alternative to corporate America, with its legacy of institutionalized bias and inflexibility toward caregivers and working parents. Others are motivated by the desire to cater to Black travelers, who say they still face discrimination even after platforms like Airbnb promised to address issues like documented cases of bias.Ms. Price became an evangelist of sorts, establishing social media channels to teach other would-be entrepreneurs how to follow in her footsteps, and churning out a digital library’s worth of videos, tutorials and advice using the handle @AirbnbMoney.The irony was not lost on Ms. Price that her grand real estate ambitions were propelled by the 296-square-foot “tiny house” she spent nearly six months building for herself in her backyard. When the coronavirus pandemic slammed the brakes on travel, grounding her road-warrior lifestyle and evaporating her supplemental income stream virtually overnight, her tiny house allowed her to continue renting out her primary home and making a large profit.She even added to her portfolio, buying a second house and renting several furnished apartments in Atlanta’s popular Midtown neighborhood, and she eventually left her consulting job to manage her rental business full time.“It was a freeing experience at the time,” she said. “I’m making a ton of money that most of my family has never seen in their lifetime.”Ms. Price was earning as much as $12,000 a month and deriving a sense of purpose from her work on social media helping her peers achieve financial security. Initially, she said she had no interest in renting to long-term tenants — the profit margin for tourist bookings was so much higher.“I was adamant about only renting to vacationers,” Ms. Price said. “I was just so heavily into the rat race.”Then, the distressing messages started to come. First one or two, then too many to ignore: a litany of increasingly distraught calls and emails from people who didn’t want her Airbnbs for a weekend away — they were in desperate need of a place to call home.Ms. Price at the Emerging Founders program at Atlanta Tech Village, where she got support developing a resource hub to help homeowners of color build tiny homes.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesMs. Price realized she was on the front lines of a housing crisis. By renting property to tourists rather than long-term renters, she and others like her were exacerbating the nation’s housing affordability problem, as she related in a 2022 TEDxAtlanta talk. “I started to realize that conversation began happening across the country,” she said.The pleas and stories of financial precariousness hit home for Ms. Price, the oldest of five siblings and a first-generation college graduate. She went to business school at Indiana University. “When I started to get these calls from single mothers and students, I started to realize that’s the identity of some of my family members,” she said. “And I’m realizing the connection of how I’m not very far removed at all from that.”She began to re-examine her values and to walk away from the lucrative vacation-rental business. She stopped listing properties on short-term rental sites, and over the next several months, she shed her rental portfolio. “Everyone has their own ethical compass and for me, mine felt just off with what I was doing,” Ms. Price said.The few remaining tenants she has now are on long-term leases, and the rent she collects is enough to cover her costs, with maybe “a couple hundred dollars left over,” she said. She supplements that income with freelance consulting and public speaking gigs. Although she is earning a fraction of her former income, she is more fulfilled and no longer feeling burned out, she said.The housing crisis Ms. Price witnessed in Atlanta is playing out across the nation. The United States is short about 6.5 million single-family homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. For more than a decade, homes were not built fast enough to keep pace with population growth, a trend that was exacerbated by the pandemic. During this time, demand for larger homes grew even as construction slowed, hamstrung first by public health restrictions, then by a labor shortage and supply-chain issues that made everything from copper pipe to carpet scarcer and more expensive.The number of affordable houses has plunged: Only 10 percent of new homes cost less than $300,000 as of the fourth quarter of 2022, even as mortgage rates have roughly doubled over the past year.These challenges have a cascading effect that has driven up rents, as well: Moody’s Analytics found that the average renter now spends more than 30 percent of their income on rent.“If you look at rental vacancy rates, they’re extremely low,” said Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. “It’s really hard for people to find an affordable place to move to. It’s extremely tight, especially for low-income renters.”As Ms. Price experienced up close, a growing number of municipalities — including Atlanta — have emerged from the pandemic only to find a full-blown housing crisis on their doorsteps. Lawmakers are seeking greater regulation of short-term rentals, with many trying to discourage “professional hosts,” as opposed to homeowners who are renting out part or all of their primary home.Policies should be nuanced enough to distinguish between the two categories of renters, said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University, and faculty director of the university’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.“Airbnb can be a really useful tool for a lot of people, for homeowners who are maybe struggling to make their mortgage payments, or even renters who want to occasionally make some income and rent their units while they’re away on vacation,” she said. “Those are all forms of usage that don’t actually restrict the long-term supply of housing.”Ms. Price’s experience with the tiny house in her backyard inspired her to search for another way for people to add housing — and for homeowners to generate rental income. These units, known colloquially as “tiny homes” or “granny flats” and identified formally as accessory dwelling units, can take the form of tiny homes, guest cottages, or apartments that are either stand-alone or attached to the primary house. An increasing number of policymakers are hoping these units can help take some of the pressure off the tight housing market.Living in roughly 300 square feet lets Ms. Price earn income renting out her primary house.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York Times“She’s working on a pressing problem — the lack of housing supply across the U.S.,” said Praveen Ghanta, a technology entrepreneur who began the Emerging Founders program, a start-up incubator for Black, Latino and female founders in Atlanta. Ms. Price, a participant in the program, is working on a start-up she named Landrift, which is intended to be a resource hub so that homeowners — particularly homeowners of color — can increase the value of their properties and generate income by building their own tiny homes. “We can make a meaningful impact, particularly in markets like Atlanta,” Mr. Ghanta said.“Sometimes I think people get fixated on the notion of affordable housing and that it has to be nonprofit,” he said. “The reality is there’s a lot of both money to be made and housing to be supplied, even within market rate constructs.”Ms. Price has reoriented her social media platforms away from the management of short-term rental properties and toward the promotion of small-scale development of accessory dwelling units. “At this point I do want to begin acquiring other properties,” she said. She is looking for houses with enough land to accommodate a tiny house while building a second ancillary structure — a guest cottage — on her first property.“My plan is to get a property I would be able to do some kind of housing on so I’m not just taking housing, but would be able to make more housing,” she said. “The American dream is real estate.” More

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    California Panel Calls for Billions in Reparations for Black Residents

