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On December 5, as part of its 20th anniversary celebration, the L.A. Alliance for a New Economy will honor OUR Walmart, an organization determined to transform conditions at the world’s largest retailer. Frying Pan News recently asked Walmart employee Martha Sellers, who has worked at the company’s Paramount store for 10 years, to reflect on her role in one of the most ambitious social justice efforts of our time.
Frying Pan News: If you could sit down for a one-on-one conversation with Walmart CEO Mike Duke, what would you say?
Martha Sellers: Explain to me why you cannot afford to pay us a living wage when it is proven you make mega bucks. Why?
You spend your money on all these things but your associates. Why?
You spend money on PR and opening more stores when the stores that are already open are not doing well.
» Read more about: Fear Is No Option: Walmart Associate Martha Sellers »
This morning L.A. Observed disclosed the death of its business editor and writer, Mark Lacter. LAO editor-in-chief Kevin Roderick reported that Lacter’s “wife, the author Laura Levine, told me that Mark suffered a stroke yesterday and could not survive the bleeding on his brain. He was 59 and died at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.”
A former Los Angeles Business Journal editor, Lacter was a regular commentator on radio station KPCC and also published in Los Angeles magazine. In 2005, he was named by the Society of Professional Journalists as Distinguished Journalist of the Year
Although Lacter would often infuriate Frying Pan News readers with his swipes at unions, he also railed against developers who were manipulating the government’s EB-5 visa program and, more notably, against the outlandish inequality between Los Angeles’ haves and have-nots.
This morning L.A. Observed disclosed the death of its business editor and writer, Mark Lacter. LAO editor-in-chief Kevin Roderick reported that Lacter’s “wife, the author Laura Levine, told me that Mark suffered a stroke yesterday and could not survive the bleeding on his brain. He was 59 and died at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.”
A former Los Angeles Business Journal editor, Lacter was a regular commentator on radio station KPCC and also published in Los Angeles magazine. In 2005, he was named by the Society of Professional Journalists as Distinguished Journalist of the Year
Although Lacter would often infuriate Frying Pan News readers with his swipes at unions, he also railed against developers who were manipulating the government’s EB-5 visa program and, more notably, against the outlandish inequality between Los Angeles’ haves and have-nots.
With all the hoopla about the centenary of the L.A. Aqueduct last week, I looked again at an article on a related piece of our history – the birth of public power. The early 20th Century was an age not entirely unlike our own, with high levels of inequality and most of the wealth controlled by a powerful few. It was in this climate that Los Angeles’ labor unions and working class communities fought for a publicly owned energy utility, to be sold at cost.
Jeff Stansbury argued in a 2011 L.A. Times opinion piece that while the reformers of the day are often credited for bringing public power to the city, they had actually allied themselves with L.A.’s three private electric companies, which wanted to control the power that would be generated by the aqueduct’s hydroelectric plants. Meanwhile, the Central Labor Council, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and other unions pushed for a citywide straw poll in 1911 that would come down on the side of municipal power for homes and businesses.
» Read more about: The Birth of a Public Utility, the Future of a City »
At the National Employment Law Project (NELP), where we advocate for low-wage and unemployed workers, some of our most inspiring moments have come from being involved in campaigns where labor and the community work together for greater economic justice.
The recent passage of AB 218 — Assemblymember Roger Dickinson’s “ban the box” bill — was a shining example of the labor movement working in alliance with the community to expand economic opportunity to people hardest hit by unemployment. The unions, led by the California Labor Federation and SEIU Local 1000, were an essential partner to the powerful coalition that organized with NELP for more than two years to provide a second chance to the one in five Californians with a criminal record who struggle to find work. In addition to our partners that co-sponsored and led the charge organizing in support of the bill – PICO California,
» Read more about: New Law Eases Job Barriers for Former Prisoners »
On Sunday, November 3, the Los Angeles Times ran a 429-word story, “Wal-Mart kicks off Christmas way early, helping to kill Black Friday,” on the retail giant’s plan to entice customers to do their Christmas shopping early by marking down prices weeks before the traditional day-after-Thanksgiving bargains. Providing Walmart with tens of thousands of dollars of free advertising, the story reported that “Deals include 36 percent savings on a JVC 42-inch LED television and 51 percent savings on a 10-inch Xelio tablet — at $299 for the TV and $49 for the tablet, those are the lowest tags Wal-Mart has ever put on those products.” Surely this is the kind of “news” that a Walmart PR executive drools over.
In contrast, the Times’ coverage of last Thursday’s anti-Walmart protest — one of the largest local civil disobedience actions in the company’s history — garnered a puny 163-word story,
» Read more about: Missing in Action: L.A. Times Coverage of Walmart Arrests »
RICHMOND, Calif. – In a run-down shopping center in the heart of this San Francisco Bay Area community, about a half dozen activists are plotting to turn the housing market on its head.
Their aim: stem home mortgage foreclosures and preserve neighborhoods in a city hit hard by the housing bust. But, this time, the activists have some unusual allies.
