Have a lively New Year’s Eve, a good weekend, and a great next year celebrating San Francisco values. And remember to fear the beard.
Meanwhile, Jean and I will be making our 25th annual New Year’s Eve pilgrimage to Pompei’s Grotto on Fisherman’s Wharf. Pompei’s is a gem of a family-owned Italian fish restaurant with Old World ambiance, red checkered table cloths, table lamps, splendid martinis and fresh-cracked dungeness crab. It’s our favorite spot to start New Year’s Eve. B3
Let us begin with the obvious: Mayor Gavin Newsom has absolutely no business deciding who should replace him. His petulant statements suggesting that he will delay taking office as lieutenant governor until the supervisors pick a candidate he likes are an embarrassment to the city. If he actually refuses to take the oath of office Jan. 3, when his term in Sacramento begins, it will damage his reputation and political career.
Newsom knew when he decided to seek higher office that he’d be leaving the city early if he won. He knew that under the City Charter, the Board of Supervisors would choose a new mayor. He knew that a progressive majority on the board was likely to elect someone whose political views differ from his. If he didn’t want that to happen, he should have stayed in town and finished his term.
Instead, his ambition and ego drove him to Sacramento, and he needs to accept that he is now out of the process. He should publicly agree to follow the state Constitution and join Governor-elect Jerry Brown for a timely swearing-in ceremony. Meanwhile, the supervisors need to make it very clear that they won’t accept this sort of political blackmail and will choose the next mayor on their own terms.
There’s only one more regularly scheduled meeting of the current board, on Tuesday, Jan. 4, the day after Newsom’s term as lieutenant governor begins. It’s unfortunate that the progressive majority on the board hasn’t been able to find a consensus candidate, and it’s appearing more and more likely that the next mayor will be a short-termer, a caretaker who agrees to fill out Newsom’s term. We’ve consistently argued that Newsom’s successor ought to be someone who can run for a full term in November, but there’s certainly a case to be made for the right person to take on the job for just 11 months. A progressive caretaker could fire all the failed managers left over (at high salaries) from Newsom’s tenure and make cuts to sacred cows like the police and fire departments without worrying about reelection. We’d still rather see a candidate with the courage and skill to make the tough choices and run in November on that record. But if that’s not possible, it’s important that an interim mayor be chosen carefully.
It’s also important that the progressive supervisors consider the long-term implications of their choice: If the next mayor only serves out Newsom’s remaining time, who’s going to run in November — and what will the interim mayor do to promote the prospects of a progressive candidate?
A number of names are floating around as possible caretakers, and several would do at least an adequate and perhaps an exceptional job. Former Board President Aaron Peskin has brilliant political instincts and knows how to run the city; he’s let us down on a few votes, but would work well with the progressive board majority. Sheriff Mike Hennessey is popular with the voters and has good progressive credentials (other than the move to privatize jail health services, which makes him somewhat unpalatable to labor), but he’s never faced anything resembling the political nightmare of the city’s current fiscal crisis. Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has a great legislative record and has hinted that he’d consider the job, but he still has two years to go as supervisor and would have to give up his seat and put his political career on hold. Former Mayor Art Agnos is the only one on the list who’s actually run the city at a time of crisis and would certainly be willing to make the tough decisions. If he could run an open office and listen to a diverse constituency, he might make up for the mistakes he made his first time in the job.
None of these candidates could do the job alone — and if they want to serve a short term as mayor, they need to start talking openly about it, explaining what their plans would be and give San Franciscans (and not just six supervisors) a reason to support them.
Tomorrow’s Guardian editorial:
The local hire ordinance that the Board of Supervisors approved last week once again puts the city on the cutting edge of progressive policy. San Francisco’s law, sponsored by Sup. John Avalos, is the strongest in the country, and ultimately will mandate that 50 percent of all the people hired on public works projects live in the city.
The politics of the bill were tricky; the local building trades unions opposed it on the grounds that many of their members live out of town and that hiring decisions should be based on seniority, not on residence. But eight supervisors recognized that a local hire law not only benefits the large numbers of unemployed San Franciscans; it’s also good economic policy for the city.
Numerous studies have shown that money paid out to local residents gets spent in town, and circulates in town, and creates more economic activity. That translates into fewer social and economic costs for the city and increased tax revenue.
There are costs to the law. Someone has to monitor compliance, and that requires additional city spending. Training local workers for union jobs may raise the price of some projects. But in the end, the studies all show that keeping money in the community is worth the price.
Avalos deserves tremendous credit for negotiating with labor and other interested parties, accepting compromises that don’t damage the impact of the measure and lining up eight votes to pass it, so even if Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoes it, the board can override the veto.
Now the board ought to apply the same principle to a local purchase law.
One of the major complaints small businesses have in San Francisco is their inability to get city contracts. The qualifying process is complicated and expensive — and when big out of town corporations with plenty of resources to put together bids can also offer lower prices, locals get left out.
The city spends vast sums of money, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, buying goods and services. Every dollar that leaves town translates into far more than a dollar lost to the local economy.
In fact, a 2007 study by Civic Economics showed that 38 percent of the money spent on locally based retailers in Phoenix, Ariz., remained in town and recirculated in the local economy; only 11 percent of the money spent at chain stores stayed in town.
That’s a huge difference, and would translate into many millions of dollars for the San Francisco economy. (Over time, the impact of local hire and local purchasing laws would be much greater than the one-time burst of income expected from the America’s Cup race.)
There are complications with any local purchase law. Not everything the city needs can be bought locally. Nobody in San Francisco, for example, makes train cars or fire engines. But on everything from office supplies and cars to uniforms and consulting contracts, there are (or could be) local companies handling the city’s business.
As with the Avalos law, there would be costs. Some small local suppliers would be unable to match the price that big chains offer. But the overall economic benefits to the city would greatly exceed those price differentials.
San Francisco currently gives a modest preference in bidding to local firms. But if the supervisors applied the Avalos principle and mandated that, within five years, a certain percentage of everything the city buys would have to go to local firms, city officials would be forced to do what they ought to do anyway: look local first.
Every year during the holiday season, the mayor and business leaders urge residents to shop locally. When the new Board of Supervisors takes over in January, the members should start looking beyond rhetoric and start working on legislation that would keep the city’s money in the city.
We’ve made it clear in several editorials that the Board of Supervisors would be wasting a great opportunity and making a political mistake by choosing a mayor who vows to serve only as a “caretaker” and not run in the fall. A caretaker would lack the authority to make the significant changes that are needed at City Hall — and a vow not to run again would deprive the voters of the right to choose the next chief executive of the city. What would happen if the interim mayor did a great job? What if the so-called caretaker turns out to be the perfect person to continue on in the role?
But the real danger is that the board might choose a caretaker who not only continues the dangerous and divisive policies of Mayor Gavin Newsom, but sends the city in the wrong direction on the key decisions that will come up in the next 12 months.
The budget crisis is going to be the central concern of both the mayor and the supervisors, but there’s plenty more on the agenda. For example, the city will be moving next year to implement community choice aggregation — and since Pacific Gas and Electric Co. fought bitterly (and apparently illegally) to block Marin County from implementing a similar program, the next mayor needs to be prepared to fight PG&E vigorously. So anyone who lacks a record of taking on PG&E, or is weak on CCA, should be disqualified.
There will be a significant number of commission appointments coming up — and since the members of some panels serve at the mayor’s pleasure, and other commissioners often resign to give a new mayor the chance to put his or her own people in charge, the next mayor can remake city government on a larger level. We just saw, in the atrocious vote to evict the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council’s recycling center, how badly the Recreation and Park Commission functions. The Public Utilities Commission has dragged its feet on CCA. The Port and Airports Commission need new blood. And quite a few department heads should be replaced. Anyone serving in the Mayor’s Office next year needs to be willing to make those moves.
A bad caretaker could do real, lasting damage to the city; allowing PG&E to torpedo CCA would set progressive energy policy back a decade. Let’s remember, the progressives have six votes on the board; if they’re unable to agree on a longer-term replacement and want a caretaker, that person needs to have strong progressive, anti-PG&E credentials. Otherwise San Franciscans will be regretting the decision for a long time to come
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
The nation’s crumbling infrastructure is in very serious need of rebuilding. There’s absolutely no doubt about that.
