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San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo has confirmed to Capital & Main that his city is nearing a settlement with its nine non-safety unions over a contentious pension-cutting law that resulted in an exodus of public employees, followed by costly legal actions. Measure B, passed in 2012, sought to reduce pensions for new hires, eliminate extra “bonus” checks to retirees and make it harder to qualify for disability retirement. It also called for veteran workers to either pay much more for their pensions or switch to a pension with reduced benefits.
The two sides appear to be moving closer to a settlement similar to one reached four months ago with police and fire unions.
How close? “Soon,” Liccardo said by telephone. “We don’t [quite] have all the signatures yet.”
Measure B is blamed for a brain drain of San Jose’s top city engineers and technical talent.
The story of Measure B and the damage it left in its wake is of more than academic interest,
» Read more about: Can San Jose Move Past Pension Measure's Toxic Fallout? »
Today kicks off the start of VisionLA ’15, a Los Angeles arts festival performed to coincide with the United Nations’ Conference on Climate Change (COP 21) as it unfolds in Paris. Below are program notes from VisionLA ’15 – please refer to the group’s site for a complete schedule and more information.
Read Judith Lewis Mernit’s Interviews With VisionLA’s Organizers
November 30 @ 6 p.m. – 10 p.m.
VisionLA Home Gallery – Bergamot Station,
2525 Michigan Ave., Building G1
Santa Monica
Join us for a celebration of the Power of Art to Make Change at our Gala Opening party for the VisionLA ’15 Climate Action Arts Festival. This opening event will launch L.A.’s first citywide climate action arts festival and is also the opening gala for our wonderful ART MAKES CHANGE fine art exhibition,
» Read more about: VisionLA Climate Change Arts Festival: November 30 Events »
In the Public Interest has made exciting progress over the past few years. Our team has worked incredibly hard, so I’d like to take a step back and share what we’ve been up to.
Even I was surprised by how much we’ve accomplished. We get calls every week from organizations around the country asking for campaign help; from state and local policymakers looking for model bills or support on legislative proposals; and from journalists needing background or quotes. Just recently, a Barcelona TV station interviewed me about private prisons in the U.S. (There are zero in Spain!)
When we added it up, we found that we’ve directly helped state and local organizations in 32 states, and our research and commentary have been cited in over 150 publications, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and local papers across the country like the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Bakersfield Californian.
» Read more about: Public Interest Advocates Tally Up 2015 Victories »
Chicago just took a huge step towards closing the door on irresponsible sales of public assets and reckless outsourcing of public services. Last week, the city council passed an ordinance that mandates real public review of large privatization deals and increases transparency and contractor accountability.
The Privatization Transparency, Accountability and Performance Ordinance (PTAPO) is a significant move by Chicago’s leaders to ensure meaningful accountability to the city’s taxpayers and working families.
Unfortunately for Chicagoans, the rules weren’t in place a decade ago, when then-Mayor Richard M. Daley leased the Chicago Skyway toll bridge to an Australian-Spanish private consortium for 99 years. The bridge has since become one of the most expensive toll-per-mile roadways in the U.S.
But Daley’s lease of the city’s parking meters to Wall Street in 2008 is the ultimate example of privatization gone wrong. Chicago sold the meters to Morgan Stanley at least $1 billion under their value,
Pasadena, California — home of the annual Tournament of Roses parade and the Rose Bowl football game — is known as the City of Roses. But a broad coalition of low-income workers, middle class professionals, clergy, nonprofit leaders, educators, unions, community and civic groups, and enlightened businesses has come together to transform Pasadena into the City of Raises.
They have built a movement to urge Mayor Terry Tornek and the City Council to adopt a law raising the minimum wage gradually to $15 an hour by 2020, just as the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County did last summer, and other area cities (Long Beach, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Glendale, among them) are considering.
These efforts are part of a growing national movement to improve wages and working conditions for low-wage Walmart and fast-food workers, janitors, hospital employees and others. They’ve been pushing cities to adopt minimum wage laws and pressuring big corporations to increase pay for its low-wage employees.
Bad enough that the climate is changing and humans are causing it; worse, most of us don’t even want to talk about it.
“Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” asked author and climate activist Bill McKibben a decade ago on Grist, comparing the climate crisis to the AIDS epidemic, which, McKibben noted, produced “a staggering outpouring of art that, in turn, has had real political effect.”
To be fair, that has started to change: Authors such as Paolo Bacigalupi (The Water Knife) and filmmaker Larry Fessenden (The Last Winter) have begun to address environmental catastrophe in their works. But it’s likely that other authors, artists and goddamn opera writers have assumed that their climate-focused work would struggle for an audience: A recent Pew Research Center poll found that only 42 percent of U.S. citizens consider rising seas and global temperatures disturbing.
