Yesterday 150 former Obama campaign volunteers and staff, and other organizers from around the Bay met in San Francisco to reflect on the successes of the campaign and to strategize about how to support community organizing in the Bay Area and across California. Participants came from San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Marin, Contra Costa County, San Joaquin County, Tri-Valley, Fremont, Palo Alto and Santa Clara. Most had worked for the Obama campaign, including traveling to other states and organizing hugely successful phonebanks.
We spent the afternoon working on our vision of community organizing, and thinking about the incredible potential of this group working together on a local, regional and statewide level.
It is a dirty little secret, but often times the more virulently anti-union employers are religious orders that run health systems. Such is the situation with the Sisters of St. Joseph who run the St. Joseph Health System. They have been resisting the efforts of their service employees to join SEIU-UHW for the past three years.
SEIU-UHW is organizing a series of events this week in support of their organizing efforts. Today Delores Huerta of the United Farm Workers wrote a HuffPost piece on the struggle.
This week I'm joining St. Joseph Health System workers, Attorney General Jerry Brown, Father Eugene Boyle, actor Ed Begley Jr, and community and religious leaders to call upon the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange to make peace with their workers.
For decades, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange have fought for justice for California's workers. In the summer of 1973, they marched in solidarity with Cesar Chavez and farm workers during the brutal Grape Strike. I witnessed the Sisters putting their personal safety at risk. They walked picket lines and even went to jail with more than 3500 striking farm workers. I was inspired by the Sisters' commitment to stand with the farm workers, even in the face of violent provocation.
But now, these same sisters are refusing to show their own workers the same justice they once fought for.
Chicago does not have rent control. In 1997, the Illinois legislature passed - and Republican Governor Jim Edgar signed - SB 531 (the Rent Control Preemption Act), which prohibited local jurisdictions from passing it. At the time, no city in Illinois had rent control - but the real estate lobby had a national effort to quietly stop it in places before it starts. SB 531 passed with little fanfare: the State House voted for it 96-18, and the State Senate approved it 46-6. One of the six senators who voted "no" was Barack Obama - although many liberal Democrats voted with landlords and the Senate's Republican majority. Obama's vote - when one considers how few people stood up with him - is an example of his core progressive principles. While it's valid to say that he should have done more to defeat it, consider that Obama was a freshman in a very hostile climate - and as a community organizer had learned to pick his battles.
(Disclosure: I'm proud to be working to help win this important battle. - promoted by Bob Brigham)
Inter-Con security officers who protect Kaiser facilities will launch an unfair labor practice strike against Inter-Con to defend their civil rights on Tuesday, May 6. This is the first-ever group of hospital security officers to strike. Inter-Con has broken the law and violated workers' civil rights by threatening, intimidating and spying on workers who were trying to form a union for better conditions.
The 3-day strike against employer Inter-Con will affect more than 20 Kaiser facilities statewide, and will cover more than 400 Inter-Con workers. Workers from facilities in Oakland, San Francisco, Hayward, Fremont, Fairfield and Union City in the Bay Area will strike. Other locations include Sacramento, Modesto, Los Angeles and surrounding areas, and the North Bay.
Inter-Con officers work for poverty wages, many making as little as $9/hour. Many Inter-Con officers cannot afford to buy the family healthcare coverage offered and do not have paid sick days. By comparison, facility janitors have free family healthcare, make a minimum of $11.50/hour and accrue paid sick leave.
Last week, I read in the New York Times how the “unusually militant” California Nurses Association (CNA) swarmed into Ohio hospitals and broke up a scheduled union vote for some 8,300 Ohio hospital workers to join with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
It didn’t make much sense to me: a union fighting another union and then robbing innocent workers of their chance to vote? Then I read further. According to the article, CNA believes that “skilled workers like nurses should belong to nurses' unions and not to unions of diverse workers like the service employees." In other words, CNA believes that the very organizations responsible for fairness in the workforce should actually divide workers and keep them from presenting a unified voice at the bargaining table.
To quote Senator Barack Obama, “that’s just wrong-headed.”
I would like to thank Calitics for hosting this debate about the future of workers in this country.
I have worked along side Sal Rosselli, the president of SEIU United Healthcare Workers West (UHW-W) for 25 years, starting when both of us worked on staff for SEIU Local 250 (which is now called UHW-W). I was the organizing director and he worked in the East Bay as a union representative.