Miles and miles of roads, highways and airport runways need to be repaired or replaced, as do miles and miles of railroad track. Many bridges and other public structures need to be fixed. So do many streets and many street lights, many water and flood control systems, many park and recreation and port facilities’ high speed train systems need developing and so does very much more that’s vital to our daily lives.
Look around you. You can’t possibly miss examples of crumbling infrastructure.
The AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions have been pointing that out for many years, and noting that the obviously needed repair and replacement work would provide jobs for many thousands, if not millions, of the unemployed, who need work as badly as the infrastructure needs it. Those jobs are good, relatively well-paying jobs – exactly what we need to escape the Great Recession that’s continuing to plague the nation.
It’s pretty much what was done during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt, with the support of Congress, put together the Works Projects Administration, or WPA, to put millions of jobless Americans to work on building and repairing the infrastructure. It worked then, and it would work now.
Last month, President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and the Treasury Department issued a report detailing the benefits of doing the needed infrastructure work, including the “long term economic benefits.” The report also noted that a huge majority of Americans support spending tax money on infrastructure improvement.
President Obama’s labor-endorsed plan for infrastructure improvements over the next six years calls rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads, laying and maintaining 4,000 miles of railroad tracks, and creating a new air traffic control system that would reduce delays.
President Edward Wytkind of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department hailed the president’s plan for its promise of “putting millions of Americans to work in the type of good jobs that transportation investments have supported for more than a century.”
Laborers Union President Terry O’Sullivan noted that “time is running out.” He said, “We need to invest in our country, and we need to create jobs as soon as possible. It’s a no-brainer – let’s build our country, create jobs, keep America competitive in the 21st century and leave behind real assets for future generations.”
Author Ezra Klein, writing in the Washington Post, put it this way: “infrastructure investment creates the right jobs, for the right people, doing the right things – and at the right time. Or, to say it more clearly, infrastructure investment creates middle-class jobs for workers in a sector with high unemployment and it puts them to work doing something that we actually need done at a moment when doing it is cheaper than it ever will be again.”
He’s right. Boy, is he right. Yet there’s a considerable body of naysayers in Congress – most of them Republicans, as you might expect – who threaten to block the bills necessary for implementing Obama’s ambitious infrastructure plans.
We need those bills passed in a hurry. We need the millions of jobs they’ll provide. We need to carry out the long delayed modernization of our crumbling infrastructure.
The progressives on the Board of Supervisors are a long way from united on a possible mayoral candidate, and if they can’t come together, the person who finishes Gavin Newsom’s term will be a compromise candidate, either a short-term caretaker (not the greatest option) or someone who’s more in the moderate camp but a candidate the left can work with — for 2011 and possibly four years after that.
We’re glad to see the proposal by Sup. John Avalos to begin the mayoral selection process early. Picking a mayor in a mad scramble on the day Newsom steps down is a recipe for chaos — and potentially a bad outcome. And as the process begins, the last thing the city needs is a mayor chosen through a backroom deal.
But it’s entirely appropriate for progressive board members to set some standards and to ask the people who are angling for the job to make clear exactly what their positions would be on key policy issues.
In other words, anyone who wants to be the interim mayor — and possibly mayor for the next five years or longer — should have to answer, directly and without hedging, question like these:
How much new revenue does San Francisco need to solve its budget problems, and where, specifically, should it come from? This is the central issue facing the city, now and for the indefinite future. San Francisco’s budget has a structural deficit of at least $250 million, and it simply can’t be closed by cuts alone. What taxes will you pledge to support — and put political capital and fundraising clout behind when they go on the ballot?
What specific programs ought to be cut? Everyone likes to talk about the city living within its means, but that ends up leading to a series of death-by-1,000-cuts decisions that year after year devastate services to the poor. Don’t tell us you need to look at budget figures and work it out later; the big-ticket items are no secret. What’s on the chopping block — and what isn’t?
Will you work to promote public power? How will you expedite community choice aggregation, and will you support a ballot measure to replace Pacific Gas and Electric Co. with a full-scale municipal electric utility?
What are your law enforcement priorities? If money’s tight, should the San Francisco police be hassling nightclubs, or should more resources go into the homicide division? How important are foot patrols, and which neighborhoods should get them? Will the SFPD and juvenile authorities continue to turn young people over to federal immigration authorities?
Who should pay to fix Muni? Should the burden of paying for the transit system fall primarily on the riders (through fare increases and reduced services) or should big downtown businesses and retailers (the major beneficiaries of the system) pay more? Should car owners pay higher fees (including parking fees and congestion management fees) to subsidize transit? Which specific fees would you be willing to push for?
Who should the city build housing for? Right now, much of the new housing stock is aimed at the very rich — and San Francisco is turning into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. Would you set housing policy to conform with the city’s General Plan assertion that more than half of all new housing should be below market rate? How would you make that balance happen? Should the city spend a significant amount of money for affordable housing, and who should pay for it?
Do you agree that public sector jobs are as important as private sector jobs in San Francisco? Would you support the tax plan proposed by Sup. David Chiu?
Do you support giving the supervisors appointments to all major commissions?
Do you think the city should be doing more to stop TICs and condo conversions and to preserve existing rental housing?
That’s just the beginning of a long list of questions — but the progressives and other supervisors on the board should make sure they have answers before agreeing to support anyone, as a caretaker or interim mayor.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
Unions, as you might certainly expect, have been having a rough time during the current recession. How rough? Well, overall union membership declined by a whopping 771,000 over the past year.
The number of workers in unions is still large, around 15 million. But that’s only a little more than 12 percent of the country’s workforce. There is one bright spot: More than one-third of public employees are in unions.
The figures for workers in private employment, however, show that only about 7 percent of them are in unions, That’s the lowest percentage of unionized workers in private employment since 1900. That’s right – the lowest percentage in 110 years.
Unions are fighting hard to reverse the downward trend, and though many outside the labor movement openly doubt – or at least wishfully think – that it can’t be done, I think they’re wrong. The doubters are forgetting that it’s been done before – and done in the face of obstacles that were at least as great as those confronted by union adherents today.
It began 75 years ago this month, in November of 1935, when eight affiliates of the American Federation of Labor – the AFL – put together what soon became the independent Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO. Their aim was to mobilize the racially and ethnically mixed mass of generally unskilled workers in steel, rubber, auto, meatpacking and other basic industries.
The AFL had largely ignored the industrial workers in favor of skilled and semi-skilled white craftsmen who were organized into separate unions according to their trade – plumbing, printing, carpentry and so forth – rather than by industry.
That kept most workers isolated from each other and enabled the industrial corporations that dominated the economy to unilaterally set pay and working conditions at the lowest possible levels.
The CIO leaders believed that workers could not make a decent living and that the labor movement could not grow and possibly not even survive unless workers were brought together in tight solidarity through industrial as opposed to the craft unionism. of the AFL.
The issues today are different. But the basic need for solidarity remains, as does the need to organize workers whatever their occupation.
That won’t be easy, with only about 12 percent of today’s workforce in unions. But when the CIO began in 1935, less than 10 percent of the country’s workers were in unions, and they faced a Great Depression that was much worse than today’s Great Recession.
The labor movement hit rock bottom during the Depression of the 1930s. But finally unemployment became so widespread and pay and working conditions so bad that large numbers of workers rebelled – most under the banners of the CIO.
President Franklin Roosevelt, fearing revolution, quickly pushed through Congress bills that in effect put the government behind the workers attempts to organize. They were granted the legal right to organize and to strike – and to choose by majority votes unions to represent them in collective bargaining with their employers.
Millions of workers flocked to unions, CIO and AFL unions alike. Millions engaged in strikes and other militant actions to press their bargaining demands. Pay rose substantially. Workers won unheard of fringe benefits. Working hours were reduced without reductions in pay. Grievance procedures were instituted. Job security was greatly enhanced.
Most important, the living standards of ordinary Americans were raised. And the United States at last had a true middle class.
As the CIO grew, so did the AFL. By the time the competing organizations merged in 1955 to form the AFL-CIO, one of every three U.S. workers belonged to a union.