They have enlisted officials from the city of Richmond and beyond. They’re working alongside a group of investors who stand to make a profit if the plan works. And they’re advocating government seizures.
Wait - seizing private property? Profiting from neighborhood preservation? Is this the Bizarro World? Well, sort of. But the way the activists see it, they’ve hit upon an idea that’s so counterintuitive, it just might work.
That idea involves eminent domain, the power of government to take private property for public purposes.
» Read more about: Richmond Considers Saving Troubled Mortgages »
In addition to serving as Senior Fellow for Health Care for the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network, I am the Executive Director for my campus’ Roosevelt chapter. A few weeks ago at our general body meeting, I asked the crowd whether they had been talking with their friends about the Affordable Care Act and what these conversations sounded like. Did they know the basics: that in January, most Americans will be expected to either carry at least minimal insurance or pay an opt-out penalty? Do they know that they will be able to stay on their parents’ insurance until they are 26, if they so choose? Have they compared the prices of different options available for young adults versus the penalty?
The question meant to take up the first 10 minutes of our meeting turned into a full 40-minute discussion. As we scarfed down our pizza in true hungry college-student fashion,
» Read more about: Obamacare: Millenials Want Facts, Not Politics »
(Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor of School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. His post first appeared on The Nation‘s website and is republished with permission.) We’re six weeks into the implementation of one of the key provisions of the Affordable Care Act, the rollout of the healthcare marketplaces. It’s been a tough month, dominated by failures of rather astonishing proportions. But sooner or later, Healthcare.gov will work and Republican governors will grasp that bipartisan cooperation with the Obama administration is in their best interest. First, let’s acknowledge the failures. The most obvious occurred within the Obama administration itself, whose Department of Health and Human Services botched the launch of the online marketplace. For those of us who worked so hard over many years to secure passage of healthcare reform, this was humiliating. We argued for years that the individual and small-group insurance market required greater transparency,
How will the 2016 election be framed? What will be America’s choice?
If the coverage of last week’s two big winners offers a guide, the choice will be between “pragmatism” and “ideology.”
The Washington Post called Chris Christie’s huge gubernatorial victory a “clear signal in favor of pragmatic, as opposed to ideological, governance.”
But the mainstream media used a different adjective to describe Bill de Blasio, last week’s other landslide victor. The New York Times, for example, wrote of “the rise of the left-leaning Mr. de Blasio.”
Again and again, Christie is described as the pragmatist; De Blasio, the lefty.
But these appellations ignore what’s happening to an America in which almost all the economic gains are going to the richest 1 percent, median household incomes continues to drop and the number of Americans in poverty continues to rise.
“Thank you for your service.”
It’s a line we hear and say a lot around Veteran’s Day, especially in California, home to 1.8 million veterans, more than in any other state.
But if we really want to show gratitude for our veterans, then we need to do more than utter a simple “thank you.” We need to help these brave heroes find a middle-class life when they return from serving our country.
According to the Department of Veterans Affairs annual survey of veterans, jobs are the biggest concern for our returning veterans and for good reason — the unemployment rate for veterans of recent conflicts is an unacceptable 10 percent and 1.5 million young veterans – many with families to support — currently live under the poverty line.
It hasn’t always been like this. According to Nick Berardino, Vietnam Veteran and General Manager of the Orange County Employees Association:
“When we came back from Vietnam,
» Read more about: Labor Initiative to Help Struggling Veterans »
As every resident of the Southland must know by now, this month marks the centennial of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. When, in 1913, the valves were first turned and water rushed down the last hillside between the Eastern Sierra and the San Fernando Valley, William Mulholland, the brilliant self-taught engineer who guided the project, and whose career would end when the St. Francis Dam collapsed, famously said, “There it is. Take it.”
A small group of anonymous but rich men already had. And they will again, if they can.
A hundred years ago, these self-styled “civic leaders” cooked up a plan that began by stealing all the water that flowed down the Owens Valley on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. If you’ve seen Chinatown you know this plot. A faked water-shortage scare stampeded L.A. voters into supporting a bond measure that provided funds to purchase ranch and farm properties in the Owens Valley,
More than any other public policy issue, health care is very personal. So it is not surprising that personal stories are a central battleground for the public perception of the Affordable Care Act. And it is increasingly clear that this battle will be fought through the prisms of class and race.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) would not have become law if it were not for the willingness of survivors of the nation’s health care mess – people who had lost loved ones, fought to get care after an insurance company denial, faced crippling medical costs – to tell their stories to members of Congress and the press. Many members of Congress voted for the bill, despite the political risk, because they were moved by personal encounters with constituents with compelling stories. Many of the most effective spokespeople during the legislative battle over the law were people whose lives and livelihoods had been threatened by our defective health coverage system.
» Read more about: Halloween’s Over But Media’s Obama-scare Stories Persist »
The motorcade of JFK commemorative TV programs began this week and will continue through the half-century anniversary on November 22. The 35th president’s reputation has run the arc from martyr to cultural piñata and, if JFK: A President Betrayed is any indication, is returning to sainthood.
