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As comprehensive immigration reform stalls along party lines in Washington, D.C., state Democrats are taking action in Sacramento. Backed by an assortment of coalition partners, California’s blue lawmakers have authored 10 new immigration bills (four in the Senate and six in the Assembly) to better the lives of two million undocumented individuals — five percent of California’s population.
As a thunderstorm with hail and lightning soaked a drought-parched Sacramento, Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) and Assembly Speaker Toni G. Atkins (D-San Diego) announced the “Immigrants Shape California” reform measures. They would increase the consumer, civil, criminal, health-care and labor rights of undocumented households.
“We are doing the work of the federal Congress,” said de León during a late-morning news conference inside the state Capitol. “This is our reaction to their lack of action.”
“With these bills,” said Atkins, “California will show the practical, humane and forward-thinking leadership that can move the needle on a national discussion.” To this end,
» Read more about: Curtain Raised on State Immigration Bills »
Somerset Waters has the passion of a convert. You can hear it in his voice when he outlines why he set up the only worker-owned cooperative business in Los Angeles.
“It’s really exciting pushing the boundaries of how a small business can operate here,” he says, standing in front of a bank of solar panels outside a residence in Calabasas. “People want a sense of ownership at work, a feeling of justice, a real stake in their working lives.”
Last year, inspired by the Pioneer Valley Solar Co-Op in Massachusetts, and with guidance from co-op resource center LA WORCS, Waters created Pacific Electric, a worker-owned co-op, to see if a different kind of business model could take hold in Los Angeles.
The four-person union firm, which has plans for expansion to 100 owner-members, installs solar and other electrical systems for residential and business customers throughout Los Angeles County.
» Read more about: Workers of the World – Buy Your Own Company! »
(Yesterday David Bacon examined a decades-long labor war being fought by Gerawan Farming against the United Farm Workers — a union against which the company has been accused of orchestrating a decertification campaign. His reporting concludes today with a look at Gerawan’s political allies and the company’s attempt to overturn a key California labor law.)
As this fight unfolds, national anti-union organizations are moving in. The far-right Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence joined the appeals case. In recent years the Center has joined the Harris v. Quinn suit against the Service Employees International Union in Illinois, sued the California Labor Commissioner on behalf of employers, argued for Hobby Lobby stores against providing birth control for their employees, and supported the initiative to end affirmative action in Michigan.
Furthermore, the Center for Worker Freedom, headquartered in the Washington, D.C. offices of Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform (ATR),
» Read more about: Conservative Groups Rally Behind Gerawan Farming »
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This is an encore posting from our State of Inequality series
(Andy Warner’s comics have appeared in many places, including Slate, Medium, American Public Media, Symbolia, KQED, popsci.com and for the United Nations Refugee and Works Agency.)
When hundreds of people marched to the Los Angeles City Council last October, urging it to pass a resolution supporting a farm worker union fight taking place in California’s San Joaquin Valley, few had ever heard the name of the company involved. That may not be the case much longer. Gerawan Farming, one of the country’s largest growers, with 5,000 people picking its grapes and peaches, is challenging the California law that makes farm workers’ union rights enforceable. Lining up behind Gerawan are national anti-union think tanks. What began as a local struggle by one grower family to avoid a union contract is getting bigger, and the stakes are getting much higher.
The Gerawan workers got the City Council’s support and, on February 10, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education passed a resolution that went beyond just an encouraging statement. The LAUSD purchases Gerawan’s Prima label fruit through suppliers for 1,270 schools and 907,000 students.
» Read more about: Growers Move to Gut California’s Farm Labor Law »
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Data and research for this story were provided by Charlie Eaton of U.C. Berkeley’s Department of Sociology and DebtandSociety.org.
This is an encore posting from our State of Inequality series.
» Read more about: Affluent Private Universities Are Tax Shelters For the Rich »
Sometimes the conventional narrative the media tell about a news story feels so wrong I can’t stand it — but I don’t know why until the story’s over. The recent coverage of the labor dispute at the West Coast ports — including Los Angeles and Long Beach — is a case in point. News reports focused on the long, drawn-out negotiation process as an economic disaster waiting to happen, and blamed the entire situation on those dastardly workers and their unions.
The narrative included several key arguments: A union slowdown at the ports was causing a backlog of shipping containers carrying everything America buys, putting all importers at risk and causing a plague on American shoppers. There would be long-term economic damage to our region as a consequence. With the eventual opening of the widened Panama Canal, shippers would skip the West Coast and head to other ports.
Capital & Main has confirmed that a proposed California law could upend existing minimum wage laws across the state, potentially rolling back wage increases for tens of thousands of people. If passed, the legislation could invalidate wage hikes approved by voters in some of the state’s largest cities, including San Francisco and Oakland. (See original story here.)