The vital, demanding and essential task of today’s labor leaders is nothing less than to do what was done by their predecessors when they formed the CIO three-quarters of a century ago . . . nothing less than to bring new life to the American labor movement.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist who has covered political and labor issues for a half-century as a reporter, editor , author and commentator. Visit him at his website, www.dickmeister.com.
OK, the election is over and labor, Democrats and the other good guys came up a bit short. But what now? What next for the good guys?
Well, for starters, organized labor and its Democratic Party allies must be ready to block Republican plans to try to enact legislation that would cut taxes for the very wealthy, slash Medicare funding, and possibly even privatize Social Security. I know that may sound alarmist and far-fetched. But that’s what Republican leaders are actually talking about.
After all, the GOP’s anti-labor corporate allies spent nearly a billion dollars on the election and they damn well want their money’s worth. Larry Cohen, president of the communications workers union, thinks it’s getting like the way elections were 100 years ago when the big trusts and robber barons made sure their voices were the only ones heard during election campaigns.
Not yet, Larry. Not quite. Unions were able to make a lot of highly effective noise that helped elect some important pro-labor Democrats and defeat several Tea Party candidates and other anti-labor wackos who argued, as the AFL-CIO’s Mike Hall notes, “that government should do nothing to improve the economy or protect working families during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”
Let’s me take a little closer look at how the election went for organized labor and its political friends in two of the country’s most important states politically, numbers one and two in population, California and Texas.
In California, as the AFL-CIO says, unions were a key factor propelling notably pro-labor Democrat Jerry Brown to the governorship and pro-labor Democrat Barbara Boxer to a third term in the Senate. Those victories were especially sweet, since the opponents of Governor-elect Brown and Senator Boxer were former business executives with tons of money, including their own, to spend on their campaigns.
Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman spent more than $141 million of her own money on her losing campaign against Jerry Brown for governor. And though Carly Fiorina, former Hewlett-Packard CEO, spent several million of her own money on her campaign, the total was nowhere near the obscene amount that Whitman pulled from her own pocket for her campaign.
Anyway, Meg Whitman lost, and good for Californians for making that happen. Labor couldn’t imagine a worse anti-labor governor than Meg Whitman, or more labor-friendly governor than Jerry Brown, a worse anti-labor senator than Carly Fiorini, or more labor-friendly senator than Barbara Boxer.
It was a bit different in most other states. As Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro of the California Nurses Association notes, the election of Democratic, pro-labor candidates in California “provided a national alternative to the conservative, corporate-oriented economic program that won so many other races nationwide.”
DeMoro praised California’s voters “for seeing through the fool’s gold promises that the path to economic recovery and job creation is through corporate tax breaks and shifting more wealth and resources to those who need it the least.”
The news isn’t so good out of Texas, where, as Jim Lane of the People’s World says, “the second largest delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives, already heavily leaning to the right, tilted drastically further on November 2 – plus, many of the most popular Texas Democratic leaders were defeated.
The re-election of Gov. Rick Perry was more bad news for labor and its allies, given what the People’s World’s Lane notes as Perry’s “far-right, anti-worker vision.” Reporter Lane says “progressive Texans are not looking forward to extending the years of being shamed about their home state, as we have been since GW Bush took the national stage.”
But at least the Texas labor movement was able to run what Lane calls “a strong and largely independent political campaign.” Unions even dared to run “one of their own,” former national AFL-CIO official Linda Chavez-Thompson, for lieutenant governor. But, as Lane notes, “Like all other statewide Democratic candidates, Chavez-Thompson’s campaign was buried by big money.”
So, what next for Texas, California – the whole country?
What’s next should be in large part to carry out what AFL-CIO and Democratic Party leaders have been advocating for many years – rebuilding of our long crumbling infrastructure
President Obama has a plan that calls for rebuilding 150,000 miles of roads, laying and maintaining 4,000 miles of railway tracks, restoring 150 miles of airport runways and , in doing so, providing badly needed jobs for many of the country’s millions of unemployed workers.
That’s how labor and political leaders can – and must – begin to deliver on their election campaign promises to, above all, do what it takes to create “jobs, jobs, jobs.”
Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based columnist who has covered political and labor issues for a half-century as a reporter, editor , author and commentator. Visit him at his website, www.dickmeister.com.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
Unfortunately, as we all know – or should know – working women generally make less than working men, currently 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. But now come new census figures showing that in at least one regard, women are forging ahead of their male counterparts. They’re doing much better than men among higher paid workers.
It turns out that the number of women with six-figure incomes is rising at a much faster pace than is the number of men making six-figure incomes.
Nationwide, it looks like this: About one in 18 women working full time – about 2.5 million women in all – earned $100,000 or more in 2009, a jump of 14 percent from two years earlier. Only one in seven men, a total of about 8 million, made that much, an increase of just four percent.
How did that happen? Why so many higher-paid women? The most important reason seems to be the steady growth over the past three decades of women with the academic credentials to qualify them for higher-paying work. Women, in fact, now outnumber men at just about every level of higher education, with three women attending college and graduate school for every two men doing so.
Women earn more master’s degrees and more PhDs. Most law school students are women. So are almost half of the country’s medical students. Law and medicine are, of course, the academic fields that generally lead to higher paying professional jobs.
The two Washington Post staff writers who reported the Census findings, Carol Morello and Dan Keating, caution, however, that the wage gap between men and women “remains stubbornly persistent”. And despite women’s increased pay generally, women are only sparsely represented at the higher levels of business. For instance, just 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.
lIene Lang, president of Catalyst, a group that’s working to improve business opportunities for women, is cautious as well. It’s no surprise to her that as women get more education, they earn more. But, she said, “women have been getting these degrees for a long time. And they’re still hitting a glass ceiling.”
We should take into account the impact of the current recession, which has hit men much harder than women. Median pay and hours worked fell twice as much for men as for women. The share of workers earning annual pay of $50,000 or more has stayed pretty much the same for men throughout the recession, but has risen 5 percent for women.
There’s another matter to consider. The fields with more men than women – manufacturing and construction, for example – have been declining throughout the recession, at the same time that there’s been a steady increase in jobs requiring the higher levels of education that more women have reached. So working women, although still far behind working men in compensation, are steadily gaining.
Women still have got a long, long way to go before reaching wage equality, but they’re on the way. Finally.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
Alas, this year some of the small business groups and leaders in San Francisco, such as the Small Business Advocates and Scott Hauge at Small Business California, once again came out with endorsements that were virtually identical with those of the downtown/Chamber of Commerce/PG&E/landlord/real estate gang. (See Guardian blogs.) Their candidates were, and the big downtown money went to, Steve Moss in District l0, Theresa Sparks in District 6, and Scott Wiener in District 8 and they all backed the Sit-Lie Ordinance and took identical positions on all the other local props.
There are many small business people who do not subscribe to the downtown line and vote more independently. I decided this year to do a special blog and email blast on the endorsements of the Guardian, which are done from the perspective of an independent, locally owned and operated alternative newspaper. I think it’s also good for people to know that there are a lot of independents and progressives out there in the small business community who support such things as public power, a city health plan for workers, more progressive taxation, and foot patrols by police for the neighborhoods and not just kicking kids off the sidewalks. b3
To the small business community in San Francisco:
Here are our 2010 endorsements of state and San Francisco candidates and propositions from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a locally owned and operated, independent alternative weekly newspaper in San Francisco. The Guardian is a newspaper that is of, by, and for small business. We always question candidates carefully on their small businesses record and policies and consider small business to be a crucial criterion for candidates and propositions in our endorsement process. In a major story on the Guardian in its pre-election Sunday edition (Oct. 31), the Chronicle reported that Guardian endorsements “are widely considered the most influential in this left-leaning town.” We have done endorsements in every election since our founding in 1966.
For us, this is a serious, intensive process of many months: we interview all the major local candidates, put up podcasts of interviews on our website at sfbg.com, do extensive independent checking on the candidates and issues and their background and record and do independent reporting on the campaign and issues. You may agree with us; you may not. But you can have faith in our one and only campaign promise: Our Clean Slate represents what we think is best for San Francisco and San Francisco small business.
b3
And so you will remember, from my earlier blog (STEVE MOSS: THE BIG DUCK) that I asked Steve Moss some questions in the critical District 10 race. He answered but ducked the questions, so I put forth the relevant follow up questions. No answer at all. But the blog comments provide some interesting back and forth with Moss supporters and others in the district. (Yes, I don’t like anonymous comments and I always sign my comments as Bruce and B3.)
