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Nine years ago, Raven Stevens moved to Mount Shasta, California, after being priced out of the housing market in Santa Cruz, where she had lived for 27 years. She describes the picturesque mountain town just south of the Oregon border as a community “in transition.” By that she means two things: it is an economy moving from logging to more sustainable industries, such as tourism. And it is a community being overtaken by transplants from the Bay Area, like herself.
“We bring our crazy ideas with us,” she says. “And we get a hard time for that. We’ll never be locals. I’ve heard some people say, ‘You people should just go back to where you came from.’”
The house Stevens and her partner purchased in Mount Shasta is about two thousand feet south of an old water bottling plant that was vacated in 2010 by Coca-Cola/Danone.
» Read more about: Life in Time of Drought: Will Mount Shasta Bottle Its Water for Profit? »
A broad-based coalition today launched an effort to reform Proposition 13, the 1978 law passed by voters that many critics believe imposed a fiscal stranglehold on the Golden State.
The strategy of the “Make It Fair” coalition is clear – to split the business community while keeping homeowners on the sidelines. In doing so, advocates have put themselves in a strong position to challenge what has been called the third rail of California politics.
“Make It Fair” is proposing a critical change to the state’s tax law: closing loopholes that have allowed commercial properties to be taxed at nearly the same level as they were in 1975 (tax rates for residential property would remain unchanged). The coalition claims that California could gain an additional $9 billion a year if these loopholes are eliminated – revenue that could be used for schools, social services,
» Read more about: New Prop. 13 Reform Effort Could Succeed by Splitting Business Interests »
Emeryville, California is more than a brief Amtrak stop across the bay from San Francisco. On Tuesday evening all five Emeryville City Councilmembers approved an ordinance that increases the minimum wage for workers employed at small firms to $12.25 an hour, effective July 1. Employees at Emeryville companies with more than 55 employees, such as Home Depot and Ikea, will earn a minimum wage of $14.44 an hour, also to begin July 1.
“This is a momentous occasion for the city of Emeryville,” Jennifer Lin, deputy director of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, told Capital & Main by phone. “Many of the city councilmembers in their deliberations spoke about the need to address income inequality, to give workers a leg out of poverty.”
California’s current hourly minimum wage is $9, an increase of $1 over 2014. Meanwhile, the Golden State’s rate of poverty in 2013 was 23.4 percent,
» Read more about: Emeryville Joins Movement to Raise Minimum Wage »
“If we’re serious about fighting inequality, we need to understand it and track it to see how we’re doing,” Dr. Annette Bernhardt tells Capital & Main. Bernhardt is the lead author of Low Wage Work in California: 2014 Chartbook, the first of what will be an annual report from the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center. “Our goal was to show that the story of inequality isn’t just about the top one percent; it’s also about the millions of low-wage workers and their families who struggle with economic insecurity every day.”
Bernhardt and co-authors Ian Perry and Lindsay Cattell have assembled a detailed yet accessible profile of California’s low-wage workers – those earning less than $13.63 per hour in 2014, which is two-thirds of the state’s median hourly wage. A third of California workers, about 4.7 million, fell below that standard last year.
» Read more about: Report: State's Low-Income Workers Are Falling Behind »
Move lips, move minds and make new meanings flare.
— Seamus Heaney, “Beacons at Bealtaine”
During a time of political optimism in Northern Ireland when the peace process was beginning to take hold, Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney gave a talk at Queens University in Belfast about the potential power of poetic language. In a place where the “idioms of suspicion and accusation” were insidious and entrenched, Heaney hoped that a fluid approach to identity and language might provide an escape route from binary thinking and the “weary twisted emotions” of Northern Ireland’s “troubles.”
Heaney suggested that it was poets and other writers who could provide a “re-angling of perception” that might loosen the stranglehold the sectarian psyche had imposed upon the linguistic and political landscape. Given some room to move, a more unruly vocabulary could surface where Catholics might regard themselves as “Catestants,” and Protestants could see themselves as “Protholics” —
René Bobadilla had just started lunch on April 13 when he got a call from Walmart’s government relations office.