Assembly Bill 669 is backed by the California Restaurant Association (CRA) and is being championed by Assemblyman Tom Daly, a Democrat from the Orange County city of Anaheim.
The legislation’s target is tipped workers – under Daly’s proposal, the minimum wage for workers who receive tips would be capped at $9 if their total hourly compensation, meaning base wage and tips, is $15 an hour or more. If, for example, an Oakland waitress earns that city’s current minimum wage of $12.25 an hour, and additionally makes $3 in hourly tips,
(Editor’s Note: This is an encore posting from our State of Inequality series.)
March 1, 2060
Dear Granddaughter,
Just the other day, you asked me two questions that I failed to answer. How did California get into the fix it’s in today? And, a half century ago, when I was writing regularly about our home state, did anyone see this future coming?
I must confess the real reason for my evasion was that your questions reminded me of a document from those days that I couldn’t immediately put my hands on. It took me a week but I finally found it on a very old laptop computer I still hang onto. (I know, I know, I’m a dinosaur!)
This artifact is dated 2010, and it’s a map of sorts — not of a city but of a future.
Last month former San Jose mayor Chuck Reed took the first step toward offering a promised draft of a 2016 public pension cutting initiative that, he has hinted, will target the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. CalPERS manages the retirement and health benefits for more than 1.6 million California public employees, retirees and their families. Reed tried to get a pension initiative on the ballot in 2014, only to withdraw the measure when state attorney general Kamala Harris assigned it a ballot description that Reed and his allies believed would hurt their chances with the electorate.
This time, however, Reed could find his campaign in danger from an unexpected source – conservative allies who might be worried that his initiative’s very presence on the ballot will draw huge numbers of liberal and union voters – who would then also vote against conservative candidates running for local and state office.
» Read more about: Pension Cutters' 2016 Ballot Obstacle: Voters »
As this series has made clear, “The California Chasm” is a challenge that threatens to transform the state into a shadow of its former self. Once a place where people came together to realize fortunes, remake their lives and attain their piece of the American Dream, we have become a state saddled with sharp differences in social, economic and health outcomes due to race, place and class.
This is an encore posting from our State of Inequality series
The resulting division is damaging to our sense of community but it also leaves the potential of our residents untapped. With research increasingly demonstrating that more equitable strategies can produce more sustainable growth, we need to create a conversation about how California can lead the nation not in inequality but in opportunity.
We have the know-how —
» Read more about: Twelve Ways to Reverse Inequality and Close the "California Chasm" »
California is one of only seven states that pays tipped workers their state’s minimum wage instead of the penurious $2.13 (the federal minimum) to $5 range. California’s wait staff and other service workers collect a $9 hourly minimum—plus gratuities. Legislation will raise the state minimum wage to $10 hourly next year. But that won’t apply to tipped workers, if a proposed bill passes the California legislature and becomes law.
Assembly Bill 669 was sponsored by the California Restaurant Association (CRA) and introduced by Assemblyman Tom Daly (D-Anaheim). Daly’s bill would cap the minimum wage for California’s tipped workers at $9 if they earn a total of $15 hourly. Far more disturbing to low-income service employees, however, is a passage embedded in the bill that could undo local minimum wage ordinances previously approved by voters in Oakland, Richmond, San Francisco and San Jose.
Those measures would be overturned unless they “specifically reference” the Daly bill’s language – an unlikelihood,
» Read more about: Will a New California Bill Trump Minimum Wage Ordinances? »
One day late last year, retired police officer Robert Mitchell took several visitors on a tour of the West Fresno community where he has lived for decades. But it was hardly a nostalgia excursion.
This is an encore posting from our State of Inequality series
First, there was a stop at Hyde Park, a former dump. There was another at a sports complex and fishing pond built on a Superfund cleanup site. And still another at a controversial meat-rendering plant operated by Darling Ingredients Inc. that residents say has spewed foul smells into nearby residential areas for more than half a century.
“You constantly had the horrific odor of the processing that occurs here at Darling,” said Mitchell, a thoughtful man with a bushy white beard and deep voice. He and his visitors stood outside the Darling plant,
» Read more about: Hell’s ZIP Code: Clearing the Air in West Fresno »
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Walking on the tiered layers of rebar at the Wilshire Grand Center construction site is a challenge, especially when wearing the heavy shoes required for safety. You have to watch every step, looking down to make sure that each foot is firm and the body balanced before moving forward. The rough edges of the rods are a brown, grey and rust color mix that blends through the 20-foot long steel. You see and feel the ordered coherence of an enduring structure.
There is a sense in which the ability to notice, rather than to merely look, is part of an artist’s skill. In his drawing classes, the 19th century British art critic and writer John Ruskin taught that noticing the environment around you in a more rigorous way was something that could be learned, a way of thoughtfully moving through the world that he believed need not be limited to the “cultured” and “educated.”