Moss told us in the Guardian endorsement interview that he fully supports more sunshine and accountability in non profits. So let’s take him at his word on this one and raise again the questions he has been ducking. PG&E has invested millions of dollars over the past 10 years into Moss, his non profit (and by extension his for profit firm and the Potrero View, which he now owns and uses for his personal and political agenda.)
More, Moss’s non profit collected $1,290,000 in the past three years from the California Public Utilities Commission for energy efficiency projects, according to SF Power’s annual revenues in its 2008 to 20l0 report on its website. Loretta Lynch, former president of the CPUC, explained to us that this money for energy efficiency programs are funded by ratepayers, not utilities, and that PG&E decides each year whether Moss/SF Power gets any of this money and how much. Lynch lives on Potrero Hill.
The report also disclosed that SF Power got $150,000 from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commisson in 2008 and $125,000 in 2009.) Both the CPUC and SF PUC are widely recognized PG&E- friendly bastions. Moss got hundreds of thousands more in previous years since he incorporated his non profit in 2001. And, according to a statement in the report, Moss is still hustling money from the big polluters in District 10 (from PG&E, Mirant and its power plant and the mayor’s office et al).
This district has been brutalized for decades by PG&E, for starters with the belatedly shuttered Hunters Point power plant and with the still fuming Potrero Hill power plant, and with the concentration of gas pipelines under the district. If elected, Moss would be the first supervisor in memory who would be a direct financial captive of PG&E.
It is only fair to the residents and businesses in his district that Moss explain before election day some basic questions: how much money in total and by year has PG&E invested in him and his non profit and profit businesses? Why has he been secretive about it?
Will he keep hustling PG&E and Mirant for more money if elected? Will he cut his ties to PG&E and the non profit/profit firms and when? How can his constituents trust him considering PG&E’s investments in him?
Other critical questions concern the $250,000 or so investment that the downtown/Chamber/PG&E/real estate/landlord/BOMA gang has made in Moss and his campaign with the full expectation of getting good returns with friendly votes that would most likely be inimical to the interests of his district. Given the huge, unprecedented money gushing into his campaign from commercial landlords, developers, PG&E, and the Chamber gang, how can district residents and businesses trust him on the critical issues of public power, closing down the Potrero power plant, tenant rights, land use, Lennar and other big developments, affordable housing, and protecting the neighborhoods and small businesses?
The critical pre-election question: If Moss can’t answer these key questions fully and forthrightly, and he keeps the Big Duck going, how can he be trusted as a district supervisor?
Full disclosure: I look out from my office window at 135 Mississippi St. at the Potrero Hill power plant, pumping out poisons every minute of every day, courtesy of PG&E and Mirant, and the PUC/City Hall.
Dick Meister. former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeistersf.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
Whoopie! Our valiant Giants are in the World Series again, for the fourth time since they moved to the city from New York in 1958. Pretty exciting, the first series for the Giants since the 2002 series that was won, alas, by the New York Yankees.
Pretty exciting stuff coming up in this year’s series too, Giants vs. Texas Rangers. But it was more than excitement that swept San Francisco during that first SF Giants World Series and the regular season leading up to the series. It was near-hysteria. As a young reporter for the SF Chronicle in those days, I felt it up close and very personal.
Merchants filled the newspapers with ads that offered goods “the Giants look up to,” promised “big league values,” and, of course, congratulated the Giants and their fans. for every victory leading to the series.
The hype was too much for some of us at the Chronicle, even me, a former ballplayer. I joined 10 others to sign an anti-baseball petition prompted by the airing at the paper — loudly and daily — of the radio broadcasts of Giants’ games.
“It is not that we have any inherent objection to the Great American Pastime,” the petitioners explained. “Our protest is against the unilateral establishment of an electronic device which broadcasts to a captive city room the trivia associated with the sport. Exhortations like ‘Willie Mays,’ while they obviously provoke a pseudo-religious ecstasy among fans, leave a number of us writhing in embarrassment.”
We gained nothing by our petition. Worse, City Editor Abe Mellinkoff added insult to injury by sending us out, transistor radios in hand, to capture the mood of the “man on the street” during the World Series’ broadcasts. I was the first to get the assignment. I was supposed to rush up to people in the street after particularly exciting plays, get their excited comments and weave them into one of the fluffy page one feature stories my editors favored – “wiggly rulers,” as they called them, after the wavy lines used to set them off.
But I stuffed the radio into a jacket pocket and wandered aimlessly around Chinatown, where there were few Giants fans in evidence, returning later to explain lamely that I just couldn’t find any men in the street who cared about the World Series.
The next day, the radio was turned over to another reporter, but he had no more interest in the assignment than I. City Editor Mellinkoff, hinting darkly that he might fire the lot of us for insubordination, got his story on the third try – even though the reporter he sent out that day spent the whole time in his favorite drinking establishment down the street.
The reporter returned to the office barely able to walk, much less type a story or give a coherent excuse for not doing so. We propped him up carefully behind a desk in the far reaches of the city room, safely hidden from the nearsighted city editor, then dictated a story to another reporter at the desk directly in front of his, using the names of friends for our men on the street and quotes we had turns making up to go along with the names.
As he completed a page, the reporter who was typing the story would turn and lay it on the desk of the reporter who supposedly was writing the story, one of us would shout, “Boy!,” and a copy boy would grab the page and rush it to the city editor’s desk at the front of the room.
It was a very lively story, quite possibly the best wiggly ruler the Chronicle had run in several months.
Dick Meister. former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeistersf.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
Thanks to the U. S. Supreme Court, it’s almost impossible to regulate the so-called independent expenditure committees.
EDITORIAL Big money moved into the district supervisorial races this fall. Downtown forces, working with landlords and a labor union that wants a giant new hospital on Van Ness Avenue, are pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into races in Districts 6, 8, and 10, trying to alter the direction of the board by electing more conservative candidates. And while district races allow grassroots candidates without huge war chests a decent shot at winning, all this cash is going to have an impact — and might prove to be decisive in some races.
A lot of the money hasn’t been raised directly by candidates, either — it’s in the form of so-called independent expenditure committees, outside operations that, in theory, have no direct connection to any candidate. These committees can raise money without limits, spend it however they like, and ignore the limits that candidates face. And thanks to the U. S. Supreme Court, it’s almost impossible to regulate the committees. So the IEs, as they’re known, can put out attack ads, make scurrilous accusations, even lie outright — and have no accountability.
But San Francisco, which led the nation in using ranked-choice voting and has an impressive system for public financing of elections and disclosure, ought to be working to control this flood of sleaze. There are two major steps the supervisors should be looking at.
1. Respond to the money. San Francisco currently gives matching public funds to candidates who raise enough on their own to meet a threshold. That gives underfunded candidates at least a fighting chance to stay competitive. But it doesn’t address what happens when an outside group comes in and drops, say, $50,000 to promote or attack a candidate.
Unfortunately, federal law and court decisions limit the city’s ability to cap or restrict that spending. But the current system of matching public funds offers a potential alternative.
Suppose, for example, the city offered matching funds not just on the basis of what a candidate has raised — but also on the basis of what his or her opponents (including IEs) are spending. For example, if an IE spends $50,000 attacking a candidate, the city could give that candidate $50,000 (or, better, $100,000) to fight back.
That sounds like a lot of taxpayer dollars — but if the system is designed right, much of it will never be spent. Because the independent expenditure committees are only effective if the money is one-sided. Once these operators realize that all they’ve be doing by spending money against a candidate is increasing that candidate’s own resources, they’re far less likely to mount these campaigns.
The disclosure laws can be tightened too. Campaign ads and mailers have to say where the money’s coming from — but only in tiny type or in rushed voiceovers that few people notice. The federal government’s mandate that cigarette packages and ads have big, prominent statements about the health risks of smoking has been very effective. Requiring campaigns, particularly independent expenditure groups, to identify their major donors in large, visible type in prominent places on printed material and in clear language on radio or TV ads would help the voters understand the players — and the motivations — behind the campaign material.
