For years firefighters and environmentalists have warned of the dangers from upholstered furniture treated with flame-retardant chemicals that are linked to cancer, decreased fertility, hormone disruption and lower IQ development. Although state safety regulations allow the use of flame retardants, they are not required — the choice is left to manufacturers. Today Californians wishing to buy a sofa or easy chair free of toxic chemicals are in for a surprise when they try to get information in stores about the presence or absence of flame retardants. An informal survey of West Los Angeles furniture showrooms recently encountered these scenes:
Trouble Down the Road
At the flat top grill, he was all business,
flung raw eggs dead center into the corned beef
hash like a strapping southpaw.
In the alley, with me, he was all ideas.
Said he’d be leaving soon, had a shot back east—
a tryout for the big leagues.
Said his sister would loan him a Buick convertible,
and he’d fill it with malt beer and tuna.
All he needed was a woman to hold
his cat while he drove.
I like animals, I told him. Then I dropped
my cigarette into the dusty clay,
ground it out, slow,
felt the road under my foot.
Source: Luvina, Issue 57 (December 2009).
Cece Peri’s poems have appeared in journals and magazines, including Luvina: Writers of Los Angeles Issue (University of Guadalajara),
The U.S. prison population has grown more than 700 percent between 1970 and 2009. We’re locking people up left and right, including thousands of non-violent immigrants whose only crime is crossing the border without documentation. They are now trapped in private prisons with no voice.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has just released the jaw-dropping findings of its investigation into the shadowy system of privately run Criminal Alien Requirement (CAR) prisons used to hold immigrants. Here, thousands of immigrants serve lengthy prison sentences where they are exposed to abysmal conditions.
Private prisons have a lot to gain from the incarceration of immigrants. Their business model revolves around imprisoning people for profits, siphoning tax dollars away from public goods and into shareholders’ pockets. For locked-up immigrants, however, it means being isolated from family and the outside world.
Until ACLU’s blockbuster investigation, CAR facilities have operated in the shadows,
If proof is needed that good things happen to people who don’t just wait but act, look no further than Governor Jerry Brown’s agreement, this past week, to allow in-home caregivers to receive overtime pay. Last year his administration had claimed that such overtime, which the federal government had mandated for in-home caregivers, would pose a prohibitive financial burden for California. Then, in January, the governor unveiled a 2014-15 budget that explicitly capped caregivers’ hours at 40 per week for the program, which is administered by the state’s In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS).
Not only would low-income seniors and Californians with disabilities who require in-home care have to hire additional workers to meet their needs, but the cap also struck deep at the livelihood of many caregivers by taking away from them a substantial number of work hours. A January Capital & Main investigative story, written by Gary Cohn,
» Read more about: Reversal of Misfortune: Caregivers Win Overtime »
To the sources of airborne diseases brought in from schools, hospitals and airliners, add a new threat: Thousands of low-paid food handlers who are compelled by economic circumstances to remain on the job even when they are ill. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “Infected food workers cause about 70 percent of reported norovirus outbreaks from contaminated food.” The CDC’s recommendations for containment include, “Requiring sick food workers to stay home, and considering use of paid sick leave and on-call staffing, to support compliance.”
Yet many of these workers have no paid sick leave and, in some cases, have claimed they risk losing their jobs if they stay home with the flu or a cold. From Orange County to South and East Los Angeles, however, hundreds of workers at El Super, which is the largest grocery chain in California’s exploding Latino food market, are demanding their employer provide sick leave pay.
» Read more about: El Super Grocery Workers Fight for Paid Sick Leave »
Ever wonder how the reality behind splashy headlines about jobs really stacks up? I promise you a jolt of hope from reading a new study called Work for All the Crafts: Restoring the Union Depot in St. Paul.
The study was released June 10 by Jobs to Move America coalition leader Good Jobs First, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that promotes smart growth for working families. The study shows that the recently completed restoration of the Union Depot — an historic transit hub in St. Paul, Minnesota that is pictured above — employed about 2,000 workers with special skills in 13 different building and construction crafts.
When the car in front of you gets pulled over for speeding and you’re going just as fast, you tend to slow down.
Judging from a story in last Friday’s L.A. Times, this sort of common-sense approach may not be so common at the Santa Monica headquarters of the film and TV studio, Lionsgate. According to the Times’ reporting, Lionsgate is the last major studio to retain its unpaid internship program after the rest of the entertainment industry has started to pay interns.
The industry’s problems began in 2011, when interns working on the film Black Swan for Fox Searchlight filed a class action suit against the company, claiming violations of federal labor law. (Companies are not allowed to use interns as a source of free labor as viewed by the U.S. Department of Labor.) Following the Black Swan suit,
» Read more about: Lionsgate Raises Nickel-and-Diming to an Art »
Every year Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center releases a glossy brochure called Report to the Community. Among the doctor profiles and research-breakthrough stories are several dry metrics dealing with the number of beds, total patient and outpatient days and, perhaps most impressively, the year’s dollar value for something called “community benefit contributions.”
Cedars, which is the state’s third highest-earning nonprofit hospital, claimed $640.3 million as its 2012 community benefit contribution.
This number turns out to be the real point of the report. Because under state law all not-for-profit hospitals must justify their continuing tax exemption as charitable institutions by demonstrating that they are providing a community benefit — free charity care to indigent patients and what California calls “activities that are intended to address community needs and priorities primarily through disease prevention and improvement of health status.”
Whether Cedars and California’s other nonprofit hospitals have been living up to that charitable obligation is a question that Assembly Bill 503,
» Read more about: Sweet Charity: The Truth Behind Hospitals’ Community Benefits Windfall »
Why a major magazine put the issue of reparations for slavery on its June cover, I really don’t know. Maybe because Juneteenth – the festival marking the day in 1865 when Texas slaves learned of their emancipation 18 months after President Lincoln had signed it – comes in June. Of course, that date rolls around every June 19 and the concept of reparations existed long before emancipation.
Reparations came to my attention through civil rights activism in the 1960s, although it was proposed by abolitionists before the Civil War. Lincoln’s “40 Acres and a Mule” policy was actually a form of reparations, recognizing that the wealth of much of the country had come from the work of slaves who remained landless and penniless, and without many opportunities otherwise. Where it was implemented change happened, even in the Deep South. But it stalled after Lincoln’s assassination, and things went backwards as segregation took root and became the common public policy of the nation.
On Tuesday a coalition of faculty, legislators, staff and students (pictured above) marched to Governor Jerry Brown’s office in support of greatly increased funding for the California State University system. Governor Brown’s budget for the 2014-2015 fiscal year includes $142.2 million for the beleaguered CSU system, a five percent increase in its budget. Kevin Wehr, a sociology professor at CSU Sacramento and one of the marchers, said that “the governor’s proposal is welcome but it’s not nearly enough. [The cuts to the CSU budget] were massive, deep and really hurt the ability to deliver a quality public education.”
During the recession, many state programs were hit hard by budget cuts. However, the economic downturn took a particularly devastating toll on the state university system. More than a billion dollars was slashed from its budget as California dealt with the recession. Only a small fraction has since been restored.
The CSU system faces numerous problems.