» Read more about: The Heat’s On: An L.A. Arts Festival Tackles Climate Change »
There’s something deceptively familiar about the first scene of Young Jean Lee’s play, Straight White Men, receiving its West Coast premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theater. It opens with an American family gathered together for Christmas. The three adult Norton brothers spend a lot of time horsing around their dad’s living room in flannel jammies, re-enacting childhood pranks, recalling old nicknames and play-fighting with one another as though they’re young boys again. It’s the kind of reunion play whose lines often begin, “Remember the time . . .” So we know, with all this holiday cheer and familial merriment, that things are about to go to hell.
Sure enough, eldest son Matt (Brian Slaten) abruptly begins to cry as the brothers and their father eat a Chinese take-out dinner. Matt’s got a secret but this is 2015, so veteran theatergoers raised on the social-issue dramas of the late 20th century surmise it’s not that Matt is gay or that he has an incurable disease – especially since we also know this 90-minute play was written and directed by a New York playwright who is the reigning queen of experimental theater.
Will the United Nations conference on human-caused climate change move toward saving the earth for habitation? That’s what’s at stake as the heads of the world’s nations gather in Paris on November 30 through December 11. They intend to put teeth into the U.N.’s “framework” that is aimed to reduce carbon emissions, and which has been adopted by some 195 countries. But will they?
Bill Gates doesn’t think so. In an interview in The Atlantic, Gates praised countries for pledging to roll back emissions by 80 per cent, but cast doubts about their ability to reach that goal. It’s not that he thinks government is particularly inept and that the private sector could do it. He really doesn’t think that either can or will.
He believes that people will cut the easy stuff first, leaving the hard-to-do for the latter half of the time frame.
» Read more about: Paris Climate Change Conference: A Planet in the Balance »
Here’s In the Public Interest’s pick of recent news in for-profit education. Not a subscriber? Sign up. For more from Cashing in on Kids, visit our website.
If legendary labor activist Joe Hill were alive today — and some contend that he is — he would have plenty to say about the state of the American worker. And the country, if it listened, would have plenty to learn.
Hill, who was executed in Utah 100 years ago this month, was an unapologetically radical union organizer whose rough-hewn songs and poems matched the brutal working conditions endured by tens of millions of Americans in the early 20th century. While his lyrics might at first sound anachronistic to contemporary audiences, their underlying spirit speaks directly to the experiences of far too many in our often unforgiving 21st century economy.
“Would you have freedom from wage slavery… Would you from mis’ry and hunger be free,” from Hill’s 1913 anthem “There Is Power in a Union,” could easily have been inspired by the thousands of truck drivers who haul goods to and from the nation’s largest port in Los Angeles.
The most wonderful thing about hearing Gloria Steinem speak recently at the Getty House was meeting the two high school students sitting in front of me. These young Latinas had just formed a feminism club at Montebello High, and its first meeting was a big success. The goal of the club, they told me, is to “explore what feminism means to other students and to educate ourselves.” The two were here to get a boost of ideas and inspiration from Steinem — and were they excited.
Over 100 high school students, overwhelmingly female and from a wide diversity of backgrounds, came to hear Steinem and to submit questions to which she responded. It felt like Feminism 101 and seemed to be exactly what the young women came for.
Amy Wakeland, who prefers to be identified as the First Lady of Los Angeles, and her husband, Mayor Eric Garcetti,
Faculty and students from the 23 campuses of the California State University (CSU) system will demonstrate today over a contract fight that they say is critical to the future of higher education in the Golden State. The actions will be highlighted by a march through downtown Long Beach, ending at the state chancellor’s office, where the CSU Board of Trustees is to meet.
The long-running conflict intensified last week, as the California Faculty Association (CFA) announced that 94 percent of its members who voted agreed to authorize a strike. Faculty have been frustrated by what they say is under-investment in teaching: stagnant wages and the CSU’s move towards cheaper part-time teachers rather than tenure-line faculty, while at the same time hiring and giving raises to non-academic supervisors and top management. Student fees increased multiple times over that period. The result, say CFA members, is that students face a tougher path to graduation,
» Read more about: Why California's State University Faculty Might Hit the Bricks »
As America’s heartland prepares for another frigid winter, low-income families in Iowa are also bracing for a significant change. That’s because private companies are scheduled to take over management of the state’s Medicaid program the first of the New Year, a shift Iowa’s governor is calling “modernization.”
Governor Terry Branstad says that concerned Iowans “should not be afraid of change,” but private management could make it harder for almost 600,000 people—about 22 percent of the state’s population—to get the health care they need.
The Des Moines Register says the current state-run program “spends less per person than the majority of other states, while still providing comprehensive coverage.” Why jeopardize that? A chaotic transition, diminished services or reduced coverage could threaten low-income families and people with disabilities.
But Iowans still have a say. The federal government has to sign off on the transition,
» Read more about: Iowa to Hand Over Medicaid to Private Companies »
November 19 marks the 100-year anniversary of Joe Hill’s execution by a Utah firing squad for a sensationalized Salt Lake City double homicide. Hill, a 36-year-old Swedish immigrant, was an itinerant laborer and union organizer for the Wobblies – the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Today most historians view Hill’s arrest as a police frame-up and consider his trial and execution as, at the least, a politically motivated miscarriage of justice, if not outright judicial murder.