2. Deal with the legal violations — promptly. A lot of these big-money campaigns have a tendency to skirt — or sometimes flagrantly violate — the city’s campaign law. And by the time the ethics Commission gets around to investigating (if that even happens) the election is over and it’s too late.
The supervisors ought to mandate that all credible allegations of election-law violations be investigated — and resolved if at all possible before Election Day. And if that means Ethics needs more staff, that’s a small price to pay for honest elections
WORKING DOGGEDLY TO PIN DOWN THE EDITOR OF THE POTRERO VIEW WHO IS ALSO A CANDIDATE FOR SUPERVISOR FROM DISTRICT 10
We’ve been trying to pin Steve Moss down on some key questions. Over the weekend, I sent him some questions by email. He responded, but ducked or ignored the real points and never gave us any straight answers.
Here’s our exchange, my questions and his answers — unedited, followed by some comments from me as we doggedly try to make sense of where Steve Moss really stands on key issues in the district.
Dear Steve,
In your October, pre-election issue of the Potrero View, your signed column
compares the Guardian with Fox News and states that we are both “advocacy groups disguised as news purveyors” who “whip mostly anonymous commentators on their websites to call political candidates ‘weasle, lying, doucebags’ and worse.” You also state that “these same outlets barely take the time to edit–much less fact check–their stories.”
As you know, our reporter Sarah Phelan has done factual reporting on you and your campaign (http://www.sfbg.com/2010/09/14/five-things-you-should-know-about-steve-moss) and she and I have both checked with you to respond to our points before publication. We will continue our policy by submitting these email questions to you in advance of publication. Our deadline is 5 p.m. on Monday
l. What specific facts do you find inaccurate in our previous reporting on you and your campaign? (You mixed up a comment on a blog with Phelan’s actual story and reporting. Was this intentional?)
2. How much money have you and your various profit and nonprofit enterprises accepted from PG&E during this past year?
How much money have you accepted in total from PG&E during your many years of operating your profit and nonprofit enterprises? Why did you change the pro-public power View of Ruth Passen to a PG&E-friendly View under your ownership? (For example, Passen always supported public power but you as the new owner refused to support the last public power initiative and said it was “too contentious.”)
3. Campaign finance records show that Thomas Coates, a Republican who spent $l million trying to overturn rent control in California in 2008, has just dumped
$45,000 into the so-called Alliance for Jobs and Sustainable Growth in support of your candidacy. Public records also show that you served a cure or quit notice
to a tenant in your rent-controlled building in District 8. Would you comment on this? And would you state whether you support or oppose rent control?
4. On the front page of the October View, your lead story reported on the troubles of the Neighborhood House under the headline, “NABE Reeling Under City Budget Cuts.” Your story noted that the Nabe had lost “nearly $400,000 in funding from the Department of Human Services (DHS) and the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families” and that individual donations had dropped by 75 per cent. The result, your story noted, was that the NABE “has been forced to eliminate teen-focused programming, reduce elementary school offerings by 25 per cent, lay-off staff and impose pay cuts.”
Each year, the NABE sponsors the Potrero Hill festival as a benefit to raise much-needed funds. This year the benefit was more critical than ever to reduce its crippling deficit. Just as the View was going to press earlier this month, I got a call at the Guardian from a representative of the festival with a startling bit of information. I was told that you, as the owner and editor-publisher of the View, and a candidate for supervisor from our district, were refusing to run a full page ad for the festival, a key piece of the NABE’s promotion on the hill,if the ad contained the logo of the Guardian as a festival sponsor.
The representative was concerned that, if you wouldn’t run the NABE ad, that the Guardian as a media sponsor wouldn’t run a NABE ad in the Guardian.
(I told him not to worry, do what he had to do to get the ad in the View, and that the Guardian would run the ad and double up on its promotion for the festival. The Guardian logo did not appear on the Nabe ad in the View but did appear on all other NABE promotions.)
Why did you make this threat to the NABE and its festival benefit? Were you serious?
5. You said in your endorsement interview at the Guardian that, if you were elected supervisor, you would give up the View. Do you still plan to do that, if elected? If so, how would you do that?
Steve Moss responds:
1. The entire way you’ve covered the District 10 election has been slanted towards the candidate you prefer, and against the candidates you dislike. From this perspective the Guardian is not serving the role of a newspaper, but rather is acting as an independent expenditure committee on behalf of its chosen candidates and causes. I’d be happy to select a panel of five independent journalists — you pick two, I’ll pick two, and the four can pick one — to render an opinion about how you’ve run the Guardian during this election cycle, and how I’ve run the View.
2. In 2010 I believe SF Power has received less than $25,000 in payments related to the small business demand-response program it operates, as sanctioned by the California Public Utility Commission. I’ve already provided you and your reporter with multiple responses to your requests about SF Power’s successfull advocacy related to CPUC orders requiring PG&E to fund programs focusing on working families and small businesses, all of which, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, are a matter of public record.
The View has published several articles about community-based energy systems, and effective ways to achieve local control over the power grid, during my tenure as publisher. They are available on our website.
3. I read about Coats’ contribution in Bay Citizen. As you know, this donation was made to an independent expenditure committee over which I have no control and almost no knowledge. I have stated throughout the campaign, and directly to the Tenants Union, that I believe current rent control policy should remain unmolested.
4. I made no threat to the NABE. In fact, the festival was featured on the front page of the November issue, with a story inside, and a full page ad.
5. Yes. A new editor will be found to run the View if I’m elected to office.
Okay, You aren’t responsive. Let me try again, point by point:
l. I am not running for office. You are. Please tell me where we are factually wrong in any of our reporting on you and your campaign.
As you know, we have contacted you in advance of publication for comment. And you have written us twice with generalities but no specifics on inaccurate reporting.
2. You defend your PG&E payments on the basis that it’s actually money from the California Public Utilities Commission that PG&E is required by law to put up for energy efficiency projects. However, Loretta Lynch, former president of the CPUC, told me that PG&E decides who gets the money and that fund recipients that “cross PG&E” are in danger of getting their funds cut off.
In other words, if you want to continue to fund your organization with upwards of more than $l million over three years, you must avoid angering the utility. This may explain why the Potrero View under your ownership has switched from its historic position supporting public power under former owner Ruth Passen to going easy on PG&E and ducking a position on the most recent public power initiative (Proposition H).
The background: Your non profit collected $1,290,000 from the CPUC for energy efficiency projects over the past three years, according to SF Power’s annual revenues and estimated budgets from 2008 to 2010 as provided on its website.
The breakdown: $500,000 in 2008, $440,000 in 2009, $350,000 in 2010.
You also got $150,000 from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission in 2008 and $125,000 in 2009. Your non profit also got $50,000 chunks each year from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman fund, where his wife Debbie Findling works. The Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund kicked in $5,000 in 2008 and 2009. The Potrero View contributed $5,000 in 2008, $4,500 in 2009, and $5,000 in 2010. A footnote stated that SF Power “is also informally negotiating with the California Air Resources Board, San Francisco’s Office of the Mayor, Mirant Corporation, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company, among others, for project funding support.” Did you get any additional money from Mirant, PG&E, the Mayor, or anybody else? Are you still negotiating? If not, when did you stop?
Lynch explained that “all energy efficiency programs in California are funded by ratepayer dollars that are collected by the utilities as part of each ratepayer’s utility bill. Thus, California ratepayers, big and small, pay for all energy efficiency programs and each and every program is funded by ratepayers, not utilities.”
She said that the CPUC “sets broad parameters for each utility concerning the amount of overall energy efficiency savings to be achieved and in what customer classes (residential, small business, large business,etc.). But the utilities choose the program providers. The CPUC simply reviews the overall package provided by the utilities to check to see whether the energy efficiency savings targets are met.”
Thus, PG&E each year decides the amount of money going to SF Community Power. Lynch noted that some non profit people told her, when she was a commissioner, that “if you crossed PG&E, they would stop the funding.”
Lynch mentioned a meeting with you that showed PG&E’s influence on you, your non profit and the View. .