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    A task force recommended that legislators enact a sweeping program to compensate for the economic harm from racism in the state’s history.A California panel approved recommendations on Saturday that could mean hundreds of billions of dollars in payments to Black residents to address past injustices. The proposals to state legislators are the nation’s most sweeping effort to devise a program of reparations.The nine-member Reparations Task Force, whose work is being closely monitored by politicians, historians and economists across the country, produced a detailed plan for how restitution should be handled to address a myriad of racist harms, including housing discrimination, mass incarceration and unequal access to health care.Created through a bill signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in the wake of the nationwide racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the panel has spent more than a year conducting research and holding listening sessions from the Bay Area to San Diego.It will be up to legislators to weigh the recommendations and decide whether to forge them into law, a political and fiscal challenge that has yet to be reckoned with.The task force’s final report, which is to be sent to lawmakers in Sacramento before a July 1 deadline, includes projected restitution estimates calculated by several economists working with the task force.One such estimate laid out in the report determined that to address the harms from redlining by banks, which disqualified people in Black neighborhoods from taking out mortgages and owning homes, eligible Black Californians should receive up to $148,099. That estimate is based on a figure of $3,366 for each year they lived in California from the early 1930s to the late 1970s, when federal redlining was most prevalent.To address the impact of overpolicing and mass incarceration, the report estimates, each eligible person would receive $115,260, or about $2,352 for each year of residency in California from 1971 to 2020, during the decades-long war on drugs.In theory, a lifelong state resident who is 71 years old, the average life expectancy, could be eligible for roughly $1.2 million in total compensation for housing discrimination, mass incarceration and additional harms outlined in the report.All of these estimates, the report notes, are preliminary and would require additional research from lawmakers to hash out specifics. The costs to the state were not outlined in the report, but totals from harms associated with housing and mass incarceration could exceed $500 billion, based on estimates from economists.While the panel members considered various methods for distributing reparations — some favored tuition or housing grants and others preferred direct cash payments — they ultimately recommended the direct payments.“The initial down payment is the beginning of a process of addressing historical injustices,” the report reads, “not the end of it.“Kamilah Moore, the chair, and Amos Brown, the vice chair, at the task force meeting on Saturday.Jason Henry for The New York TimesLast year, the task force, which is made up of elected officials, academics and lawyers, decided on the eligibility criteria, determining that any descendant of enslaved African Americans or of a “free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century” should receive reparations.Still, on Saturday, there was sometimes contentious debate over clearly expressing the criteria in certain sections of the report — particularly regarding compensation.Should lawmakers pass legislation for payments, the panel suggested that a state agency be created to process claims and render payments, with elderly individuals getting priority. Nearly 6.5 percent of California residents, roughly 2.5 million, identify as Black or African American.“This is about closing the income and racial wealth gap in this country, and this is a step,” Gary Hoover, an economics professor at Tulane University who has studied reparations, said in an interview. “Wealth is sticky and is able to be transferred from generations. Reparations can close that stickiness.”In voting on its final report on Saturday on the Oakland campus of Mills College at Northeastern University, the panel also suggested that state legislators draw up a formal apology to Black residents. A preliminary report made public last year, outlined how enslaved Black people were forced to California during the Gold Rush era and how, in the 1950s and 1960s, racially restrictive covenants and redlining segregated Black Californians in many of the state’s largest cities.In emotional testimony for much of the past year, Black residents have stood before the panel often revealing personal stories of racial discrimination, lack of resources in communities because of redlining and trauma that has had negative effects on health and well-being.While the task force marked the first such effort by a state, a similar measure aimed at creating a commission to explore reparations has stalled in Congress for decades.Representative Barbara Lee speaking during the task force meeting on Saturday.Jason Henry for The New York TimesIn brief remarks before the panel on Saturday, Representative Barbara Lee, a Democrat whose district spans Oakland, lauded the work members have done.“California is leading on this issue,” said Ms. Lee, who is running for the U.S. Senate. “It’s a model for other states in search of reparative damage, realistic avenues for addressing the need for reparations.”The median wealth of Black households in the United States is $24,100, compared with $188,200 for white households, according to the most recent Federal Reserve Board Survey of Consumer Finances. In California, a recent report from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found for every $1 earned by white families, Black families earn 60 cents — the result of disparities in, among other things, education, and discrimination in the labor market.Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who is one of two state lawmakers on the panel, said he had spoken with Mr. Newsom in recent weeks and expressed optimism that legislation would be approved based on the panel’s report.“The reality is Black Californians have suffered, and continue to suffer, from institutional laws and policies within our state’s political, social, and economic landscape that have negated Blacks from achieving life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for generations,” said Mr. Jones-Sawyer, who represents a Los Angeles district. “This really is a trial against America’s original sin, slavery, and the repercussions it caused and the lingering effects in modern society.”Mr. Jones-Sawyer said he expected to present some form of legislation early next year.But the efforts and support for racial justice that followed Mr. Floyd’s death are now confronted with an economy that is shadowed by fears of a recession. In January, Mr. Newsom announced that the state faced a $22.5 billion deficit in the 2023-24 fiscal year, a turnaround from a $100 billion surplus a year ago.Nationwide, opinions on reparations are sharply divided by race. Last fall, a survey from the Pew Research Center found that 77 percent of Black Americans say the descendants of people enslaved in the United States should be repaid in some way, while 18 percent of white Americans say the same. Democrats were even split on the issue, with 49 percent opposed and 48 percent in support. Other polls on the issue have found similar splits.Even so, cities across the country have moved forward with reparations proposals. In 2021, officials in Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb, approved $10 million in reparations in the form of housing grants.More recently, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has expressed support for reparations that could offer several million dollars. And in nearby Hayward, Calif., city officials are hearing proposals for reparations for land taken from Black and Latino families in the 1960s.Kamilah Moore, a lawyer who is chair of the California task force, said she was confident that the Legislature would “respect the task force’s official role as a legislative advisory body and work in good faith to turn our final proposals into legislation.”“It will soon be in their hands to act,” Ms. Moore said. More

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    How Janelle Jones’s Story About Black Women and the Economy Caught On

