In 1895, Eugene V. Debs — the patriotic labor leader, socialist, and five-time presidential candidate — observed: “There is something wrong in this country; the judicial nets are so adjusted as to catch the minnows and let the whales slip through.”
In that regard, our justice system hasn’t changed that much in the 119 years since Debs uttered those words. We spend many more resources policing and prosecuting crime in the streets than crime in the suites, even though corporate crime is much more costly in terms of death, injury and disease.
If you need evidence of this double standard, look no farther than how the federal government has “punished” General Motors for failure to provide timely information about mishandling its recall of about 2.5 million cars with a defective ignition switches that the company has linked to 13 deaths.
On March 4, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration insisted that GM answers 107 questions about why the company waited until this February to begin its recall when it knew about the problem as early as 2001.
You know the old joke. It gets tailored for whatever the despised group of the moment is:
Q: What do you call 10,000 [lawyers/politicians/whatever] at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.
I was thinking about that recently with regard to Wall Street and bankers. The popular (and populist) rage that has been rising against Wall Street seems to be reaching new levels. According to Gallup, Americans rank the “honesty and ethical standards” of bankers as “low” or “very low” at a rate about three times higher than we did in the mid-1980s. (The vast majority of that increase came after the most recent financial meltdown.) And politicians – even Republicans – now regularly use Wall Street as an easy punching bag for cheap political points.
It’s hard to argue with the sentiment. Those people did ruin a minimally well-functioning economy.
» Read more about: Study: Wall Street Banks Overcharge L.A. »
Like thousands of family child care providers across Los Angeles County, Ramona Duran’s day begins at a frantic pace. While most Angelenos are still asleep, Ramona is up before sunrise preparing for the first family to arrive at 5 a.m. at the Long Beach day care center she operates. She checks on the status of a healthy breakfast cooking in the kitchen and makes some last minute arrangements of the play area. Ramona’s Day Care is not a baby-sitting service; it is the center of her community and a labor of love. What she loves most is taking care of the “little ones” and helping families.
“I help the family to go to school, to go to work [and] go to the doctor,” Ramona says. She truly enables families to thrive.
Unfortunately, thousands of women who serve our youngest and most at-risk children struggle to make ends meet — family child care providers earn less than $20,000 per year.
Today, Mayor Garcetti will deliver his first State of the City address to outline his goals and vision for the coming year. One can expect a focus on his “back to basics” message of creating a stronger economy and more efficient and effective city government. As he delineates those “basics” and how he hopes to achieve them and pay for them, the Mayor needs to make sure he is taking a full accounting of what’s happening in his own City Hall backyard – ensuring that the fulfillment of his vision doesn’t come at the expense of our streets, communities or workers. An item that requires his immediate attention is the draining of hundreds of millions of dollars from city taxpayers each year.
It turns out that the city of Los Angeles spends more than $200 million on annual fees to Wall Street banks and other financial institutions. This eye-popping figure is detailed in a new research report released by Fix LA,
Everyone is talking about living wages, but few have actually written the laws that stand behind them. Margo Feinberg has done just that. As an activist labor attorney for more than 30 years, she has played a critical part in shaping groundbreaking legislation, including a worker retention law to ease the plight of workers in industries that change management frequently, as well as a landmark superstore ordinance to protect neighborhoods from the blight that often follows in the wake of a Walmart. Currently, Feinberg is involved in a campaign to secure sick days for nonunion grocery store workers, many of whom have no such benefit. In recognition of her accomplishments and commitment to economic justice and working families, she will be honored at the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy’s Women for a New Los Angeles Luncheon on May 9. We spoke to Ms. Feinberg about her life and work,
» Read more about: Giving Workers a Voice: An Interview With Margo Feinberg »
About seven years ago I was at my first meeting of an education advisory board, staring out the window at the panoramic view of the Santa Monica Mountains, when a fellow sidled up and began making casual conversation. We exchanged a few pleasantries, when he leaned in to tell me in a confidential hush that he had a $34,000 tax problem. Taken aback, I first thought, How odd that he should share such a thing — and figured maybe he wanted sympathy.
Then it occurred to me that his tax problem was more than half what I had made altogether that year, so I said, “If you have that big a problem, you must have the resources to deal with it.” He backed away and never spoke to me again at that meeting, or at any thereafter.
I suppose that makes sense. He assumed I don’t like taxes the way he dislikes them.
Most Americans today know that Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was killed 46 years ago in Memphis, Tennessee. But fewer know why he was there.
King went to Memphis to support African American garbage workers, who were on strike to protest unsafe conditions, abusive white supervisors, and low wages — and to gain recognition for their union. Their picket signs relayed a simple but profound message: “I Am A Man.”
If he were still alive, King would surely join the growing campaigns to unionize and improve pay and working conditions for janitors, security guards, hotel workers, hospital employees, farmworkers, grocery employees, and others who earn poverty-level wages. He might disrupt Walmart stockholder meetings to demand that the company pay employees a living wage, join fast-food workers in their quest for decent pay, and urge consumers to boycott the Gap, Walmart and other companies until they stop manufacturing their products in overseas sweatshops.