Like just about anything open to historical interpretation, Kennedy’s thousand days in office and his assassination provide grist for the relentless, endless shouting matches that have replaced the American conversation about our national identity. In fact, I would say that the culture wars did not start with the Pill, the Beatles, Lenny Bruce, Timothy Leary or Mario Savio – they began the minute John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead.
There was some minor confirmation of this today in the online reaction to the review, by Los Angeles Times TV critic Robert Lloyd, of the National Geographic Channel’s Killing Kennedy,
I have been practicing the first two
lines of a poem by Chung Ling:
“I make fast my white barge
to the bank of the brimming stream.”
One of my students wrote it out for me
phonetically. I want to say these lines
to the old Chines guys I swim
with every afternoon at the Y.
I think they would enjoy it. I think
they would like me. Today there is
no one in the pool but us, and we
are all hanging onto the sides.
I point to the placid water and recite.
They are stunned, and then Mr. Chu
starts to weep. His friends help him
out. They disappear through the blue
door. Later there is a note on my locker,
written on a paper towel,
During NPR’s Morning Edition, broadcast on Southern California’s public radio station KCRW, you’ll hear an underwriter spot for “Labor Lawyers” Fisher & Phillips.
Turns out Fisher & Phillips represents employers and it’s not a benign management firm.
Here’s Fisher & Phillips describing on its website how it helped a manufacturing plant during a labor dispute with the Machinists union:
[O]ur firm provided advice to the company on how to weather the strike including the hiring of permanent replacements for the approximately 100 employees . . . Our attorneys also advised our client regarding the legal and practical issues involved in removing the union . . . As a result, today our client’s plant is union-free and more productive than before the strike.
A national firm, Fisher & Phillips’ L.A. partner Lonnie Giamela is referenced in the promo.
Randy Shaw’s The Activist’s Handbook is a book with legs. First published in the early 1990s, it has now been updated as a guide to “winning social change” in the new millennium. If you’re a long distance runner in any U.S. social movement—or trying to figure out how to become one—this is the training manual for your team.
The appearance of a second edition has given the California-based author and community organizer a chance to expand upon the case studies he utilized in the initial edition, adding new material about protest activity not yet stirring two decades ago. The eclectic mix of older and new material makes the information and advice that Shaw dispenses even more useful to organizers of all types. His latest Handbook examines “new strategies, tactics, issues and grassroots campaigns and revisits whether activists have learned from past mistakes.”
The ground covered includes fights for better housing and tenant rights,
On Tuesday, Bill de Blasio won a landslide victory to become the mayor of New York City, voters in New Jersey and Seatac, Washington supported minimum wage hikes and the Illinois legislature voted to legalize same-sex marriage. These are among the progressive victories that swept across the country.
Despite a few setbacks, progressives had much to cheer about, sensing that the tide is turning against the unholy alliance of big business, the Tea Party and the religious right. Growing protests — such as the “Moral Monday” movement in North Carolina, militant immigrant rights activism, battles to protect women’s health clinics from state budget cuts, strikes by low-wage workers, civil disobedience actions to challenge voter suppression and student campaigns against global energy corporations — reflect a burgeoning progressive movement bubbling up from below the surface that is beginning to have an impact on elections.
By far the most impressive symbol of this rising tide is de Blasio’s landslide win,
» Read more about: The Elections: Ebb Tide for the Tea Party? »
So how to explain this paradox?
As of November 1 more than 47 million Americans have lost some or all of their food stamp benefits. House Republicans are pushing for further cuts. If the sequester isn’t stopped everything else poor and working-class Americans depend on will be further squeezed.
We’re not talking about a small sliver of America here. Half of all children get food stamps at some point during their childhood. Half of all adults get them sometime between ages 18 and 65. Many employers – including the nation’s largest, Walmart – now pay so little that food stamps are necessary in order to keep food on the family table and other forms of assistance are required to keep a roof overhead.
The larger reality is that most Americans are still living in the Great Recession. Median household income continues to drop. In last week’s Washington Post-ABC poll,
» Read more about: Congress: Safety Nets Are Made for Shredding »
Apparently Walmart, the country’s largest — and, some say, stingiest — private employer thought its troubles at the new Chinatown grocery center were over once it opened for business in September. That, however, was corporate wishful thinking in serious need of a cleanup in aisle three. Today, November 7, the community coalition that opposed Walmart’s original entry into the historic neighborhood will be demonstrating against the mega-chain’s continued abuse of its low-paid employees. The event will culminate with the arrest of 100 men and women in front of the store.
Their immediate goal is to draw attention to Walmart’s strategy of maximizing profits by scheduling its workers for the minimum number of hours possible and by encouraging them to apply for food stamps and other tax-funded programs to supplement their meager paychecks. (Not to mention firing dissident workers.) But organizers also hope to build momentum for nationwide protests against Walmart scheduled to take place in three weeks.
» Read more about: Walmart Civil Disobedience Planned for November 7 »