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    The first Black woman to serve as chief economist at the Labor Department advanced the idea that lifting up people on the margins helps everyone else, too.“Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.It takes approximately 30 seconds of conversation with Janelle Jones, the chief economist and policy director of one of the largest labor unions in the United States, to learn where she’s from and why it matters.“I’m from Ohio! Is that not obvious?” she exclaimed, at a decibel level that reflects how core the state is to her identity. Lorain, Ohio, to be exact, where her mother and her mother’s mother (and aunts, uncles and cousins) worked in the local Ford plant.Those union jobs, and the upward mobility they provided to millions of Black people who migrated from the South in search of freedom and opportunity, taught Ms. Jones what it means to move from the margins to the middle class. She noticed the difference when her mother switched to making Econoline vans after years serving Happy Meals at McDonald’s — a business that her current employer, the Service Employees International Union, is in a long-running battle to unionize.Now she is fighting to make more jobs as good as the union jobs that supported her family — or, even better, jobs with new safeguards that protect workers’ physical health.“It is a town where one of the best jobs you can have is to work at Ford,” Ms. Jones, 39, said of Lorain. “And while I love that for a lot of the people I know, it’s not the only way a town of 70,000 should be able to have economic security.”Last year, Ms. Jones left the U.S. Labor Department, where she served as chief economist, for the Service Employees International Union, which represents nearly two million security guards, nurses, teachers, airport retail workers and janitors. About two-thirds of the members are women, and more than half are people of color. That’s why the position seemed tailor made for the philosophy she’d developed and advanced over her entire career — that targeting policies to assist some of the most disadvantaged members of society will lift everyone else up in the process.Ms. Jones with Aparna Kumar, assistant director of communications for the Service Employees International Union, at the organization’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesMs. Jones’s superpower, according to her colleagues, is her ability to translate the economy into a framework that helps workers.For the past several years, Ms. Jones has been developing one central philosophy: Because Black women have historically been concentrated in low-paid caregiving jobs, which are often excluded from labor laws and benefits like Social Security, they have accumulated less wealth and experienced worse health outcomes. Furthermore, Ms. Jones argues, helping Black women — through measures like raising wages in care professions and canceling more student debt — is the best way to construct an economy that functions better for everyone.In 2020, she gave her narrative a name, “Black Women Best.” She came up with it while working for a progressive nonprofit called Groundwork Collaborative, which conducted focus groups across the country to find a narrative about how the economy should work for working people.“They were like, ‘I would like to not be tired,’” Ms. Jones recalled of the participants. “‘I want to buy school supplies.’ ‘I want to know that if my car breaks down, because I think it might, I won’t lose my apartment.’” Solving those basic problems for people with the least resources, she thought, would buoy the labor market from the bottom up.Her premise, which she articulated in a working paper for the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, found an eager audience under President Biden, who owed his victory in large part to Black women. It was embraced by influential figures, including corporate economists and a Federal Reserve president, and formed the basis of a 133-page report commissioned by the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls.It hasn’t escaped pushback: Some scholars, including Tommy J. Curry at the University of Edinburgh, counter that Black men are more disadvantaged than Black women. Dr. Curry, a professor specializing in Africana philosophy and Black male studies at the university, said that, while he understands the “political popularity” of Ms. Jones’s theory, the evidence did not back it up. Black women, he said, “have seen higher levels of labor participation, entrepreneurial endeavors supported by government grants, and higher rates of college degree attainment since the 2000s, while Black men have been shown to have greater unemployment, less earnings per dollar — at 51 cents by some measures — and an overall downward mobility.”Ms. Jones declined to respond to Dr. Curry’s critique, but emphasized that her policy recommendations are generally not a zero-sum game.Ms. Jones in her office, meeting remotely with government relations colleagues about their lobbying efforts to increase the federal minimum wage to $15.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesMs. Jones’s desk chronicles her history in photos, books and a letter from President Biden.Lexey Swall for The New York Times“I do think that, in a really short period of time, she’s been able to get traction because people do see it as an additive vision,” said Angela Hanks, who worked with Ms. Jones at Groundwork and is now the chief of programs at the think tank Demos. “In a world where there aren’t a ton of totally new ideas, it’s a new idea. And one that’s resonant because it’s explicit but not exclusionary.”While few concrete policy changes are the result of one person’s efforts, it’s possible to see Ms. Jones’s message in actions as small as a guaranteed income program for Black mothers in Mississippi (now in its fourth round of funding) and as large as the expanded child tax credit and unemployment insurance provisions in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. Both federal policies helped low-income people in service professions, where Black women are overrepresented.“What Black Women Best is pushing us to do is to center those who have always been described as ‘deserving’ of their economic hardship,” said Azza Altiraifi, a senior policy manager at the racial justice advocacy group Liberation in a Generation. “Those sorts of stories were not common before. And it’s not because there weren’t people doing that research — it just didn’t seem to be a worthwhile exploration.”Ms. Jones’s path to influencing policy wasn’t a straight line. After majoring in math at Spelman, a historically Black college for women, she started two different Ph.D. programs and dropped out each time, after finding them to be only glancingly useful for the real work she wanted to do.“I felt like economics was the way I could do something for my grandmother, who was on a fixed income, or do something for my cousin, who’s a home health aide,” Ms. Jones said, explaining why she called off her pursuit of a doctorate. “I thought it was going to be labor economics, the things that I love, and it wasn’t. It was like advanced real analysis. It was honestly awful.”Fortunately for Ms. Jones, Washington is littered with Ph.D. dropouts who found policymaking more motivating than academic credentials. She spent years training with economists at the city’s labor-oriented think tanks. When Mr. Biden’s transition team went looking for a chief economist at the Department of Labor, in the wake of nationwide protests for racial equity in early 2020, she was an obvious choice — and became the first Black woman to hold the position.Ms. Jones with Alesia Lucas, assistant director of communications for the Service Employees International Union.Lexey Swall for The New York TimesWorking for Labor Secretary Martin J. Walsh, Ms. Jones found, was a unique opportunity to put her ideas into practice. She was charged with carrying out the president’s executive order on advancing racial equity, which instructed each agency to determine how it could eliminate barriers for minorities. Ms. Jones dug in, finding ways to make sure people of color got their share of procurement dollars, unemployment insurance, apprenticeships, jobs at the department, fair performance reviews and everything else that the Labor Department had to offer.Through it all, she argued that the economy hadn’t recovered until everyone was doing well. At times she even had to make that case inside the 17,000-person department, where some of her colleagues didn’t realize that the Black unemployment rate is almost always about twice as high as the white unemployment rate. Other times she had to make that case publicly, in regular videos breaking down the latest jobs report, for the better part of the year she worked at the Labor Department.While the average unemployment rate sank back to its prepandemic level in 2022, the racial gap remained wide. “It took forever — forever — for Black women to recover to even 2018 levels,” Ms. Jones said. She took this message to Twitter, sometimes using memes. In 2021, she didn’t hide her disappointment when the Senate backed off of legislation that came right out of the Black Women Best playbook — including beefed-up subsidies for child and elder care — in the face of opposition from Senator Joe Manchin III, the West Virginia Democrat.Mr. Walsh, who recently stepped down as labor secretary, said that Ms. Jones kept him focused on the idea that the prepandemic status quo wasn’t good enough.Ms. Jones is seven months into her new role at the Service Employees International Union.Lexey Swall for The New York Times“Janelle brought her brilliant economic mind, passion for building an accessible, equitable economy for all, and leadership to the Department of Labor at a critical time of transformation in the American economy,” Mr. Walsh said in an email, “insisting that this country’s workers — especially those usually left behind — remain at the forefront of the national policy response to tremendous upheaval.”Ultimately, Black men and women made strong gains as the pandemic waned, in part because in 2021 the Federal Reserve held off on raising interest rates for months in an attempt to cool off the economy, even as prices started to escalate. Raising interest rates makes businesses less willing to expand and often results in layoffs, which tend to hit people of color first. Ms. Jones, who now speaks for millions of union workers, had argued that a tight labor market would reduce racial inequality.“I care about all workers, obviously, but I really, really care about Black and brown women,” Ms. Jones said. “And to be in a place where those workers are centered, where it’s most of our members — it feels like the perfect place to do the things that make me excited.” More

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    California Panel Sizes Up Reparations for Black Citizens

