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Here’s to the Folks Who Demanded the Impossible and Brought Us the $15 an Hour Minimum Wage: The Labor Movement

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Time to give credit where credit is due. It was not the noblesse oblige of individual politicians or the Democratic Party that brought us the $15 dollar an hour minimum wage, it was the labor movement. Surely, the governors of New York and California and their fellow Democrats in those statehouses deserve credit for listening to the cry for economic justice and having the good sense to do the right thing, but the historic victory of the Fight for $15 that we have just celebrated would never have come to pass without the bold vision and prolonged struggle of working people standing together and demanding what many called impossible.

As Steven Greenhouse rightly noted in the New York Times, back in 2012 when the Fight for $15 began “many scoffed at their demand for $15 an hour as pie in the sky.” Nonetheless the labor movement led by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) pushed long and hard, starting at the local level.   [Read more…]

Go Padres: Vivas to Those Who Have Failed!

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Today is opening day and with it, if history is our guide, what is most likely another season of futility is born. Having grown up a Padres fan, this is par for the course as the Pads have only gone to the postseason five times and have a meager .463 winning percentage over the life of the franchise.

They are, in short, losers.

So why go? Why will I be sitting in the stands this afternoon as the Padres take on the Dodgers hoping against hope that the outcome will be different?   [Read more…]

Meet Sarah Saez: Candidate for San Diego City Council District 9 (Part Three)

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Sarah Saez is best known locally for her work on the heroic United Taxi Workers of San Diego (UTWSD) campaign. And the Taxi Workers’ victory was about more than just their own struggle in that, as I observed at the time, it “provided a good example of precisely how [a] new kind of workers’ movement can succeed.”

Saez continues her work with the UTWSD and is deeply involved in the community in a host of other ways. Most recently, she has decided to run for City Council in District 9 where she lives and works in City Heights.

What follows is the final installment of my interview with Saez.  If you missed the first part it’s here and the second part is here.
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Meet Sarah Saez: Candidate for San Diego City Council District 9 (Part Two)

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Sarah Saez is best known locally for her work on the heroic United Taxi Workers of San Diego (UTWSD) campaign.  As labor leader Richard Barrera noted after their big win in 2014:

The victory by UTWSD comes five years after drivers, improperly classified as independent contractors and without NLRB recognition, came together and organized a strike to protest their wages, benefits, and working conditions.  Despite constant harassment, retaliation, and intimidation by permit holders and dispatch companies over the last five years, and despite obstruction by public agencies, these workers stuck together, fought back against injustice, and prevailed.  It reminds and teaches all of us that a union is not formed by formal government recognition, it is formed by workers standing together to fight for justice and a brighter future for their families. 

And the Taxi Workers’ victory was about more than just their own struggle in that, as I observed at the time, it provided a good example of precisely how [a] new kind of workers’ movement can succeed.”      [Read more…]

Meet Sarah Saez: Candidate for San Diego City Council District 9 (Part One)

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I’m running for City Council after being asked to do so by my community. I’m committed to supporting workers – including the working poor – fixed-income seniors, people of color and others who are ignored by our current political system. As a nonprofit professional and organizer, I also want to be the best constituent services councilmember ever in order to advance the quality of life for residents in the district and throughout San Diego. I believe I have the personal, professional, and academic experience to ensure that everyone in our community has an equal opportunity to succeed by continuing to draw from the wisdom of residents and strongly promoting the political voice of disenfranchised community members.   [Read more…]

A New American Majority in San Diego?

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Last week I had the pleasure of going to see a talk at Alliance San Diego by Steve Phillips, author of Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority. The central point that Phillips makes is that, at present, we already have a new American majority of 51% of the electorate comprised of progressive people of color and like-minded whites.

The problem we face, Phillips argues, is that we are failing to mobilize that majority because many in the consultant class and the upper reaches of the Democratic Party don’t believe the numbers and/or are stuck in an old pattern of chasing after the elusive “swing voter” typically identified as white who could be persuaded to vote for a Republican or a Democrat.   [Read more…]

The Stunning Moral Failure of the Presidential Debates: Where is the Climate Crisis in Our National Discussion About the Future of the World?

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If you are an observant reader you might have noticed that last week, amidst the usual banal political commentary surrounding the Presidential race, the New York Times matter-of-factly reported that, “Seas are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries”. If you managed not to spit out your coffee, you read the alarming news that:

The worsening of tidal flooding in American coastal communities is largely a consequence of greenhouse gases from human activity, and the problem will grow far worse in coming decades, scientists reported . . .