“I almost choked,” he says.
Bobadilla is the city manager of Pico Rivera and the government relations rep had just informed him that the local Walmart Supercenter was shutting down within hours and possibly for six months — due to a plumbing issue.
That meant 530 workers cut at Pico Rivera’s second-largest employer and a severe budget hit to the San Gabriel Valley city of 63,000. Sales tax from the Supercenter accounts for some 10 percent of city revenues — an estimated $1.4 million a year.
The nature of the problem is a mystery.
“They haven’t told us specifically — is it their main, do they have water coming out of their drain? I don’t know,” Bobadilla says.
The Pico Rivera store is one of five Walmart stores around the country suddenly closed due to vaguely defined plumbing problems.
» Read more about: Walmart's Pico Rivera 'Plumbing Problem' »
This year’s May Day events in Los Angeles are grouped around the themes of immigration reform and raising the minimum wage. Below is an updated list of events, provided by the Los Angeles May Day Coalition and other sources. Note: Michael Brown Sr., father of the teenager shot and killed last year in Ferguson, Missouri, will join the #MayDaySolidarity march meeting in Downtown L.A., at the Chinatown Gateway (Broadway & Cesar Chavez Ave.) shortly before 3 p.m. Tom Morello, activist, singer and guitarist for Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, will join the march once it approaches the Metropolitan Detention Center (Aliso & Alameda streets) around 4 p.m.
Schedule of events:
2 p.m. – 3 p.m.: People gather at Dragon’s Gate, Chinatown, corner of Broadway & Cesar Chavez Ave.
3:15 p.m.– 3:45 p.m.: May Day Rally & program begins
Brief presentations and music. Speakers include elected officials such as L.A.
» Read more about: Tom Morello, Michael Brown Sr. to Join May Day Events »
Charles Gladden has held his current job for eight years. The 63 year old sweeps floors, cleans dishes and mops bathrooms. His take-home pay is about $360 a week and he is currently homeless, moving between shelters and occasionally a Metro stop next to the White House.
Bertrand Olotara is a college graduate and a single father. After being laid off, he now earns $12 an hour as a cook and has a second job which often means he works up to 70 hours a week. Despite these two jobs, he is eligible for food stamps that help him feed his family.
These stories of America’s working poor aren’t anything new, but you may be surprised to learn where they work: the United States Senate. When the Senate privatized food service in their cafeterias and dining rooms, formerly living-wage jobs were converted into poverty-level positions through for-profit contractors like Restaurant Associates and Compass Group.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has a digital education division called Amplify. A Bloomberg News article, “News Corp.’s $1 Billion Plan to Overhaul Education Is Riddled With Failures,” outlines the company’s efforts to cash in on education without positive results. Read more here.
Other news:
More than 5,000 registered nurses belonging to the California Nurses Association (CNA) are striking today at eight California hospitals, with a somewhat smaller number continuing the strikes Friday. The nurses are demanding that hospitals provide adequate staffing levels which are now, they claim, endangering patients. (Disclosure: CNA is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)
Hospitals affected by the strike are: Los Angeles Medical Center (Kaiser Permanente); Providence Little Company of Mary Medical Center Torrance; Providence Saint John’s Health Center; Mills-Peninsula Health Services (Sutter); Sutter Auburn Faith Hospital; Sutter Roseville Medical Center; Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital and Sutter Tracy Community Hospital.
Sue Robbins, a registered nurse who has worked at Sutter Roseville Medical Center for 14 years, says this is her first strike and it’s also the first time a strike has taken place at her hospital, located north of Sacramento.
Robbins says that a rehab center that served the community is gone and that Sutter’s management wants to eliminate “baby nurses” —
» Read more about: Nurses at Eight California Hospitals Strike to Demand Adequate Staffing »