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    In the two years since nationwide social justice protests followed the murder of George Floyd, California has undertaken the nation’s most sweeping effort yet to explore some concrete restitution to Black citizens to address the enduring economic effects of slavery and racism.A nine-member Reparations Task Force has spent months traveling across California to learn about the generational effects of racist policies and actions. The group, formed by legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020, is scheduled to release a report to lawmakers in Sacramento next year outlining recommendations for state-level reparations.“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” said Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a member of the task force.While the creation of the task force is a bold first step, much remains unclear about whether lawmakers will ultimately throw their political weight behind reparations proposals that will require vast financial resources from the state.“That is why we must put forward a robust plan, with plenty of options,” Dr. Lewis said.The effort parallels others on a local level, in California and elsewhere, to address the nation’s stark racial disparities and a persistent wealth gap. The median wealth of Black households in the United States is $24,100, compared with $188,200 for white households, according to the most recent Federal Reserve Board Survey of Consumer Finances.In a preliminary report this year, the task force outlined how enslaved Black people were forced to California during the Gold Rush era and how, in the 1950s and 1960s, racially restrictive covenants and redlining segregated Black Californians in many of the state’s largest cities.Californians eligible for reparations, the task force decided in March, would be descendants of enslaved African Americans or of a “free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.” Nearly 6.5 percent of California residents, roughly 2.5 million, identify as Black or African American. The panel is now considering how reparations should be distributed — some favor tuition and housing grants while others want direct cash payments.The task force has identified five areas — housing discrimination, mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses and health care — in discussions for compensation. For example, from 1933 to 1977, when it comes to housing discrimination, the task force estimates compensation of around $569 billion, with $223,200 per person.Final figures will be released in the report next year; it would then be up to the Legislature to act upon the recommendations and determine how to fund them.The state and local efforts have faced opposition over the potentially steep cost to taxpayers and, in one case, derided as an ill-conceived campaign to impose an “era of social justice.”More on CaliforniaJaywalking Law: California has had one of the strictest jaywalking laws in the nation. Starting Jan. 1, that will no longer be the case.Remaking a River: Taming the Los Angeles River helped Los Angeles emerge as a global megalopolis, but it also left a gaping scar across the territory. Imagining the river’s future poses new challenges.A Piece of Black History Destroyed: Lincoln Heights — a historically Black community in a predominantly white, rural county in Northern California — endured for decades. Then came the Mill fire.Employee Strike: In one of the nation’s biggest strikes in recent years, teaching assistants, researchers and other workers across the University of California system walked off the job to demand higher pay.A two-day public meeting of the state task force this fall, in a makeshift hearing room tucked inside a Los Angeles museum, included a mix of comments from local residents on how they had been personally affected and how the disparities should be addressed, along with testimony from experts who have studied reparations.While even broad-scale reparations would be unlikely to eliminate the racial wealth gap, they could narrow it significantly, and proponents hope California’s effort will influence other states and federal legislators to follow suit.“Calling these local projects reparations is to some degree creating a detour from the central task of compelling the federal government to do its job,” said William A. Darity Jr., a professor at Duke University and a leading scholar on reparations. Even so, Dr. Darity, who is advising the California task force, said “there is an increasing recognition” that the lasting effects of slavery must be addressed.Every year for almost three decades, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan introduced legislation that would have created a commission to explore reparations, but the measure consistently stalled in Congress. After Mr. Conyers retired in 2017, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas began championing the measure, which passed a House committee for the first time last year, but stalled on the floor.Underscoring the political hurdles, opinions on reparations are sharply divided by race. Last year, an online survey by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that 86 percent of African Americans supported compensating the descendants of slaves, compared with 28 percent of white people. Other polls have also shown wide splits.Still, several efforts have gotten off the ground recently.In 2021, officials in Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb, approved $10 million in reparations in the form of housing grants. Three months later, officials in Asheville, N.C., committed $2.1 million to reparations. And over the summer, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a plan to transfer ownership of Bruce’s Beach — a parcel in Manhattan Beach that was seized with scant compensation from a Black couple in 1924 — to the couple’s great-grandsons and great-great-grandsons.“We want to see the land and economic wealth stolen from Black families all across this country returned,” said Kavon Ward, an activist who advocated on behalf of the Bruces’ descendants and has since started a group, Where Is My Land, that seeks to help Black Americans secure restitution.“We are in a moment that we cannot let pass.”A so-called blight law from 1945, the task force’s interim report explains, paved the way for officials to use eminent domain to destroy Black communities, including shuttering more than 800 businesses and displacing 4,700 households in San Francisco’s Western Addition beginning in the 1950s.After work on Interstate 210 began later that decade, the report goes on, the freeway was eventually built in the path of a Black business district in Pasadena, where city officials offered residents $75,000 — less than the minimum cost to buy a new home in the city — for their old homes.And there is Russell City, an unincorporated parcel of Alameda County near the San Francisco Bay shoreline where many Black families fleeing racial terror in the Deep South built lives during the Great Migration. Testimony to the task force by Russell City residents recounts the community’s rise and ultimate bulldozing.A mural honoring the history of Russell City in what is now Hayward, Calif.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesMonique Henderson-Ford grew up hearing stories from her elders about Russell City, where many Black families fleeing racial terror in the Deep South built lives during the Great Migration.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesThe town was demolished to make way for an industrial park.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesUnlike neighboring Hayward and San Leandro, Russell City didn’t have racist housing covenants stipulating that only white families could own certain homes. After World War II, it grew into a small but tight community of Black and Latino families that once included seven churches.On weekends, children played on the unpaved streets as their parents, many of whom worked in the shipyards, sat on porches, and on some foggy nights, Ray Charles and Big Mama Thornton played shows at one of the town’s music venues, called the Country Club.“It was vibrant,” said Monique Henderson-Ford, who grew up hearing stories about Russell City from her mother, grandmother and cousins.After leaving Louisiana in the 1950s, her grandparents lived briefly in San Francisco but were displaced by an urban renewal project. Using savings from years of work at Pacific Gas & Electric, her grandfather paid $7,500 for their property and home in Russell City, and the family soon added three small houses to the homestead for their sons.“This was their American dream,” Ms. Henderson-Ford said in an interview.But it didn’t last long.Lacking sewer lines and reliable electricity, the area was designated as a blight, and officials called for its destruction and the area to be turned into an industrial park. Russell City was annexed into Hayward, and the city and county bought up some properties and seized others through eminent domain. Residents, including Ms. Henderson-Ford’s grandmother, pleaded with officials to be allowed to remain in their homes.“I got a nice place,” she told the Alameda County Board of Supervisors during a public meeting in 1963, according to a transcript. “Allow me a break.”In exchange for their property and homes, county officials gave the family roughly $2,200, less than a third of what it had originally paid, according to Ms. Henderson-Ford.On a recent morning, Ms. Henderson-Ford and her cousin joined a reporter on a walk through what was once Russell City but is now an industrial park.They passed the spot where their grandfather used to fish, yanking up striped bass from the bay as he peered northwest and watched San Francisco’s skyline take its distinctive shape.“Imagine if the houses were still here,” Ms. Henderson-Ford said. “We would all be sitting on a fortune.”Amid the uproar in 2020 over the murder of Mr. Floyd, a Black man, in police custody in Minneapolis, Artavia Berry, who lives in Hayward, knew she had to do something.“We could not look away from what happened right here,” said Ms. Berry, who learned the history of Russell City after moving to the region from Chicago a decade ago.Ms. Berry, who leads the Community Services Commission, a municipal advisory body, composed what would become a formal apology from the City of Hayward to onetime residents of Russell City. Last November, the City Council approved the resolution, as well as several follow-up steps.An aerial view of the area as the industrial park that replaced Russell City, lower right, was under construction in 1971.Hayward Area Historical SocietyA kindergarten class on the playground at a school in Russell City in 1949.Hayward Area Historical SocietyBut in a public letter to city officials, Hayward Concerned Citizens, the group that railed against an “era of social justice,” said the apology was misguided, arguing that Alameda County, not the City of Hayward, had pushed residents out.“We are strongly opposed to any direct financial reparations,” the group wrote.For Gloria Moore, who grew up in Russell City, the words stung.Now 79, she was 3 when her parents arrived in Russell City from Texarkana, Ark. Her mother worked as a cook at a local elementary school and her father worked for Todd Shipyards in the Bay Area. She still has vivid memories of walking to school in the mud when it rained, because the streets weren’t paved and there was no public transportation.After their home was taken for about $2,200, the family members struggled to regain the financial stability and community they had built in Russell City.By the 1970s, Ms. Moore had moved to Los Angeles to begin a career in city government, and she remembered noticing how many of her co-workers owned their own homes. She was renting.Over the years, she and other former residents of Russell City have gathered at a park in Hayward for a Labor Day reunion, where they share stories and often tears.“Sometimes things were suppressed because it was too painful,” she recalled. “But no one ever forgot.” More