I also worked closely with him when I was in charge of SEIU's hospital organizing campaign in Southern California from 1999 to 2004 that ultimately resulted in 26,000 workers becoming members of UHW and gaining major improvements in pay and benefits.
So I am surprised by his recent actions. He has been attacking the democratic decisions made jointly by the huge majority of SEIU local unions across the country. In fact, he recently resigned from the SEIU Executive Committee, saying he could no longer abide by decisions made by "simple majorities" of elected SEIU leaders.
Speaker Fabian Nunez went to the LA Times editorial board last week to tell them about the big plans he and Arnold Schwarzenegger are dreaming up: to take their hasty, half-cooked, gift-to-the-insurance-industry-masquerading-as-a-healthcare-reform-plan straight to the voters as a ballot initiative next year.
Not so fast. A new poll release today by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee finds considerable unease among the California public over the Schwarzenegger-Nunez plan. Voters don't want a bad bill just for the sake of having a bill; they don't want a bill born from a dirty political deal; and they don't want a bill that simply won't work. All of which adds up to trouble for the healthcare deal currently known as AB 8. It would likely start out under 50% in the polls, and face an uphill struggle that would only get harder as voters learn about the opposition from the state's nurses and healthcare activists.
The tragedy here is that these politicians are playing games while we have a historic opportunity to rid our healthcare system of the insurance industry that is poisoning it. Sen. Sheila Kuehl's SB 840 is based on the very systems that are succeeding in every other industrialized democracy in the world.
This is a high-stakes issue not just for patients in California, but also for the future direction of the movement for healthcare reform around the country. Fortunately, voters have smelled the rat.…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association's Breakroom Blog, as we organize to make 2007 the Year of GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.
CATHOLIC DEMOCRATS ORGANIZING IN CALIFORNIA
Support includes prominent members of Congress
SAN JOSE, Calif. - August 28, 2007 - The Catholic Democrats, a national organization of Democratic Roman Catholics, are now organizing in California. Led by Democratic activist Bill Roth of San Jose, this group hopes to build a broad-based organization of California Catholics who are seeking to represent Catholic policy perspectives within the State Democratic Party, and to accentuate the ways in which the Democratic Party is working to advance humanistic goals so well-articulated in Catholic Social Teaching.
(Wow, I couldn't have said it better! : ) - promoted by atdleft)
First category of responses that really pisses me off is typified by an aquaintance of mine, currently interning in Sacramento, let's call him CHET, who writes, "Let's just say it's dead on arrival. The odds of that resolution getting through the committee and to the convention floor are pretty slim. With all the presidentials in town, they're not going to want anything too controversial distracting the press/delegates, and making the CA Dems look any less unified than they already appear."
A lot of other responses we've had here, rather than debate the merits of what this resolution aims to accomplish, focus solely on how "the party won't let us do it."
For distasteful, dysfunctional-family analogies, follow me to the flip.
Faculty for Cal State schools throughout California will begin voting today to determine whether to walk off the job over grievances regarding pay, class size, and health care. If approved by a simple majority, faculty would begin a series of rolling two-day walkouts statewide. The voting process will last into next week with the results announced soon afterwards.
(Poor Pombo, people don't like him, and we dare to organize against him - promoted by SFBrianCL)
In a recent comment printed in the Manteca Bulletin, Congressman Richard Pombo (CA 11) gives blogs high praise by singling out their effectiveness. Speaking of the Defenders of Wildlife, he said:
The group has a full-time office in Pleasanton with a full-time staff, Pombo said. They have drawn their activist workers from personal website blogs in the Bay area. They send them into the neighborhoods campaigning against him in his congressional district, he said.
“It’s a full-blown campaign,” he pointed out. “I don’t think there has ever been anything to this extent before.”
Just recently the campaign group had some six buses pick up the Bay Area activists they had searched out from San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley taking them to district neighborhoods for door-to-door contact.
When Pombo was home in the district during the months of August and September, the group showed up at every event he attended with their signs charging him with corruption, he said.
Those blogs are PomboWatch and SayNoToPombo. The effectiveness of getting feet on the streets is one thing that the Internet does as as well as it helps raise money.
