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On December 21, 2015, Organize Sacramento and Raise the Wage Sacramento filed documents with the city clerk to gather 21,503 valid voter signatures necessary to place a minimum-wage measure on this year’s November ballot. The measure would boost the city’s minimum wage to $15 by 2020, peg it to the Consumer Price Index and let workers earn paid sick leave.
Activists: City-approved wage hike is too low and too slow.
Two months earlier the city council, on a 6-3 vote, had approved a minimum-wage ordinance bump to $12.50 by 2020. For Organize Sacramento and Raise the Wage Sacramento, though, that was too low and slow, spurring the current ballot drive for a $15 minimum wage. The Democratic Party of Sacramento County, Restaurant Opportunities Center United , Capital Region Organizing Project and Center for Workers’ Rights also back the measure.
» Read more about: Sacramento’s Minimum-Wage Rumble Begins »
Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post’s editorial page editor, has fired columnist Harold Meyerson, one of the nation’s finest journalists and perhaps the only self-proclaimed socialist to write a weekly column for a major American newspaper during the past decade or two.
At a time when America is experiencing an upsurge of progressive organizing and activism — from Occupy Wall Street, to Black Lives Matter, to the growing movement among low-wage workers demanding higher minimum wages, to Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president — we need a regular columnist who can explain what’s going on, why it’s happening, and what it means.
More than any other columnist for a major U.S. newspaper, Meyerson provided ongoing coverage and incisive analysis of the nation’s labor movement and other progressive causes as well as the changing economy and the increasing aggressiveness of big business in American politics. He was one of the few columnists in the country who knew labor leaders and grassroots activists by name,
» Read more about: Washington Post Sacks Columnist Harold Meyerson »
Historians may remember 2015 as the year of the minimum wage — and for good reason. Twenty-one states and multiple cities raised the minimum wage in the past 12 months, scarcely two years after the “Fight for $15” was dismissed as a pipe dream by some observers. The past year also saw other major advances for working Americans. Here are ten of the most important:
1) Bottoms Up: L.A. Minimum Wage Increase Caps Historic Year for Low-Wage Workers
This summer the City of Los Angeles enacted the most far-reaching minimum wage increase of any municipality in America. L.A. County did the same soon after, which means that over the next five years nearly one million people will see their pay rise to $15.37 an hour. They will also be covered by some of the strongest wage theft protections in the nation, ensuring they actually get the increases mandated by law.
The end of the year is traditionally a time for reflection, and in that spirit we bring you “Our Moment,” a short video that reflects on some of the defining moments in the social justice movements of our time.
The video, featuring words and performance by poet Mayda de Valle, first premiered at the Equity Summit 2015 in Los Angeles, and is now being widely shared on social media. It was produced for PolicyLink by Wyatt Close and Big Bowl of Ideas and directed by Jon Sautter.
Info about Equity Summit 2015 can be found here.
Love. Joy. Peace. That’s the message of the season. From carols to holiday cards to street signs, even shopping mall windows. These words hover next to the pervasive images encouraging us to buy, but somehow they persist despite the maze of mercantile messages, because they are the deep longings of human beings.
“No justice, no peace!” is what workers and activists often chant on picket lines. It turns out that without climate justice, we will also have no world peace. A recent Los Angeles Times story on El Niño and its potential “long-distance” or “teleconnected” effects quoted researchers arguing that “it doubles the risk of war in much of the Third World.”
Our military accounts for 80 percent of all the fossil fuels consumed by the U.S. government.
Peace activists have long identified war and the preparations for it as a major source of human-caused climate change.
Sebastian Alonzo graduated into “journeyman” status a couple of Fridays ago at the Iron Workers union hall in Norwalk. The 26-year old, who struggled to make it out of high school, completed the five-year training program and now will make top wage – about $33 an hour – in his trade.
“It’s the best achievement I’ve accomplished in my life,” he said, pointing out that his family came there that night to cheer him on.
As part of the graduation ritual, Alonzo and 35 other new journeymen stood in front of a packed audience whose members had traveled from across Los Angeles and Orange Counties to watch the proceedings. The graduates this night included men and women, whites, Latinos, African Americans and Asians. The group – as the cliché goes – looked like America.
To embrace someone as a brother or a sister is to incur obligations that are not easily discarded. » Read more about: Finding Grace at Local 416 »
Get this. In some states, charter school operators can purchase school buildings from public school districts — using taxpayer money. That’s right. The public pays twice for a building it no longer owns.
This scheme and many others are detailed in the National Education Policy Center’s new research brief on charter school policies. Through a study of policies from across the country, Bruce Baker and Gary Miron reveal how many charter operators use existing laws to profit from the privatization of public assets.
Their conclusion: Many current policies allow new actors into public education who skim profits from the system, pocketing money that might otherwise be spent on direct services for children.
These policies have serious costs. In Florida for example, a recent analysis by the Associated Press found that now-closed charter schools in 30 school districts had received more than $70 million in taxpayer money for capital needs.