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    For Disabled Workers, a Tight Labor Market Opens New Doors

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    With Covid prompting more employers to consider remote arrangements, employment has soared among adults with disabilities.The strong late-pandemic labor market is giving a lift to a group often left on the margins of the economy: workers with disabilities.Employers, desperate for workers, are reconsidering job requirements, overhauling hiring processes and working with nonprofit groups to recruit candidates they might once have overlooked. At the same time, companies’ newfound openness to remote work has led to opportunities for people whose disabilities make in-person work — and the taxing daily commute it requires — difficult or impossible.As a result, the share of disabled adults who are working has soared in the past two years, far surpassing its prepandemic level and outpacing gains among people without disabilities.

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    Share employed, change since Jan. 2020
    Note: Includes workers between 18 and 64 years old. Data is not seasonally adjusted.Source: Current Population Survey, via IPUMSBy The New York TimesIn interviews and surveys, people with disabilities report that they are getting not only more job offers, but better ones, with higher pay, more flexibility and more openness to providing accommodations that once would have required a fight, if they were offered at all.“The new world we live in has opened the door a little bit more,” said Gene Boes, president and chief executive of the Northwest Center, a Seattle organization that helps people with disabilities become more independent. “The doors are opening wider because there’s just more demand for labor.”Samir Patel, who lives in the Seattle area, has a college degree and certifications in accounting. But he also has autism spectrum disorder, which has made it difficult for him to find steady work. He has spent most of his career in temporary jobs found through staffing agencies. His longest job lasted a little over a year; many lasted only a few months.This summer, however, Mr. Patel, 42, got a full-time, permanent job as an accountant for a local nonprofit group. The job brought a 30 percent raise, along with retirement benefits, more predictable hours and other perks. Now he is thinking about buying a home, traveling and dating — steps that seemed impossible without the stability of a steady job.“It’s a boost in confidence,” he said. “There were times when I felt like I was behind.”Mr. Patel, whose disability affects his speech and can make conversation difficult, worked with an employment coach at the Northwest Center to help him request accommodations both during the interview process and once he started the job. And while Mr. Patel usually prefers to work in the office, his new employer also allows him to work remotely when he needs to — a big help on days when he finds the sensory overload of the office overwhelming.“If I have my bad days, I just pick up the laptop and work from home,” he said.Workers with disabilities have long seen their fortunes ebb and flow with the economy. Federal law prohibits most employers from discriminating against people with disabilities, and it requires them to make reasonable accommodations. But research has found that discrimination remains common: One 2017 study found that job applications that disclosed a disability were 26 percent less likely to receive interest from prospective employers. And even when they can find jobs, workers with disabilities frequently encounter barriers to success, from bathroom doors they cannot open without assistance to hostile co-workers.The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.September Jobs Report: Job growth eased slightly in September but remained robust, indicating that the economy was maintaining momentum despite higher interest rates.A Cooling Market?: Unemployment is low and hiring is strong, but there are signs that the red-hot labor market may be coming off its boiling point.Factory Jobs: American manufacturers have now added enough jobs to regain all that they shed during the pandemic — and then some.Missing Workers: The labor market appears hot, but the supply of labor has fallen short, holding back the economy. Here is why.Workers with disabilities — like other groups that face obstacles to employment, such as those with criminal records — tend to benefit disproportionately from strong job markets, when employers have more of an incentive to seek out untapped pools of talent. But when recessions hit, those opportunities quickly dry up.“We have a last-in, first-out labor market, and disabled people are often among the last in and the first out,” said Adam Ozimek, chief economist at the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington research organization.Remote work, however, has the potential to break that cycle, at least for some workers. In a new study, Mr. Ozimek found that employment had risen for workers with disabilities across industries as the labor market improved, consistent with the usual pattern. But it has improved especially rapidly in industries and occupations where remote work is more common. And many economists believe that the shift toward remote work, unlike the red-hot labor market, is likely to prove lasting.More than 35 percent of disabled Americans ages 18 to 64 had jobs in September. That was up from 31 percent just before the pandemic and is a record in the 15 years the government has kept track. Among adults without disabilities, 78 percent had jobs, but their employment rates have only just returned to the level before the pandemic.“Disabled adults have seen employment rates recover much faster,” Mr. Ozimek said. “That’s good news, and it’s important to understand whether that’s a temporary thing or a permanent thing. And my conclusion is that not only is it a permanent thing, but it’s going to improve.”Before the pandemic, Kathryn Wiltz repeatedly asked her employer to let her work from home because of her disability, a chronic autoimmune disorder whose symptoms include pain and severe fatigue. Her requests were denied.Ms. Wiltz’s new job allows her to work from home permanently.Sarah Rice for The New York TimesWhen the pandemic hit, however, the hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich., where Ms. Wiltz worked in the medical billing department sent her home along with many of her colleagues. Last month, she started a job with a new employer, an insurance company, in which she will be permanently able to work remotely.Being able to work from home was a high priority for Ms. Wiltz, 31, because the treatments she receives suppress her immune system, leaving her vulnerable to the coronavirus. And even if that risk subsides, she said, she finds in-person work taxing: Getting ready for work, commuting to the office and interacting with colleagues all drain energy reserves that are thin to begin with. As she struggled through one particularly difficult day recently, she said, she reflected on how hard it would have been to need to go into the office.“It would have been almost impossible,” she said. “I would have pushed myself and I would have pushed my body, and there’s a very real possibility that I would have ended up in the hospital.”There are also subtler benefits. Ms. Wiltz can get the monthly drug infusions she receives to treat her disorder during her lunch break, rather than taking time off work. She can turn down the lights to stave off migraines. She doesn’t have to worry that her colleagues are staring at her and wondering what is wrong. All of that, she said, makes her a more productive employee.“It makes me a lot more comfortable and able to think more clearly and do a better job anyway,” she said.The sudden embrace of remote work during the pandemic was met with some exasperation from some disability-rights leaders, who had spent years trying, mostly without success, to persuade employers to offer more flexibility to their employees.“Remote work and remote-work options are something that our community has been advocating for for decades, and it’s a little frustrating that for decades corporate America was saying it’s too complicated, we’ll lose productivity, and now suddenly it’s like, sure, let’s do it,” said Charles-Edouard Catherine, director of corporate and government relations for the National Organization on Disability.Still, he said the shift is a welcome one. For Mr. Catherine, who is blind, not needing to commute to work means not coming home with cuts on his forehead and bruises on his leg. And for people with more serious mobility limitations, remote work is the only option.Many employers are now scaling back remote work and are encouraging or requiring employees to return to the office. But experts expect remote and hybrid work to remain much more common and more widely accepted than it was before the pandemic. That may make it easier for disabled employees to continue to work remotely.The pandemic may also reshape the legal landscape. In the past, employers often resisted offering remote work as an accommodation to disabled workers, and judges rarely required them to do so. But that may change now that so many companies were able to adapt to remote work in 2020, said Arlene S. Kanter, director of the Disability Law and Policy Program at the Syracuse University law school.“If other people can show that they can perform their work well at home, as they did during Covid, then people with disabilities, as a matter of accommodation, shouldn’t be denied that right,” Ms. Kanter said.Ms. Kanter and other experts caution that not all people with disabilities want to work remotely. And many jobs cannot be done from home. A disproportionate share of workers with disabilities are employed in retail and other industries where remote work is uncommon. Despite recent gains, people with disabilities are still far less likely to have jobs, and more likely to live in poverty, than people without them.“When we say it’s historically high, that’s absolutely true, but we don’t want to send the wrong message and give ourselves a pat on the back,” Mr. Catherine said. “Because we’re still twice as likely to be unemployed and we’re still underpaid when we’re lucky enough to be employed.”Disability issues are likely to become more prominent in coming years because the pandemic has left potentially millions of adults dealing with a disability. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimated that close to two million working-age Americans had become disabled because of long Covid.Employers that don’t find ways to accommodate workers with disabilities — whether through remote work or other adjustments — are going to continue to struggle to find employees, said Mason Ameri, a Rutgers University business professor who studies disability.“Employers have to shape up,” he said. “Employers have to pivot. Otherwise this labor shortage may be more permanent.” More