She said that, shortly after she was termed out as a CPUC commissioner in 2009, you asked her to meet with him at Farleys coffee shop and asked her to serve on the board of his nonprofit. “I thanked him and said that he should consider my relationship with PG&E before making that offer if he was funded through PG&E, as PG&E and I have a very contentious relationship, and that they would not be happy if I were on the board. He thanked me for telling him and agreed that I should not serve on the board.” Lynch lives on Potrero Hill.
3. I followed up my rent control question: “If state law were amended to allow it, would you support extending rent control to vacant apartments?” No answer.
4. I got a call from Keith Goldstein, president of the Potrero Hill Association of Merchants and Businesses and co-chair of the festival. He had gotten an email from you that read: “Please have the festival’s pr agent remove the Guardian’s logo from any complimentary ad the View is providing the festival in this month’s paper.” Why did you make such an unprofessional move? Would you have backed out of sponsoring this event if the Guardian logo had remained? Is that how you would behave as a supervisor?
5. If elected, do you plan to sell the View? Will you continue to operate your non profit and take chunks of money from PG&E? If elected, would your income from PG&E disquality you from voting on PG&E and energy issues? At what point would you sever your relations, if at all, with your non profit and PG&E?
6. If you lose, will you (as your wife suggested in an email to friends) move back to your house on Liberty St in Distict 8?
We anxiously await your response. B3
Dick Meister. former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeistersf.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
So, as the Washington Post ‘s Paul Farhi reported recently, hunter Harry Whittington is still suffering from the effects of being shot accidentally by hunting partner Dick Cheney in Texas four years ago.
I’m sure we’re all sorry about that, about how Whittington still has the lead pellet that pierced his larynx when the then-vice president swung around abruptly and fired away at a flight of quail. We’re of course sorry, too, about the 30 or so other pieces of shot still inside Whittington out of some 200 that slammed him, and the scars he bears.
“I was lucky,” Whittington told Farhi, “I just feel every day ‘s a gift. Sometimes I wonder why I got those extra years.”
But what of the real victims? What of the defenseless quail that Cheney, Washington and two friends were stalking with a clear and undisguised intent to kill?
At least one quail was saved when Dead Eye Dick hit Whittington while aiming for a bird, and there was a bit of poetic justice since Whittington was struck as he was returning from retrieving a quail he had killed.
But no one bothered reporting how many other birds had been killed. After all, they were inferior beings raised for the amusement of Cheney and others who get their kicks stalking and killing fellow creatures.
Cheney’s been at it a long time, targeting ducks, pheasants and other birds as well as quail, in company with such other conservative favorites as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and former President George W. Bush.
Although apparently not as skilled and frequent a hunter as Cheney, Bush has managed to bring down a few winged creatures himself, most notably during his New Year’s holiday in Texas a few years back., Bush, who modestly declared that “I’m not that good a shot,” managed to down five quail. He said that “was a lot of fun.”
Bush praised the owner of the area in which the hunt took place for maintaining the land as a good habitat, not because it benefited the birds, of course, but because – like the Texas farm where Cheney was hunting – it provided easy targets for hunters who wished to kill birds.
There are more than 20 million “sportsmen” like Bush and Cheney who find it fun to prey on innocent birds and animals.
The number of “sportsmen” has declined in recent years, thanks to anti-gun sentiment, urbanization, the animal rights movement, availability of a broad range of other leisure activities, heightened environmental awareness and the increasing cost of hunting equipment,
But there are still far too many people searching the countryside for winged and four-legged victims. What’s more, manufacturers of guns and other hunting gear have greatly intensified efforts to increase their number. So have state fish and game departments, which rely on hunters’ license fees to cover much of their operational costs.
Hunters and their defenders argue that, although the hunters’ targets are too dumb to realize it, hunting actually benefits them by “thinning the herds” and thus keeping them from starvation. But though there’s no doubt that reducing or at least relocating some animal populations may be necessary for their survival, there are civilized ways to do it.
Once, long ago, we had to hunt and kill in order to survive. But this is the 21st century. It’s outrageous that leaders and citizens of the world’s most powerful and influential nation, one that presumes to be the role model for all others, find it amusing to engage in the barbarity of killing for sport.
Invariably, when I address this subject, people come back at me complaining that I just don’t understand that some people need to hunt animals to help feed their families.
I understand. But that’s another matter entirely. I’m writing about the vast majority of hunters who hunt and kill their fellow animals, not for food, but for the fun of it. To me, that seems a sick thing to do.
Let me repeat: It’s killing for the sport of it that should disturb us all. It’s not just the bird and animal targets that need protecting. Think of the message that’s being delivered to the rest of us. It’s a message, as animal rights activist Jamie Kemsey noted, “that it is acceptable to commit an act of violence and take innocent life simply for the fun of it. In these violent times we cannot afford, under any circumstances, to condone such morally bankrupt actions.”
Dick Meister. former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeistersf.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
Never have the nation’s younger workers been more in need of unionization. And never have the nation’s unions been more in need of the membership growth that recruiting younger workers can bring them.
Here’s how it looks, and it’s not a pretty picture for labor: Last year, unions lost 10 percent of their members in private employment – the biggest drop in more than 25 years. That cut union membership by 834,000 workers, down to 15.7 million workers.
Which means that overall, counting public as well as private employment, unions now represent only a little more than 12 percent of the country’s workers. Just 20 years ago, 20 percent of all workers were unionized.
So, how can organized labor add significantly to its numbers and thus add significantly to labor’s political and economic strength.
The answer should be obvious, and it certainly is to union leaders: Sign up the younger workers aged 18 to 29 who are especially hurting economically. They need unions as much as unions need them.
A recent survey commissioned by the AFL-CIO shows that fully half of the young workers surveyed said they had only enough savings to cover their living expenses for two months should they become unemployed, as of course many workers of all ages have in recent months.
Many of the young surveyed also were concerned that whatever the jobs they find, they’ll do worse than workers of other generations have done when they retired.
Unions hope to attract such workers to their ranks in part with recent academic studies showing that unionized workers invariably do better than non-union workers when they retire and in virtually all other ways. For instance, studies show that the average wage of unionized younger workers is about $15 an hour – more than 12 percent or about $1.75 an hour more than non-union workers of the same age.
Forty percent of the unionized younger workers had employer-financed health care, while only 20 percent of those outside unions had such a benefit.
Whatever the occupation, and however they were measured, unionized younger workers did better – unionized men better than non-union men, unionized women better than non-union women, unionized African Americans and Latinos better than non-union workers in those categories.
Yet despite the obvious advantages of union membership that has brought better pay and benefits to the younger workers who’ve joined, younger workers generally have had the lowest unionization rate of any age group. Only about 7 percent are in unions.
But that could very well change. Other new studies indicate that the economic situation for younger workers is worsening, and that well over half the workers now say they hope to avoid that by unionizing. Joining a union would not only help them improve their own status and help reverse what’s been a steady decline in union strength. It also would bring new strength to union efforts in behalf of important social, economic and political reforms.
The AFL-CIO has established a program aimed at recruiting the younger members that its affiliated unions badly need – as badly as the younger workers need unions. And as badly as we need the benefits that a strong labor movement can bring to all of us, whatever our age.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
It’s the little festival with a big view. Potrero Hill, the home of the Guardian, is hosting the 20th annual festival with of a “New Orleans” Style Brunch created by the California Culinary Academy and an exciting street fair on 20th Street between Missouri & Wisconson Streets. Enjoy music, food, crafts and activities for the young and old alike.
Potrero Hill Festival
Date: October 16, 2010, 11am-4pm
Location: 20th Street Between Missouri & Wisconson Streets
New Orleans Jazz Brunch
Location: Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, 953 De Haro Street
Date: October 16, 2010, 9:00am-1:00pm
Before the Festival, join the Festival Committee and the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House for an annual tradition – a lavish and delicious brunch catered by the California Culinary Academy featuring Dixieland music and superb bay views.
Festival Performances & Activities
Marketing
Attendance
Benefits the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House
The Potrero Hill Festival will support the programs of the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House (NABE). The NABE is an invaluable community resource that provides important programs for the community, including youth and senior nutrition, employment and supplemental education programs and programs for developmentally disabled adults.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
The AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions know what they must do to grow and strengthen the labor movement for the benefit of all Americans. They must recruit and train millions of young workers, particularly young women and minority workers. It is they who will join with others to shape our future.