» Read more about: MLK’s Last Campaign Was for Workers’ Rights »
On Tuesday — April Fools’ Day no less — Los Angeles’ City Council nearly unanimously approved the Zero Waste LA Franchise System, which would make it the first and largest city nationally to adopt a robust plan to move towards Zero Waste. The Zero Waste LA Franchise System, under the direction of the City of Los Angeles’ Bureau of Sanitation, will transform the antiquated waste and recycling system that currently serves apartment dwellers and businesses. In its place will emerge an innovative model for the nation. This new system will carve the city into 11 waste service zones intended to boost recycling and provide strong customer service – a similar success found in the city’s single-family waste and recycling programs.
The Zero Waste LA franchise plan specifically requires trash-hauling companies to bid for exclusive contracts to operate in the 11 waste service zones. This will help the city to meet its Zero Waste goals,
» Read more about: Los Angeles City Council Boldly Approves Zero Waste LA Plan »
We’ve written on more than one occasion here about the travesty that is the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and its treatment of big-time college athletes. So obviously we take great pleasure in the ruling last week, made by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), that said football players at Northwestern University are employees and ordered an election for those employees to decide if they want to be members of the College Athletes Players Association (CAPA).
The ruling itself is one the feds can be proud of, properly reducing the question of employee status to its core issues—do the players perform a service for money, subject to the control of the person paying them the money?
With football players, the answers are pretty clear. Their coaches require them to sign a contract, make them work 60-70 hours some weeks, control their lives down to the most minute detail and in exchange give them various forms of compensation,
» Read more about: Of Football and the Limits of Labor Law »
Working families know that making ends meet is not easy. Low and stagnant wages cannot cover the ever-increasing cost of basic expenses, leaving workers and consumers constantly scraping the bottom of the barrel. Nearly half of all Americans lack the incomes they need to be secure, according to research by Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW).
In Los Angeles, these challenges have inspired a new proposal to give workers in the city’s largest hotels a raise to $15.37 an hour. Across the country there is a growing national movement to raise the federal hourly minimum wage to $10.10.
Renewed attention to issues of economic insecurity and income inequality provide us an opportunity to ask an important fundamental question: what do working families really need to get by?
WOW answers this question by crunching the numbers. Our Basic Economic Security Tables™ measures the incomes that California’s working families need by determining the true cost of households’ basic expenses – such as food,
Two and a half years after the Occupy Movement jolted the country, America is once again abuzz with talk about poverty and inequality. Of course, along with a heightened focus on the problem come lots of ideas for fixing it. Some are smart, others are not, but nearly all of them share one thing in common: They are complicated.
The status quo “solution” isn’t complicated – at least on paper. It’s the one proposed by former Reagan official Herbert Meyer, who, on his website The Cure for Poverty, offers a three-word remedy: the free market.
Meyer, who worked at the CIA, may have been too busy warding off the enemy to notice that market forces have enjoyed one of the most unfettered periods in recent American history, even as poverty and inequality have risen inexorably. But he is surely onto something with his one-step prescription.
So I have my own,
The movement to make Los Angeles the country’s largest city to employ an exclusive franchise system for hauling its commercial and multi-family waste drew tantalizingly close to completion today, as the City Council voted 12-1 to replace the current Byzantine hodgepodge of trash pickup routes servicing businesses and apartment buildings with a completely different model. The historic vote took place this morning, with Councilman Bernard Parks providing the lone dissenting vote. Because the vote was not unanimous, a final vote must take place April 8.
Although the City of L.A.’s Bureau of Sanitation provides hauling service for houses and four-unit apartment complexes, a wild frontier system characterizes the remaining commercial and residential pickups, resulting in fleets of trash trucks, whose owners often pay their workers low wages, crisscrossing the city on uncoordinated schedules. The consequence has been extra wear and tear on roads, and increased air pollution.
The new system will divide the city into 11 pickup zones,
» Read more about: Historic Victory for Zero-Waste Campaign »
Many people thought Cesar Chavez was crazy to think he could build a union among migrant farmworkers. Since the early 1900s, unions had been trying and failing to organize California’s unskilled agricultural workers. Whether the workers were Anglos, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos or Mexican Americans, these efforts met the same fate. The organizing drives met fierce opposition and always flopped, vulnerable to growers’ violent tactics and to competition from a seemingly endless supply of other migrant workers desperate for work. So when Chavez left his job as a community organizer in San Jose in 1962 and moved to rural Delano to try, once again, to bring a union to California’s lettuce and grape fields, even his closest friends figured he was delusional.
Within a decade, however, the United Farm Workers (UFW) union had collective bargaining agreements with most of California’s major growers. Pay, working conditions and housing for migrant workers improved significantly.
There haven’t been, to put it mildly, many films about America’s labor movement. Take away Salt of the Earth (1954) and Norma Rae (1979) and what are you left with? Cesar Chavez, then, offers to fill a cavernous void in the public’s knowledge about both union organizing and the history of the country’s mostly Latino agricultural workforce. Directed by the Mexican actor and film producer Diego Luna (Y Tu Mamá También, Elysium), the film follows Chavez (Michael Peña) from the time he parted company with the grassroots Community Service Organization (CSO) to the signing of union contracts with growers following a successful consumer boycott of table grapes.