Those emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, are causing the ocean to rise at the fastest rate since at least the founding of ancient Rome, the scientists said.   [Read more…]

What A New Supreme Court Means for Unions, Education Funding, and the Future of California

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With the death of Antonin Scalia on February 13th, public sector unions in America were given a reprieve from what was sure to be a bad ruling in the Friedrichs v CTA case before the Supreme Court. As Michael Hiltzik explained in the Los Angeles Times:

The target of the Friedrichs lawsuit, and several others just like it, is the “agency” or “fair share” fee. Under the law and according to a 1977 Supreme Court decision known as the Abood case, unionized public employees can be assessed nonmember fees to cover solely the cost of negotiations and contract enforcement, without being compelled to join the union and support its political activities by paying full union dues. That’s the arrangement in California.   [Read more…]

Pragmatic Realism Inc: Who Wants the Era of Big-Program Liberalism Over?

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Last week, in a New York Times editorial, Mark Schmitt joined the chorus of clear-eyed “realists” chiming in against Bernie Sanders’ bold agenda in “Is the Era of Big-Program Liberalism Over?”

While acknowledging the political appeal and strategic advantages of universal programs, Schmitt argued that, given the presumably inevitable constraints of the present, the future belongs to an incrementalism that is “most interesting and novel for the absence of big, universal programs that require legislative action.”

This approach to policy forgoes the need for tax increases on the rich and corporations and instead “test[s] the limits of what government can do by rearranging the pieces of existing programs, using regulations, incentives to states, tax credits and ‘nudges’ informed by behavioral economics in place of direct spending.”   [Read more…]

San Diego Quality Of Life Coalition Presents Vision Statement to SANDAG for Ballot Measure

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In a recent interview, Naomi Klein discussed the reality facing anyone interested in promoting meaningful climate action. The “structural problem” we face, according to Klein, is that people can “simultaneously understand the medium to long term risks of climate change” and still believe it is in their “short term economic [or political] interest” to continue business as usual. This is precisely the situation concerned San Diegans face when dealing with the San Diego Association of Governments’ (SANDAG) limited vision when it comes to taking the actions needed to address the pressing threat of climate change at the local level.

As Doug Porter has pointed out here in the San Diego Free Press, given SANDAG’s history, it’s easy to be cynical about our regional planning efforts. Nonetheless, our future hopes depend on us not giving up. We must continue to push for a just, sustainable future.

Last Friday, the San Diego Quality of Life Coalition, a group of labor, environmental, social justice, affordable housing, and transit organizations representing over 150,000 San Diego County residents submitted a vision statement to SANDAG’s Transportation and Regional Planning Committee meetings for consideration as the basis for the sales tax ballot measure currently under discussion at SANDAG.   [Read more…]

Clinton Democrats in 2016: Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

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Whatever happens in today’s Iowa caucuses, one thing is abundantly clear—when confronted with a credible challenge from the left in the form of the Bernie Sanders, the response of much of the leadership of the Democratic Party and their allies in the corporate media has been to defend the status quo with great zeal even if it meant borrowing tropes from the right.

Whether it was red-baiting from Thomas Freidman or condescension mixed with an appeal to “realism” from Paul Krugman, the drumbeat was loud and consistent: Sanders’ agenda, with it’s direct ties to the legacies of Martin Luther King Jr. and FDR was simply an unrealistic option in the neoliberal era.

It didn’t matter if it was Clinton proxies stirring fears about taxes, terrorism, and government health care or commentators on CNN and MSNBC bloviating about how Sanders’ views were the progressive past to Clinton’s pragmatic future, the fix was in. After the last few months of the Democratic presidential campaign, it has never been more clear that Noam Chomsky’s critique of America’s political system being dominated by the “two wings of the business party” working in concert with a corporate propaganda machine is spot on.   [Read more…]

Whither 2016 Ballot Measures?: The Oracle Jerry Brown Weighs In

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As I noted in my New Year’s column, many in California’s labor and progressive circles had high hopes for ballot measures extending Proposition 30’s taxes on the rich to fully fund education and for raising the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. But it did not take long for Governor Jerry Brown to rain on his presumed allies’ parade.

With regard to the Proposition 30 extension, the fear had been that competing measures being pushed by warring camps in SEIU and their allies in labor and the health care industry might both make the ballot and sink each other. Then a compromise measure was proposed that would continue the Prop. 30 taxes on the rich while letting the sales taxes expire with the new revenue funding education and health care for the poor AND keeping the measure temporary—through 2030 in this case.   [Read more…]

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