Union organizers are already focusing clearly on reaching out to young would-be members who are often skeptical of union promises to help them win, not only better pay and working conditions, but also a meaningful voice in community affairs.
Participants in one of several recent AFL-CIO meetings on the subject noted that a key issue among young workers, as among so any others in these perilous economic times, is their inability to find a job or to pay for higher education. While unionization, of course, does not guarantee workers jobs or money to pay for higher education, it certainly gives them to at least a good chance of finding work or earning a college degree.
AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Liz Shuler told another gathering that outreach to young people is a top labor priority. But she said that, even though young workers need unions, they generally don’ t know much about them. That’s in part because they are less likely than young people in earlier generations to have a family member or neighbor to talk to them about unionization and its rewards.
Unions, of course, usually win agreements from employers for, among other fringe benefits, health insurance. But recent surveys show that about one-third of young workers have no health insurance. The surveys show in general “a massive decline” in the economic situation of the young. One-third of those surveyed say they often can’t pay their bills, for instance. Only about half have paid sick days and must work so even if ill.
A survey done recently by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics cautions that “unions must become more diverse and open up more opportunities for young workers and women in leadership or they will move on to other social justice organizations.”
The AFL-CIO’s James Parks noted that “while acknowledging the significant gains for women in the workplace made possible by unions and their growing diversity in the union movement, the federal report urges unions to do even more to become more open.”
The national AFL-CIO has moved further in that direction by requiring state and local AFL-CIO bodies to establish concrete goals for diversifying the leadership of their member unions.
There’s also been efforts to movement to meet the complaints of young members and would-be members that union leaders are often able to stay in office far too long, blocking younger candidates for union office from assuming leadership posts. . That would be eased by an AFL-CIO proposal for unions to set term limits for elective leadership positions.
At any rate, this much is very, very clear: Unions need the young if they are to prosper and grow, and the young need unions if they are to realize their full potential as citizens. Together, unions and the young can bring important new strength to the country.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
It’s Hispanic Heritage Month, an excellent time to remember three of the most important Hispanic labor leaders in U.S. history. All three were engaged in the much needed and very tough job of organizing and improving the generally poor conditions of the nation’s largely Latino farm labor force.
Cesar Chavez, of course, is one of the farm worker leaders we should particularly honor. Another is Dolores Huerta, who joined Chavez in founding the United Farm Workers union – and who, in fact, is still organizing and otherwise helping Latino workers, particularly women.
The third leader who’s especially deserving of honor is the lesser known but no less important t pioneer farm labor organizer, Ernesto Galarza. Despite his important work, Galarza has been largely forgotten – though certainly not by me. He’s been dead now for a quarter-century, but I recall him well from my days as a reporter covering farm labor:
His shining, black hair and fierce, penetrating gaze. His angry, intense words and slashing speeches against those who resisted demands for reform. His scholarly writing and novels and poetry – and his teaching.
Galarza was one of the loudest and most unusual of the voices that have been raised for the farm worker. He had a Ph. D., wrote a half-dozen books and numerous pamphlets and articles , and taught at all levels, from elementary school to university.
Yet Galarza was also an active union organizer – a key leader in laying the groundwork for the farm labor movement led by Cesar Chavez.
Galarza came to California’s fields in 1948, as an officer of the American Federation of Labor’s now long gone National Farm Labor Union. He had grown up in California, and had worked on farms as a teenager.
But Galarza had left that behind to head off to college on a scholarship and, eventually, to Columbia University for a doctorate in Latin American affairs.
After that, Galarza worked for the Pan American Union in Washington – until, characteristically, he became enraged over what he felt was the organization’s overlooking the exploitation of Latin American workers by US business interests. He resigned to take the job with the National Farm Labor Union.
Galarza led several strikes, but he was completely thwarted by the federal Bracero program that allowed growers to import penniless, undemanding Mexican workers to replace US workers who dared to strike or otherwise seek better treatment. So Galarza shifted his efforts into trying to abolish the Bracero program.
For more than a dozen years he fought a frustrating and often lonely battle. He spoke out endlessly before legislative committees and elsewhere, He issued hundreds of reports documenting the abuses of U.S. and Mexican workers under the Bracero program,. But the program remained untouched, and by 1960, Galarza’s union was gone. Near exhaustion, he turned mainly to writing and teaching.
But finally, in 1964, the public pressure that Galarza had a key role in generating led Congress to kill the Bracero program. It’s no coincidence that year, 1964, was the same year in which Cesar Chavez began his organizing drive. For Galarza was correct: The existence of the Bracero program had made farm labor organizing impossible.
By the time of Galarza’s death at 78 in 1984, the Chavez-led United Farm Workers had become an effective, nationally supported union.
The farm labor system still relies heavily on desperately poor immigrant workers, But thanks to the farm workers union that Ernesto Galarza helped bring about, many workers have had the chance to seek – and many have won – the right to the decent lives that Ernesto Galarza spent so much of his life seeking for them.
I was fortunate enough to also get to know Cesar Chavez. I first met him when I was covering labor for the San Francisco Chronicle. It was on a hot summer night 45 years ago in the little farm town of Delano in southern California.
“Si se puede . . . It can be done . . . Si se puede.” He said it repeatedly as we talked deep into the early morning hours.
Si se puede . . . But I would not be persuaded. Too many others, over too many years, had tried and had failed to win for farm workers the union rights they had to have if they were to escape their severe economic and social deprivation. The Industrial Workers of the World who stormed across western fields early in the 20th century, had first tried organizing farm workers – and failed. Failing, too, were Communist organizers, socialists, and AFL and CIO organizers.
I was certain Chavez’ effort would be no different from theirs. Boy, was I wrong. I had not accounted for the tactical brilliance, creativity, courage and just plain stubbornness of Cesar Chavez.
He understood that farm workers had to organize themselves, not depend on outsiders to do it. Chavez led the workers in creating a union of their own, which then sought out – and won – widespread support from influential outsiders through boycotts and other tactics of non-violence patterned after those of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Chavez proved beyond doubt that the poor and oppressed can prevail against even the most powerful of opponents – if they can effectively organize themselves and adopt non-violence as their principal tactics. As Chavez explained, “We have our bodies and spirits and the justice of our cause as our weapons.”
The results of the Chavez-led organizing drives were impressive – the first farm union contracts in U.S. history, and the California law, also a first, that requires growers to bargain collectively with workers who vote for unionization.
Chavez worked closely with Dolores Huerta in creating and leading the United Farm Workers union. Huerta was, for instance, one of the principal leaders of the worldwide grape boycott that forced growers to agree to those first farm labor contracts – which Huerta negotiated despite her lack of experience in contract bargaining.
Huerta’s work with the UFW was just a part of her lifelong and extraordinarily successful and courageous fight for economic and social justice that she waged while also raising 11 children.
Huerta’s traveled the country, speaking out and joining demonstrations for a wide variety of causes and successfully lobbying legislators for important gains for Hispanic immigrants and others.
Huerta started out as an elementary school teacher in northern California in 1955, but soon tired of seeing the children of farm workers regularly come to school hungry. That, and her anger over the injustices suffered by the local farm workers, led Huerta to quit teaching and join the Community Services Organization – the CSO – an organization founded by community organizer Saul Alinsky, with Chavez eventually serving as its General Director.
The CSO helped local Chicanos wage voter registration drives and take other actions to win a strong political and economic voice. But when the CSO’s other directors refused to agree to a union organizing drive among local farm workers, Chavez and Huerta quit to organize on their own. Like so many others, the CSO directors said it couldn’t be done. Thankfully, they were wrong and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were right.
But being right is just the first step, essential as it is. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of poorly treated farm workers badly need to be organized, badly need the decent treatment that unionization can bring them, as it did to many others that the extraordinary efforts of Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Ernesto Galarza helped bring to many others.
Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
Sidebar to The pummeling of SF Labor
Jerry Brown or Meg Whitman? Barbara Boxer or Carly Fiorina? For labor voters, the choice should be obvious.
All too often, we’re faced with choosing between the lesser of two political evils, but not this time. Democrat Jerry Brown has proven throughout his long political career to be one of the best friends labor has ever had, and shows no sign that he’d be anything else if returned to the governorship in November.