» Read more about: How Charter Schools Skim and Scam Public Money »
See Dan Braun and Bill Raden’s report on the Capital & Main poll.
Read other Capital & Main stories on pension-cutting ballot proposals in California.
» Read more about: Infographic: Public Pension Ballot Proposals' Tepid Support »
Chuck Reed today declined to address the findings of a Capital & Main poll that showed weak support for two Reed-created ballot initiatives aimed at reducing pension benefits for California’s public employees. If either measure receives the necessary number of petition signatures to be placed on the 2016 ballot, it will face fierce opposition from organized labor.
The poll, conducted by David Binder Research, was released yesterday and showed that if an election were held today, the two measures would win between 40 and 42 percent of the vote. The survey sampled 500 likely voters and has an error margin of plus or minus 4.4 percent.
“I never make statements based on other people’s polling,” Reed told Capital & Main. “Especially in a political environment. We’ll make our decisions based on our own polling.”
Drafted by Reed, a former Democratic San Jose Mayor, and former Republican San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio,
» Read more about: Chuck Reed: No Comment on Weak Ballot Polling Numbers »
Ron Miller, the head of the Los Angeles Building Trades Council, says that it is a “ritual” for trades workers to drive around Los Angeles surveying the jobs they have worked on.
Virtually every person I’ve talked to who is currently building the Wilshire Grand Center tower in downtown Los Angeles plans to bring their friends and family members to the building once it is finished. Electrician Anthony Sotelo wants to book his mother into the Wilshire Grand’s hotel for at least one night so he can switch on the lights that he wired to make sure they turn on.
“You take pride in your work by showing your family what you have built,” he says.
One of the delights of completion is the possibility of taking material and psychological pleasure in what you have created, the ability to tell a full story that reveals the daily successes as well as the discords of a difficult project.
» Read more about: L.A. Construction Site: The Satisfactions of Completion »
A pair of potential ballot initiatives written to overhaul California’s public pensions could face a rough road, according to a new poll.
The results from a Capital & Main-David Binder Research poll of 500 likely voters shows that if the election were held today, the numbers of those voting for the measures and those against them appear to be dead even. Those numbers are not what pension-reduction advocates had hoped for going into the 2016 election cycle.
Drafted by former Democratic San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and former Republican San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio, the so-called Voter Empowerment Initiative, and its sibling, the Government Pension Cap Act, received their official summary language (though not their official titles) from the state attorney general last week. Low numbers and lack of support among DeMaio’s fellow Republicans had already forced the pair to abandon a previous effort,
» Read more about: Breaking News: Poll Shows Pension Ballot Measures Already in Trouble »
“There is more fear right now in the local Muslim community than after 9/11 because of the proximity of the recent violent attack in San Bernardino and the xenophobia present in U.S. political culture,” Shakeel Syed told an interfaith gathering attended by about 100 people last Sunday. Syed is executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California. He added that law-abiding, peaceful Muslims living in the Los Angeles-area are feeling paranoid.
To provide comfort and information for the local Muslim community, the Shura Council and the King Fahad Mosque of Culver City organized the event. Most of the crowd were first generation Muslim immigrants from South Asia, the Far East, West and North Africa, and the Middle East, and overwhelmingly male. The others present represented local Christian congregations, human rights activists and neighbors, all wanting to express solidarity with the Muslim community.
Shura Council Director: “Shame on us if we expect our rights to come to us on a platter.” » Read more about: Tolerance and Solidarity at Culver City Mosque Gathering »
Seven years ago local officials in Marin County, California organized to form a nonprofit electricity company with the noblest intentions. Buying and selling electricity allowed the group, Marin Clean Energy (MCE), to route around the local utility giant, Pacific Gas & Electric, which for years had resisted its customers’ pleas for cleaner, more reliable power, all the while “greenwashing” its image with marketing campaigns. “People wanted more of a sense of how their dollars were being invested,” Alex DiGiorgio, MCE’s community development manager, tells Capital & Main. “They wanted more access to competitively priced renewable energy.”
They also wanted to “catalyze local project development,” DiGiorgio says, to see their electricity bills go toward something more beneficial for the local community than large hydroelectric dams, polluting gas-fired power plants and a nuclear facility built over an earthquake fault.
But critics of the local-power movement say agencies like MCE — whose very reason for being was to stimulate renewable energy development — mostly support already extant renewable facilities.
» Read more about: Power Struggle: Will Local-Energy Groups Come Clean? »
There’s a chance that lawmakers in your city or state have recently floated something called “Pay for Success” as an innovative way to fund public services. Also known as Social Impact Bonds, Pay for Success programs bring the high-risk attitude of venture capital to critical, yet underfunded public services.
This week we, along with our allies, released A Guide for Evaluating Pay for Success Programs and Social Impact Bonds to help advocates better understand these new alternatives to public financing. Now communities can ask tough questions about a Pay for Success programs’ impact on vulnerable individuals and the public.
