(Jack Lavitch and Henry Lee are two West L.A. retirees who are also part-time, second-hand car buyers. They were lunching at Philippe the Original sandwich diner near central Chinatown when asked about the coming mayor’s race.)
Jack Lavitch
“First and foremost, the next mayor should fix up our city streets. There are potholes everywhere and they are a danger to us all. This would be something everyone could easily see — it would make a huge difference for everyone. That’s something [the mayor] could actually accomplish. It wouldn’t cost that much and it would make us all feel better about the whole city.”
“Oh yes,” he adds, biting into his sandwich. “He could get everyone free French dips like this one every Friday. I am joking.”
Jack is skeptical about official claims stating the city is nearing bankruptcy. “Maybe they actually are but they haven’t convinced me or the public.
» Read more about: L.A. Mayor’s Race: The View from Philippe’s »
(Note from Warehouse Workers United: Please take action now — workers like Javier, whose blog appears below, should not be fired with impunity. We will deliver this petition to Walmart today, April 29, 1 p.m., PDT.)
One month ago my son Alex was born. Yesterday I was fired from my job as a forklift driver at a warehouse where we move 100 percent Walmart merchandise.
I am outspoken. I defend my coworkers. I alert management about broken and unsafe equipment. I teach my coworkers about their rights, like what minimum wage is and what they should do when they are injured on the job.
I have been a target of management for a while. They watch everything I do, but it’s not my nature to be silent or scared. I know when I am right. Last year I went on strike to protest the retaliation my coworkers experienced when they spoke to the media and the public about the dirty water (if we had any water at all) that we were given to drink,
» Read more about: Help Reinstate Walmart Contract Worker Javier Rodriguez »
We come together as Americans when confronting common disasters and common threats, such as occurred in Boston, but we continue to split apart economically.
Anyone who wants to understand the dis-uniting of America needs to see how dramatically we’re segregating geographically by income and wealth. Today I’m giving a Town Hall talk in Fresno, in the center of California’s Central Valley, where the official unemployment rate is 15.4 percent and median family earns under $40,000. The so-called “recovery” is barely in evidence.
As the crow flies Fresno is not that far from California’s high-tech enclaves of Google, Intel, Facebook, and Apple, or from the entertainment capital of Hollywood, but they might as well be different worlds.
Being wealthy in modern America means you don’t come across anyone who isn’t, and being poor and lower-middle class means you’re surrounded by others who are just as hard up.
We all know that sequestration and the automatic $85 billion in federal cuts “across the board” for discretionary spending jeopardize our very delicate recovery from the Great Recession. Though slow, fragile and incremental, the recovery is real, thanks in part to an unsung legislative action — that now is in danger of being undermined by congressional inaction.
In 1998, Congress passed the Workforce Investment Act (WIA), which greatly improved unemployed people’s lives. The WIA focused on providing employment and training services for youth and adults, preparing them for jobs in industries using a model that encouraged self-sufficiency and widespread access to resource centers and training. The goal was to help people learn the skills for life-long career advancement.
What made WIA special was that that it proactively engaged with business, education and labor (as the drivers of local economies) to guide the direction of workforce development programs in a way that would specifically address geographical needs.
» Read more about: It’s Time to Reinvest in Workforce Development »
Progress, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Witness the reaction to today’s landmark L.A. City Council vote, approving the implementation plan for a far-reaching overhaul of the city’s multi-family and commercial waste and recycling system.
The plan, which passed 10-3, puts L.A. squarely in the forefront of a growing national movement to transform the way cities deal with waste. For the first time companies will have to meet a set of environmental and labor standards in order to operate. Under this exclusive franchise system, the city will be divided into 11 zones, with companies competing to be the sole operator within each zone.
Among those celebrating the City Council’s decision were environmentalists, waste workers and small business owners, who as part of the Don’t Waste LA coalition have driven the campaign to reform L.A.’s waste and recycling industry. Less enthusiastic were certain industry lobbyists and big business advocates,
(Art Sweatman is a City of Los Angeles tree surgeon. His post is a response to Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez’s April 24 article, “Time for public employee unions to pick up the tab.” The post first appeared on SEIU Local 721’s site and is republished here with permission.)
Dear Steve:
I sat down with you a couple of years ago and discussed the impact that “givebacks” would have on our SEIU 721 members who work for the City of Los Angeles.
You seemed to care then, and city workers eventually agreed to help L.A. save money. One year later we also agreed to contribute more towards our pension benefits, so we could keep our spouses on our benefits after we retire.
Your commentary is short-sighted. You acknowledge but ignore the fact that the politicians keep lying about the city’s deficit.
» Read more about: Union Worker to Steve Lopez: We’ve Picked Up the Tab! »
Two local Thursday events will mark preparations for the annual Workers’ Memorial Day that will be observed nationally on Sunday. Today’s morning activities center on the unveiling of a work-in-progress mural depicting the contributions of immigrant workers and the release of the annual “Dying at Work in California” report. The survey tallies the cost of job-related deaths, injuries and illnesses and tells the stories of the 196 Los Angeles workers killed on the job last year. These stories include:
» Read more about: Workers’ Memorial Day: Not One More Death or Injury! »
Most of us accept that the earth goes around the sun. This is impressive, since we can look up in the sky and see the sun going around the earth. We believe the opposite because we have been told about the research of astronomers over the centuries showing that what we can see with our own two eyes is wrong. Instead, we accept that the motion of the stars and planets can be much better explained by the earth going around the sun.
Suppose for a moment that astronomers and people who write on astronomy did not agree on earth or solar orbits. Imagine that a substantial group of these people, including many of the most prominent astronomers, insisted that the sun goes around the earth, as anyone can plainly see. In that case, there would likely be huge numbers of people who refused to accept that the earth goes around the sun.
» Read more about: Mickey Mouse Economics: Austerity Bible Debunked »
Cherri Senders wasn’t always looking for the union label. Back in the late 1980s the Washington, D.C. native was writing for the L.A. Weekly, an alternative newspaper that was generous with editorial pleas for social justice but miserly when paying its own workers.
“I saw how exploited writers were,” Senders tells Frying Pan News. “We joined the National Writers Union and were able to go from five cents a word to seven. That’s how I found out about the labor movement.”
About 15 years later a friend of Senders, who by then had started her own communications company, wanted to learn how to purchase union-made baby products, but couldn’t find a way to track down which ones bore a union label.
There had always been Buy Union lists – often out of date and pinned to the bulletin boards of union halls or,
» Read more about: Looking for the Union Label in All the Right Places »
Guilt — in the psychoanalytic tradition — is both a form of self-punishment and a key obstacle to therapeutic improvement. In The Ego and the Id, Freud wrote that the patient finds “satisfaction in the illness and refuses to give up the punishment of suffering.” In a paradoxical way, obsessive guilt becomes a masochistic attempt at an unreliable cure.
The Company You Keep, starring and directed by Robert Redford, is a film awash in guilt. Redford’s character, Jim Grant, an ex-radical still “hiding” in plain sight, feels guilt about his past and about the secrets he has to withhold from his daughter. A reporter, played by Shia LaBeouf, eventually feels guilty about the impact his bulldog reporting might have on the people he’s writing about. A tenured radical professor feels guilty about not keeping up “the struggle,” unable to inspire his students beyond a round of applause at the end of his stories.
» Read more about: The Sixties: What a Long, Strange Guilt Trip It’s Been »