Hill’s mythic stature continues to serve as the soul of the struggle for workers’ rights and economic equality, and interest in his life shows no sign of abating — a phenomenon that is reflected in the ongoing yearlong series of exhibits, book events and concerts commemorating his death.
Joe Hill, of course, was no ordinary organizer but also a poet and balladeer whose knack for taking a well-known hymn or folksong,
If you would like to help lift thousands of Pasadena families out of poverty, please join us on Saturday as we march to urge Pasadena’s mayor and city council to adopt a $15/hour minimum wage (gradually by 2020), then adjust it annually for inflation — similar to the law that the City of Los Angeles and L.A. County (for unincorporated areas) adopted in June.
What:
March from Pasadena Community Jobs Center to Central Park and rally to raise the wage and abolish wage theft.
When:
Saturday November 14, 9 a.m.
Where:
Begin at Pasadena Community Jobs Center, 500 N. Lake Avenue, Pasadena
(Click on event flyer)
Since L.A. adopted its minimum wage law, a number of other cities in L.A. County (including Long Beach, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Glendale and others) are considering doing the same.
» Read more about: Saturday Rally Targets Pasadena Minimum Wage »
Last night’s Republican debate got underway following a day of national demonstrations in favor of raising the American minimum wage to $15 an hour — a day of protest accompanied by nothing-to-lose strikes by fast-food workers. The debate began with a question about raising the minimum wage. The first candidate to speak said America’s wages were, in fact, “too high” and that the current federal minim wage of $7.25 has to stay where it is.
The second presidential hopeful argued that the reason there are high unemployment rates among young African Americans is “because of those high wages.” The next candidate followed by calling the minimum wage “a disaster” for the 20th century and predicted catastrophe for the 21st should the day come when higher wages “make people more expensive than a machine.”
For a moment it looked as though the debate would become a contest to see which candidates would lower the minimum wage the most.
» Read more about: Not Debatable: Minimum Wage Movement Gains Ground »
Paul Duncan, a battalion chief with California’s state firefighting agency, was at home in Northern California enjoying a day off on September 12 when he got the message: A wildfire was burning on Cobb Mountain, about a dozen miles away from Hidden Valley Lake, where he lived with his wife and two daughters.
Duncan, 46, decided to leave and help knock down the blaze because he knew the fire unit in the area was already short-staffed from putting out on another conflagration. Besides, his nearly 30 years of experience persuaded him there was no way a fire burning on a mountain to the west could burn down to the valley floor and then race eastward to threaten the Duncans’ home.
His optimism was short lived. Upon arriving on Cobb Mountain Duncan got some troubling news. The fire he was fighting was heading toward his family.
» Read more about: Paradise Burned: How Climate Change Is Scorching California »
On Tuesday, November 10, Los Angeles and Long Beach will join the National Day of Action built around #FightFor15. Its message, which has been spreading since last April’s Tax Day demonstrations, will be announced loud and clear in 270 cities: Fast-food and other low-income workers in America deserve a break today – a national $15 hourly wage and the ability to organize into unions.
That is why fast-food workers will be walking off their jobs in a nationwide strike tomorrow. To learn what other actions are taking place across California, please check out Fight For 15’s website and its Facebook page.
In case you may think that comparatively few workers actually earn the minimum wage or would directly benefit from the proposed wage boost, consider this: According to a study from the National Employment Law Project, 42 percent of Americans earn less than $15 an hour.
» Read more about: Fight for $15: A Big Movement Gets Bigger Tuesday »
Old people often shake their heads and mutter about “the younger generation.” Or they’ll say to one another, “It’s not the way it used to be,” with a solemn look of dismay as if the world was “going to hell in a hand basket.” That’s the problem when an elder like me writes about human-caused climate change: I come close to being a cliché.
Perhaps such sentiments come from nostalgia for a time earlier in one’s life, an era viewed as simpler, slower and more familiar. Friends occasionally email me photo collections that supposedly represent a decade such as the 1950s without a single photo of anyone of color. It’s as if no one other than white people lived in this country. On the other hand, since most filmgoers are younger than my cohort, and if the top 10 grossing movies of a typical week are any indication, most people attending movies today choose deeply dystopian films about the violent end of civilization as we know it.
Did you know that one of the fastest growing sectors of the charter school industry is the “virtual” charter school, where K-12 students learn from home in front of their computers? No school buildings, no recess with friends, no shared learning. It’s true. The largest virtual charter company, a publicly traded corporation called K12, Inc., provides education to over 120,000 public school students across the country. Last year, it made more than $900 million in revenue, most of it taxpayer money earmarked for public education.
But virtual charters are starting to pile up bad news and serious questions about their priorities. A study released last week by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that students attending virtual charters learn significantly less in math and reading than similar students attending brick-and-mortar schools. So significantly less that the Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton wrote,
» Read more about: Online Learning: No Buildings, No School Yards, No Education »