Working with a screenplay by Keir Pearson, Luna wisely passes on a sweeping Gandhi-style treatment of Chavez’s entire life. This allows Luna and cinematographer Enrique Chediak to linger on the arid poetry of life in California’s Central Valley (played here by Sonora,
When Diego Luna was growing up in Mexico he’d sometimes hear references to Cesar Chavez and the union of farm workers he had organized in America. Luna, who would become one of his country’s leading film stars, remembers being struck as a 13-year-old by television images of Chavez’s funeral – the man was so modest, his coffin was an unpainted wooden box. A few years ago Luna began assembling a production company to film one critical chapter in Chavez’s life – the 10-year period in which he formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee and which culminated with the triumph of the consumer grape boycott. Cesar Chavez opens this week and Luna, while in Los Angeles to promote the film, spoke to Capital & Main about the movie, the man and the movement he created.
Capital & Main: Your film is a biography but is there something more behind it?
I think its message is of what we can do when we unite.
» Read more about: Interview With ‘Cesar Chavez’ Director Diego Luna »
Today in Los Angeles attorneys will offer closing arguments in Vergara v. California, a lawsuit funded by Silicon Valley millionaire David Welch and others with ties to the school privatization movement under the banner of a front organization called Students Matter. The suit wrongly attacks as unconstitutional California statutes covering teacher employment, including the current two-year probationary period, the due process protections built into teacher dismissal and layoff procedures that value experience over more arbitrary factors.
That the probationary period is even an issue is a little mind-boggling; if a principal can have a teacher on staff for two years and still have no idea if that teacher is effective, he or she probably has no business being a principal. At trial, award-winning superintendents and principals have testified that two years is more than enough time to decide whether to keep a teacher on staff and,
» Read more about: Vergara Lawsuit Would Hurt California Students »
When Dan Flaming, the president of the Economic Roundtable research group, describes the tanking of the L.A. economy in the 1990s, he pinpoints the cause to the loss of thousands of aerospace jobs. However, he explains, it was only immigrant migration that rescued Los Angeles financially. The skills, hard work and entrepreneurial energy of the estimated 100,000 immigrants who came here each year between 1989 and 2000 fueled an informal, low wage economy that kept the city humming. (See Flaming discuss L.A.’s present economic climate in the interview above.)
Listen to podcast interview with Dan Flaming
While many people have blamed immigrants for job losses, it was actually the end of the Cold War and subsequent job cuts in aircraft and related industries that led nearly 1.5 million people to leave L.A. for other parts of the U.S.
In their place immigrants arrived and provided work that was completely legal,
» Read more about: Confronting L.A.’s Economy, Past & Present »
As a writer I bounce from job to job. When not working at LAANE, I have to pay for my own health care – whose monthly premiums, over the past few years, have threatened to surpass my monthly grocery bill. So naturally I was more than glad when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – aka, Obamacare – became law in 2010. I know a bit about what it’s like to have and not have health care. My brother was stricken with a rare form of cancer in his early twenties. He survived against some pretty big odds – but only because of my father’s great health insurance, which allowed my brother to be treated at a leading research hospital. I also lived through the height of San Francisco’s AIDS pandemic and saw what uninsured people went through: days spent in hospital waiting rooms, often minimal care, overcrowded rooms and life-threatening delays for medical procedures.
As we celebrate Women’s History Month in March, we honor many iconic women workers from past to present, from Rosie the Riveter to Dolores Huerta. But we often forget about the unsung “sheroes,” the women whose toil and dedication help move America, today.
One such group is the women workers who manufacture America’s buses, trains and streetcars for our public transit systems. Khanthaly Ditthiait is a 26-year-old mom of two who works at a bus factory owned by New Flyer Industries in St. Cloud, Minnesota. When Khanthaly was just 18 years old, she got a job as a painter’s assistant at the factory.
“It was 10 years before they hired any women to paint the buses — I was the first girl that they hired,” she says. “It was like, ‘Oh, you can’t do it, you’re short. And you have boobs.’ But I was determined. I was like,
» Read more about: In Praise of Unsung Women and Their Work »
Tuesday is the 103rd anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a major turning point in American labor history. On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers, most of them Jewish and Italian immigrant girls in their teens and twenties, perished after a fire broke out at the Triangle factory in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Even after the fire, the city’s businesses continued to insist they could regulate themselves, but the deaths clearly demonstrated that companies like Triangle, if left to their own devices, would not concern themselves with their workers’ safety. Despite this business opposition, the public’s response to the fire and to the 146 deaths led to landmark state regulations.
Businesses today, and their allies in Congress and the statehouses, are making the same arguments against government regulation that New York’s business leaders made a century ago. The current hue and cry about “burdensome government regulations” that stifle job growth shows that the lesson of the Triangle has been forgotten —
» Read more about: Remembering the Triangle Fire’s Lessons »