Ruskin (he is a featured character in the recent movie Mr.
» Read more about: Sefi Edery: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ironworker »
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Do failed policy proposals from public education officials enjoy an afterlife when their creators depart Washington for the private sector? This is no academic question. In fact, the career arcs of two former federal policymakers may well have foreshadowed the life-or-death clash over the accreditation of San Francisco City College (CCSF), one of California’s 112 community colleges. The state is home to about 10 percent of America’s 1,100 two-year colleges.
As San Francisco Superior Court Judge Curtis Karnow’s ruling on the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior College’s bid to decertify CCSF draws near, the story of Margaret Spellings becomes instructive. Spellings, who was George W. Bush’s second-term Secretary of Education, commissioned a controversial 2006 report called “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education.”
The report’s language was very much in tune with the pro-business Bush zeitgeist.
Unlike restaurant menus, community and democracy don’t work “à la carte.” We do not get to pick the laws we want to follow. The owners of Los Angeles’ trendy Golden Road Brewing seem not to understand this. As they champion one notion of “community,” they turn their backs on the actual people who compose the community.
In a recent L.A. Times piece on how a minimum wage increase will affect city businesses, Golden Road’s Tony Yanow (who also owns the Mohawk Bend and Tony’s Darts Away gastropubs) balked: “I love L.A., but that doesn’t mean it’s my best bet,” he told the Times. “Do you want to go somewhere where you can make money, or do you want to go somewhere where they’re stacking the cards against you?” He went on to engage in some not-very-subtle threat-making, noting that if L.A. increases its minimum wage, he may shift operations to neighboring,
I recently interviewed one of the country’s unabashed progressive leaders, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our discussion ranged from Ronald Reagan’s legacy to the failures of contemporary Democrats to stand up for their values. “We have an income inequality crisis in this country that will endanger the future of the entire United States of America,” de Blasio told me. We present here the fourth in a series of clips from that interview. (Full transcript here.)
Danny is communications director at LAANE and the publisher of Capital and Main. He has led LAANE’s communications efforts for the past decade. He has attracted national media attention for numerous LAANE projects, including the successful effort to stop Wal-Mart from building a superstore in Inglewood and the drive to bring living wages to hotel workers in Santa Monica.
Read more articles by Danny Feingold
» Read more about: Watch Now: Bill de Blasio on Economic Inequality »
“He’s had some statements that to me sound kind of liberal, has taken me aback, has kind of surprised me,” (Sarah Palin on Pope Francis)
“He acts so holy. He made love to every girl in every city in America and he had AIDS. And when he had those AIDS, I went to my synagogue and I prayed for him. I hoped he could live and be well. I didn’t criticize him. I could have.” (Donald Sterling on Magic Johnson)
“Everybody who wants to steal your guns is funded by the unions. Everybody who wants to raise your taxes is funded by the unions. Everybody who wants to borrow too much money is funded by the unions. Whatever center-right issue you care about, the unions are on the other team.” (Grover Norquist)
“The guy who wins the Oscar for Best Actor has a much higher bar to clear than the woman who wins best actress.” (Writer-producer Aaron Sorkin)
“They abort their young children,
I recently interviewed one of the country’s unabashed progressive leaders, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. Our discussion ranged from Ronald Reagan’s legacy to the failures of contemporary Democrats to stand up for their values. “We have an income inequality crisis in this country that will endanger the future of the entire United States of America,” de Blasio told me. We present here the third in a series of clips from that interview. (Full transcript here.)
Danny is communications director at LAANE and the publisher of Capital and Main. He has led LAANE’s communications efforts for the past decade. He has attracted national media attention for numerous LAANE projects, including the successful effort to stop Wal-Mart from building a superstore in Inglewood and the drive to bring living wages to hotel workers in Santa Monica.
Read more articles by Danny Feingold » Read more about: Watch Now: Bill de Blasio on Progressive Movements in American Cities »
“That can’t be,” Alma Gutierrez said, shaking her head.
“Why not?” Hank Dixon shot back. “It makes money for the university and they get to, you know, what do you call it they do in college … field work, I guess you’d say.”
The two were standing in the laundry room of the Eden Arms. Dixon was installing a new drive belt on one of the dryers. She’d been walking by and he’d called her inside. The handyman continued, “Look, I’m not saying this is for sure, since it comes secondhand.”
“But this man, this gambling friend of your nephew is a lawyer?” The widow Gutierrez didn’t approve of card playing or betting on the horses. Her deceased husband had a gambling habit and more than once had lost the rent money chasing the ponies or doubling down in blackjack.
“Yeah,” Dixon answered while continuing his repair work.
» Read more about: The Dixon Family Chronicles: “Shut Christmas Down!” »