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    Inflation Reduction Act to Rewrite Embattled Black Farmer Relief Program

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    To circumvent legal objections, the new law will provide aid to farmers who have faced discrimination, regardless of their race.WASHINGTON — A $4 billion program to help Black and other “socially disadvantaged” farmers that never got off the ground last year amid legal objections will be replaced with a plan to make relief funds available to farmers who have faced discrimination.The changes, which are tucked into the climate and tax legislation that is known as the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, are drawing backlash from the farmers whom the original debt relief program, part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan of 2021, was intended to help. The new program is the latest twist in an 18-month stretch that has underscored the challenges facing the Biden administration’s attempts to make racial equity a centerpiece of its economic agenda.Black farmers have been in limbo for months, not knowing if the debt relief they were promised would be granted. Many invested in new equipment after applying last year for money to help defray their debt. Some received foreclosure notices from the Department of Agriculture this year as the program languished.The legislation, which passed the Senate this week and is expected to pass the House on Friday, would create two new funds to help farmers. One, at $2.2 billion, would provide financial assistance to farmers, ranchers and forest landowners who faced discrimination before 2021. The other would provide $3.1 billion for the Agriculture Department to make payments for loans or loan modifications to farmers who faced financial distress.The money would replace the $4 billion program that was intended to aid about 15,000 farmers who received loans from the federal government or had bank loans guaranteed by the Agriculture Department. They included farmers and ranchers who had been subject to racial or ethnic prejudice, including those who are Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian American, Pacific Islander or Hispanic.Last year’s pandemic relief package included an additional $1 billion for outreach to farmers and ranchers of color and for improving their access to land.White farmers and groups representing them questioned whether the government could base debt relief on race and said the law discriminated against them. The program was frozen as lawsuits worked their way through the courts.The program also faced resistance from banks, which argued that their profits would suffer if the loans they had made to farmers were suddenly repaid.Fearful that the program would be blocked entirely, Democrats rewrote the law to remove race from the eligibility requirements. It is not clear how discrimination will be defined, and the legislation appears to give the Agriculture Department broad discretion to distribute the money as it sees fit.Groups representing Black farmers, who have faced decades of discrimination from banks and the federal government, are disappointed that the money will no longer be reserved specifically for them.What’s in the Climate, Health and Tax BillCard 1 of 8What’s in the Climate, Health and Tax BillA new proposal. More

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    Black Farmers Fear Foreclosure as Debt Relief Remains Frozen