Though Wall Street investors like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America consider Pay for Success a “win-win,” some of these new programs look better on paper than they do in reality. The first program tried in the U.S. failed to reduce the rate by which adolescents housed on Rikers Island returned to jail.
As Governor Jerry Brown touted California’s environmental initiatives and prodded world leaders in Paris to embrace tougher environmental policies during the United Nations summit on climate change, it was instructive to look back at how one of Brown’s top environmental priorities suffered a major defeat in the California Legislature this year.
That priority was to establish a 50 percent reduction in petroleum usage in cars and trucks by 2030. Brown’s failure to win its passage in an overwhelmingly Democratic Legislature clearly illustrates not only the influence of the fossil fuel lobby, but also the continued rise of a new breed of Democrats who are exceedingly attentive to big business, while tone-deaf toward their party’s traditional progressive base.
Petroleum reduction was a key part of a proposed law, introduced as Senate Bill 350, which also called for steps to increase energy efficiency in existing buildings and require that 50 percent of California’s energy come from renewable sources,
» Read more about: How Big Oil Spiked Jerry Brown's Climate Change Agenda »
You have to hand it to libertarian writer John Tierney. He doesn’t give up easily. His long-winded 1996 article, “Recycling Is Garbage,” allegedly smashed the New York Times Magazine‘s hate-mail record. It covered the same ground as his recent New York Times op-ed, “The Reign of Recycling,” stating: “Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.”
Is recycling really “the most wasteful activity in modern America?” That’s quite a charge. (What about all that Kardashian coverage?) But it may be true that it would be cheaper to put all our waste in a hole someplace and forget about it. Assuming, as Tierney does, that there are enough conveniently located holes. It would be even cheaper to use the medieval method of tossing it in the street.
» Read more about: NY Times Writer Recycles Old Ideas About Waste and Landfills »
The debate may be over in the scientific community about the threat of man-made climate change. But as world leaders continue negotiating in Paris this week at an international climate conference, many questions remain about what it will take to come up with a workable plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions enough to avoid catastrophic warming.
University of Massachusetts at Amherst economist Robert Pollin injects a note of optimism into the discussion with his recently published book, Greening the Global Economy (MIT Press). Pollin estimates that we need to invest about 1.5 percent of global GDP annually in clean energy and energy efficiency in order to slow warming enough to maintain a livable planet. The good news, he argues, is that we can decarbonize our economy without sacrificing economic growth and prosperity. Capital & Main interviewed Pollin while he was in New York on a book tour.
» Read more about: Robert Pollin Sees a Bit of Rainbow During Paris Climate Talks »
The story of Mary and Joseph leaving their small town for Bethlehem has spawned dramatizations, poems, carols and a lot more since it was first told in the late First Century CE. The Latin American enactment, called Las Posadas, runs for nine nights, from December 16 through Christmas Eve. Each night families make a procession through their communities, walking from one house to another, begging for space for the holy couple and a birthing place for the baby Jesus. At every home they are turned away – until one family welcomes these poor wayfarers, usually with warm drinks and sweets.
The festival reenacts the ancient commandment from the Jewish tradition that we should welcome the stranger, the foreigner, the immigrant – because at one time we were all newcomers to this land.
Most Americans have forgotten this and have instead become very fearful after the November Paris attacks. Even while 9,000 refugees from Syria,
» Read more about: Immigration Crisis: The Strangers Are Us »
On Thursday afternoon a fired-up, thousand-strong gathering of nurses and environmental activists packed into Los Angeles’ Pershing Square to voice their concerns about the bleak prospects of climate change, and to demand a global agreement that reduces greenhouse gas pollution. The rally was timed to coincide with the current United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris and other environmental justice protests taking place across the U.S.
Dubbed “The Climate Crisis Is a Public Health Crisis,” the event was organized by the National Nurses United (NNU), a labor union whose members were wrapping up a two-day convention at the downtown JW Marriott.
Rolanda Watson-Clark made the trip from Chicago, and told Capital & Main, “Nurses have always been at the front of social movements, so here we are.” She explained how, in the Windy City, inner city children are deeply affected by petroleum waste products in the air.
» Read more about: Nurses Address Climate Change: "Our Planet Is My Patient!" »
It’s unusual for a private contractor to terminate its own contract, especially a contract for $1.2 billion. But that just happened in Florida.
After two years of controversy, Corizon, America’s largest for-profit prison health care provider, just decided to end its care of 74,000 prisoners in the state. The company—which is owned by a private equity firm—says it is leaving because the contract terms aren’t flexible enough. But Corizon’s time in Florida has a familiar ring to it: understaffing, poor service and hundreds of lawsuits by prisoners.
Last year, 346 prisoners died in Florida prisons—the highest number in the state on record, even though the total number of prisoners has declined. Of those prisoners, 176 were listed with no immediate cause of death.
A recent state audit found nursing and staffing shortages, “notable disorganization” among medical records, and “life threatening” conditions.
» Read more about: Private Prison's Health Care: A Clear and Present Danger to Inmates »