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    Lawsuits from white farmers have blocked $4 billion of pandemic aid that was allocated to Black farmers in the American Rescue Plan.WASHINGTON — For Brandon Smith, a fourth-generation cattle rancher from Texas, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package that President Biden signed into law nearly a year ago was long-awaited relief.Little did he know how much longer he would have to wait.The legislation included $4 billion of debt forgiveness for Black and other “socially disadvantaged” farmers, a group that has endured decades of discrimination from banks and the federal government. Mr. Smith, a Black father of four who owes about $200,000 in outstanding loans on his ranch, quickly signed and returned documents to the Agriculture Department last year, formally accepting the debt relief. He then purchased more equipment for his ranch, believing that he had been given a financial lifeline.Instead, Mr. Smith has fallen deeper into debt. Months after signing the paperwork he received a notice informing him that the federal government intended to “accelerate” foreclosure on his 46-acre property and cattle if he did not start making payments on the loans he believed had been forgiven.“I trusted the government that we had a deal, and down here at the end of the day, the rug gets pulled out from under me,” Mr. Smith, 43, said in an interview.Black farmers across the nation have yet to see any of Mr. Biden’s promised relief. While the president has pledged to pursue policies to promote racial equity and correct decades of discrimination, legal issues have complicated that goal.In May 2021, the Agriculture Department started sending letters to borrowers who were eligible to have their debt cleared, asking them to sign and return forms confirming their balances. The payments, which also are supposed to cover tax liabilities and fees associated with clearing the debt, were expected to come in phases beginning in June.But the entire initiative has been stymied amid lawsuits from white farmers and groups representing them that questioned whether the government could offer debt relief based on race.Courts in Wisconsin and Florida have issued preliminary injunctions against the initiative, siding with plaintiffs who argued that the debt relief amounted to discrimination and could therefore be illegal. A class-action lawsuit against the U.S.D.A. is proceeding in Texas this year.The Biden administration has not appealed the injunctions but a spokeswoman for the Agriculture Department said it was continuing to defend the program in the courts as the cases move forward.The legal limbo has created new and unexpected financial strains for Black farmers, many of whom have been unable to make investments in their businesses given ongoing uncertainty about their debt loads. It also poses a political problem for Mr. Biden, who was propelled to power by Black voters and now must make good on promises to improve their fortunes.The law was intended to help remedy years of discrimination that nonwhite farmers have endured, including land theft and the rejection of loan applications by banks and the federal government. The program designated aid to about 15,000 borrowers who receive loans directly from the federal government or have their bank loans guaranteed by the U.S.D.A. Those eligible included farmers and ranchers who have been subject to racial or ethnic prejudice, including those who are Black, Native American, Alaskan Native, Asian American, Pacific Islander or Hispanic.After the initiative was rolled out last year, it met swift opposition.Banks were unhappy that the loans would be repaid early, depriving them of interest payments. Groups of white farmers in Wisconsin, North Dakota, Oregon and Illinois sued the Agriculture Department, arguing that offering debt relief on the basis of skin color is discriminatory, suggesting that a successful Black farmer could have his debts cleared while a struggling white farm could go out of business. America First Legal, a group led by the former Trump administration official Stephen Miller, filed a lawsuit making a similar argument in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.Last June, before the money started flowing, a federal judge in Florida blocked the program on the basis that it applied “strictly on racial grounds” irrespective of any other factor.The delays have angered the Black farmers that the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress were trying to help. They argue that the law was poorly written and that the White House is not defending it forcefully enough in court out of fear that a legal defeat could undermine other policies that are predicated on race.Those concerns became even more pronounced late last year when the government sent thousands of letters to minority farmers who were behind on their loan payments warning that they faced foreclosure. The letters were sent automatically to any borrowers who were past due on their loans, including about a third of the 15,000 socially disadvantaged farmers who applied for the debt relief, according to the Agriculture Department.Leonard Jackson, a cattle farmer in Muskogee, Okla., received such a letter despite being told by the U.S.D.A. that he did not need to make loan payments because his $235,000 in debt would be paid off by the government. The letter was jarring for Mr. Jackson, whose father, a wheat and soybean farmer, had his farm equipment foreclosed on by the government years earlier. The prospect of losing his 33 cows, house and trailer was unfathomable.“They said that they were paying off everybody’s loans and not to make payments and then they sent this,” Mr. Jackson, 55, said.The legal fight over the funds has stirred widespread confusion, with Black and other farmers stuck in the middle. This year, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives has been fielding calls from minority farmers who said their financial problems have been compounded. It has become even harder for them to get access to credit now, they say, that the fate of the debt relief is unclear.“It has definitely caused a very significant panic and a lot of distress among our members,” said Dãnia Davy, director of land retention and advocacy at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund.Mr. Smith bought more equipment for his ranch when he thought aid was finally on the way. But now he’s deeper in debt.Montinique Monroe for The New York TimesThe Agriculture Department said that it was required by law to send the warnings but that the government had no intention of foreclosing on farms, citing a moratorium on such action that was put in place early last year because of the pandemic. After The New York Times inquired about the foreclosure letters, the U.S.D.A. sent borrowers who had received notices another letter late last month telling them to disregard the foreclosure threat.“We want borrowers to know the bottom line is, actions such as acceleration and foreclosure remain suspended for direct loan borrowers due to the pandemic,” Kate Waters, a department spokeswoman, said. “We remain under the moratorium, and we will continue to communicate with our borrowers so they understand their rights and understand their debt servicing options.”The more than 2,000 minority farmers who receive private loans that are guaranteed by the U.S.D.A. are not protected by the federal moratorium and could still face foreclosure. Once the moratorium ends, farmers will need to resume making their payments if the debt relief program or an alternative is not in place.Some Black farmers argue that the Agriculture Department, led by Secretary Tom Vilsack, was too slow to disburse the debt relief and allowed critics time to mount a legal assault on the law.The Biden administration has been left with few options but to let the legal process play out, which could take months or years. The White House had been hopeful that a new measure in Mr. Biden’s sweeping social policy and climate bill would ultimately provide the farmers the debt relief they have been expecting. But that bill has stalled in the Senate and is unlikely to pass in its current form.“While we continue to defend in court the relief in the American Rescue Plan, getting the broader relief provision that the House passed signed into law remains the surest and quickest way to help farmers in economic distress across the nation, including thousands and thousands of farmers of color,” Gene Sperling, the White House’s pandemic relief czar, said in a statement.For Black farmers, who have seen their ranks fall from more than a million to fewer than 40,000 in the last century amid industry consolidation and onerous loan terms, the disappointment is not surprising. John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, said that rather than hearing about more government reports on racial equity, Black farmers want to see results.“We need implementation, action and resources to farm,” Mr. Boyd said. More

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    Making ‘Dinobabies’ Extinct: IBM’s Push for a Younger Work Force

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    Documents released in an age-discrimination case appear to show high-level discussion about paring the ranks of older employees.In recent years, former IBM employees have accused the company of age discrimination in a variety of legal filings and press accounts, arguing that IBM sought to replace thousands of older workers with younger ones to keep pace with corporate rivals.Now it appears that top IBM executives were directly involved in discussions about the need to reduce the portion of older employees at the company, sometimes disparaging them with terms of art like “dinobabies.”A trove of previously sealed documents made public by a Federal District Court on Friday show executives discussing plans to phase out older employees and bemoaning the company’s relatively low percentage of millennials.The documents, which emerged from a lawsuit contending that IBM engaged in a yearslong effort to shift the age composition of its work force, appear to provide the first public piece of direct evidence about the role of the company’s leadership in the effort.“These filings reveal that top IBM executives were explicitly plotting with one another to oust older workers from IBM’s work force in order to make room for millennial employees,” said Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer for the plaintiff in the case.Ms. Liss-Riordan represents hundreds of former IBM employees in similar claims. She is seeking class-action status for some of the claims, though courts have yet to certify the class.Adam Pratt, an IBM spokesman, defended the company’s employment practices. “IBM never engaged in systemic age discrimination,” he said. “Employees were separated because of shifts in business conditions and demand for certain skills, not because of their age.”Mr. Pratt said that IBM hired more than 10,000 people over 50 in the United States from 2010 to 2020, and that the median age of IBM’s U.S. work force was the same in each of those years: 48. The company would not disclose how many U.S. workers it had during that period.A 2018 article by the nonprofit investigative website ProPublica documented the company’s apparent strategy of replacing older workers with younger ones and argued that it followed from the determination of Ginni Rometty, then IBM’s chief executive, to seize market share in such cutting-edge fields as cloud services, big data analytics, mobile, security and social media. According to the ProPublica article, based in part on internal planning documents, IBM believed that it needed a larger proportion of younger workers to gain traction in these areas.In 2020, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released a summary of an investigation into these practices at IBM, which found that there was “top-down messaging from IBM’s highest ranks directing managers to engage in an aggressive approach to significantly reduce the head count of older workers.” But the agency did not publicly release evidence supporting its claims.The newly unsealed documents — which quote from internal company emails, and which were filed in a “statement of material facts” in the lawsuit brought by Ms. Liss-Riordan — appear to affirm those conclusions and show top IBM executives specifically emphasizing the need to thin the ranks of older workers and hire more younger ones.“We discussed the fact that our millennial population trails competitors,” says one email from a top executive at the time. “The data below is very sensitive — not to be shared — but wanted to make sure you have it. You will see that while Accenture is 72% millennial we are at 42% with a wide range and many units falling well below that average. Speaks to the need to hire early professionals.”“Early professionals” was the company’s term for a role that required little prior experience.Another email by a top executive, appearing to refer to older workers, mentions a plan to “accelerate change by inviting the ‘dinobabies’ (new species) to leave” and make them an “extinct species.”A third email refers to IBM’s “dated maternal workforce,” an apparent allusion to older women, and says: “This is what must change. They really don’t understand social or engagement. Not digital natives. A real threat for us.”Mr. Pratt, the spokesman, said that some of the language in the emails “is not consistent with the respect IBM has for its employees” and “does not reflect company practices or policies.” The statement of material facts redacts the names of the emails’ authors but indicates that they left the company in 2020.Both earlier legal filings and the newly unsealed documents contend that IBM sought to hire about 25,000 workers who typically had little experience during the 2010s. At the same time, “a comparable number of older, non-Millennial workers needed to be let go,” concluded a passage in one of the newly unsealed documents, a ruling in a private arbitration initiated by a former IBM employee.Similarly, the E.E.O.C.’s letter summarizing its investigation of IBM found that older workers made up over 85 percent of the group whom the company viewed as candidates for layoffs, though the agency did not specify what it considered “older.”The newly unsealed documents suggest that IBM sought to carry out its strategy in a variety of ways, including a policy that no “early professional hire” can be included in a mass layoff in the employee’s first 12 months at the company. “We are not making the progress we need to make demographically, and we are squandering our investment in talent acquisition and training,” an internal email states.Previously sealed documents show IBM executives bemoaning the company’s relatively low percentage of millennials.David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
    The lawsuit also argues that IBM sought to eliminate older workers by requiring them to move to a different part of the country to keep their jobs, assuming that most would decline to move. One internal email stated that the “typical relo accept rate is 8-10%,” while another said that the company would need to find work for those who accepted, suggesting that there was not a business rationale for asking employees to relocate.And while IBM employees designated for layoffs were officially allowed to apply for open jobs within the company, other evidence included in the new disclosure suggests that the company discouraged managers from actually hiring them. For example, according to the statement of material facts, managers had to request approval from corporate headquarters if they wanted to move ahead with a hire. Several of the plaintiffs in a separate lawsuit brought by Ms. Liss-Riordan appeared to have been on the receiving end of these practices. One of them, Edvin Rusis, joined IBM in 2003 and had worked as a “solution manager.” He was informed by the company in March 2018 that he would be laid off within a few months. According to his legal complaint, Mr. Rusis applied for five internal positions after learning of his forthcoming layoff but heard nothing in response to any of his applications.Mr. Pratt, the spokesman, said that the company’s efforts to shield recent hires from layoffs, as well as its approach to relocating workers, were blind to age, and that many workers designated for layoffs did secure new jobs with IBM.The ProPublica story from 2018 identified employees in similar situations, and others who were asked to relocate out of state and decided to leave the company instead.The company has faced other age discrimination claims, including a lawsuit filed in federal court in which plaintiffs accused the company of laying off large numbers of baby boomers because they were “less innovative and generally out of touch with IBM’s brand, customers and objectives.” The case was settled in 2017, according to ProPublica.In 2004, the company agreed to pay more than $300 million to settle with employees who argued that its decision in the 1990s to replace its traditional pension plan with a plan that included some features of a 401(k) constituted age discrimination.The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act prohibits discrimination against people 40 or over in hiring and employment on the basis of their age, with limited exceptions.The act also requires companies to disclose the age and positions of all people within a group or department being laid off, as well as those being kept on, before a worker waives the right to sue for age discrimination. Companies typically require such waivers before granting workers’ severance packages.But IBM stopped asking workers who received severance packages to waive their right to sue beginning in 2014, which allowed it to cease providing information about the age and positions of workers affected by a mass layoff.Instead, IBM required workers receiving a severance package to bring any discrimination claims individually in arbitration — a private justice system often preferred by corporations and other powerful defendants. Mr. Pratt said the change was made to better protect workers’ privacy.While some former employees preserved their ability to sue IBM in court by declining the severance package, many former employees accepted the package, requiring them to bring claims in arbitration. Ms. Liss-Riordan, who is running for attorney general of Massachusetts, represents employees in both situations.The particular legal matter that prompted the release of the documents in federal court was a motion by one of the plaintiffs whose late husband had signed an agreement requiring arbitration, and whose arbitration proceeding IBM then sought to block.IBM argued that the plaintiff sought to pursue the claim in arbitration after the window for doing so had passed, and that some of the evidence the plaintiff sought to introduce was confidential under the arbitration agreement. The plaintiff argued that those provisions of the arbitration agreement were unenforceable.The judge in the case, Lewis J. Liman, has yet to rule on the merits of that argument. But in January, Judge Liman ruled that documents in the case, including the statement of material facts, should be available to the public.IBM asked a federal appellate court to stay Judge Liman’s disclosure decision, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected the company’s argument, and the full circuit court also declined to grant a stay. The New York Times filed an amicus brief to the circuit court arguing that the First Amendment applied to the documents in question. More