I particularly recall the great political skill Brown demonstrated in convincing the State Legislature to enact what is still the only law outside Hawaii guaranteeing farm workers the collective bargaining rights granted most non-agricultural workers in the 1930s.
It’s impossible to imagine Brown’s Republican challenger having the will or the skill to do something like that. Whitman’s position on labor is precisely the opposite of Brown. She has made union bashing, and especially the bashing of public employee unions, a major theme of her campaign.
On the national level, Democratic Senator Boxer has long been a solid labor supporter and surely merits re-election in November. Like Brown, she’s in a contest against a mediocre Republican candidate, but one with many, many bucks to spend on her campaign.
Some of the nine initiatives on the state ballot would be good for labor, some not so good. Prop. 25 is easily the best of the bunch for labor and just about everybody else. It would require a simple majority vote of the Legislature to adopt the annual state budget rather than the current requirement of a two-thirds majority. The great difficulty of lining up two-thirds support has often resulted in legislative stalemates that have forced some state operations to be cut back or even temporarily shut down for days, sometimes weeks. No money, as they say, no service.
Prop. 23 is bad news. The measure, backed by Big Oil and other major polluters, would suspend the state air pollution laws that limit omission of greenhouse gases known to cause global warming until statewide unemployment drops to 5.5 percent or lower for one year, which – surprise! – is not about to happen. Not for a long time, anyway.
Corporate greedheads could lose big, however, with passage of Prop. 24. It would repeal $1.7 billion in tax breaks granted big corporations during last year’s budget negotiations, or “backroom budget deals,” in the impolite but quite accurate words of the California Federation of Teachers (CFT).
The CFT, an AFL-CIO affiliate, and the rival California Teachers Association (CTA), an affiliate of the National Education Association, are both campaigning for the excellent Democratic candidate for State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Assemblyman and former State Sen. Tom Torlakson of Antioch.
They stress Torlakson’s experience as a longtime high school science teacher and part-time community college teacher and his commitment to increasing badly needed funding for the state’s schools, as shown by the bills he authored that have provided more than $3 billion in school aid.
— Dick Meister
Click to read sidebar, Brown or Whitman? No contest
With five supervisorial seats open and only one incumbent running, the Labor Council has had a tough time picking the right pro-labor candidates. The easy choices were incumbent Carmen Chu in District 4, with no opposition, and Raphael Mandelman, an exceptionally promising newcomer in District 8. But Janet Reilly in District 2 opposes the Labor Council’s revenue measures. In District 6, where long-time activist Deborah Walker has been endorsed, and in District 8, where Malia Cohen and Chris Jackson are #1 and #2, there are a multitude of candidates, many of them labor friendly.
It’s not an easy year.
Prop. B on San Francisco’s November election ballot confronts the city’s working people and their unions with an unprecedented challenge. The measure, sponsored by Public Defender Jeff Adachi, would severely weaken public employee unions and undoubtedly lead to other serious attacks on workers and unions in private as well as public employment nationwide.
The proposition is by no means the only dangerously anti-labor measure on the ballot, but it ‘s the worst from labor’s point of view, as it very well should be. It’s a prime example of the public-employee bashing that’s become a favorite theme in election campaigns everywhere and, if passed, would set a clear national precedent.
Actually, Prop. B might better be described as a pummeling rather than bashing – and one coming, furthermore, just a few months after city employees took a voluntary $250 million pay cut. Prop. B would steeply raise the employees’ contributions to their pensions unilaterally and prohibit bargaining on the issue in the future as well.
It would arbitrarily lower city contributions to the employees’ health plans, especially dependent care. What employees pay for health care coverage for children and other dependents would be as much as doubled.
The steep rise in the employees’ share of their health care coverage could quite possibly force families to drop city coverage and try to get cheaper coverage on their own. That, of course, is a primary goal of the corporate anti-labor forces and others who seek to balance the budgets of public entities on the backs of their employees.
So what if workers can’t afford to take the kids to the doctor. Cutting taxes and balancing budgets is a lot more important. Besides, there’s always the emergency room and charity.
But wait! There are yet more major Prop. B flaws. For example: If city health care coverage is changed by increasing the premiums paid by employees, as the proposition requires, the city Health Service system (HSS) would have to forfeit new $23 million-a-year federal grants intended to reduce premiums for employees and retirees covered by the HSS. The system includes, not just city employees, but also school and community college district and SF court system employees and retirees.
There’s even more, much more than enough to energize labor’s troops. They are angry. Very angry. Unions citywide have at least temporarily set aside their sometimes considerable differences and feuding over tactics, jurisdictions and other matters. They’ve come together tightly along with a substantial number of labor’s Democratic Party allies to oppose Prop. B.
And watch out for Prop. G. It’s another favorite of the anti-union, anti-public employee crowd, led in this case by Sean Elsbernd, a very politically ambitious member of the SF Board of Supervisors.
Elsbernd and friends claim their intent is to “fix the Muni,” one of the nation’s most complex transit systems. The Municipal Railway, overseen by the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), is indeed badly in need of fixing. But the principal blame for that does not rest with Muni’s bus and streetcar operators – most of them people of color – as proponents of Prop. G claim. Most of the blame rests with Muni’s overpaid managers, headed by $336,000-a-year executive director and CEO Nathaniel Ford.
As President Irwin Lum of the Muni operator’s union said in a Guardian interview, “Muni needs to be changed from the top to the bottom.” He sees Muni’s problem as mainly a lack of resources and the political will to pursue them. Muni officials might also avoid lots of problems if they’d deign to consult regularly with community groups and their leaders on their transit needs.
The public rightly complains of buses not arriving on time, of being passed up while waiting at bus stops, of grumpy drivers and of other certainly legitimate matters. Naturally, they blame the drivers. But drivers do not make schedules. Under pressure to keep to the schedules made by others, they sometimes speed by waiting passengers. Sometimes they’re slowed by heavy traffic, sometimes by problems with faulty, broken-down down buses or slowed by having to deal with violent passengers. Sometimes, managers making out the schedules don’t properly anticipate such probable delays.
Oh, yes, those grumpy drivers.
Wouldn’t you be grumpy if you had to work a full shift without going to the bathroom? If you had to listen to loud complaints from unruly passengers who sometimes got rough with you and each other? If you had to weave through heavy traffic for hours at a time? If you had to time your work to unrealistic schedules you had nothing to do with making?
It’s not the drivers who are in charge of replacing badly worn buses and streetcar tracks and equipment, not the drivers who are in charge of negotiating with Muni suppliers for a reduction in ever-escalating fuel prices and other costs. In short, it’s not the drivers who run Muni – though Muni, of course, could not run without them.
So, what do Elsbernd and his anti-labor cohorts want to do to the Muni’s invaluable workers? Here’s the deal:
The City Charter now requires that Muni operators be paid at least as much as the average salary of operators at the two highest paying similar transit systems in the country. And if benefits granted Muni operators are worth less than those of operators at similar transit systems, the difference is paid to the operators from a trust fund established for that purpose.
Under Prop. G, operators’ pay and benefits would be set by bargaining between union and MTA representatives. If they couldn’t agree, the dispute would be submitted to an arbitrator, whose decision would be binding.
The arbitrator would be required to consider the possible impact of disputed proposals on Muni fares and services. But though all other city unions are also subject to arbitration, there’s no requirement that the arbitrator consider how their proposals would affect the services provided by the union’s members – an unusual requirement that’s virtually unheard of elsewhere.
Prop. G backers presumably see the proposition as a step toward their goal of being able to set, change or eliminate Muni work rules without bothering to consult workers or their unions. They are, you might say, “unilateralists.”
Taking on Muni operators is only part of Supervisor Elsbernd’s anti-labor romp. He’s also sponsoring Prop. F, a deceptively simple charter amendment that would seriously impact the 105,000 members of the Health Service System. It’s a stealth proposition, difficult to understand and explain, and thus often brushed aside as a minor ballot measure of no particular consequence.
But Prop. F is capable of doing major long-term damage to HSS members by weakening their position in negotiating with powerful health insurers such as Blue Shield on the size of the premiums HSS members have to pay for coverage and the benefits they receive.
All politicians stretch the truth. It’s part of their game. You needn’t look further than Elsbernd for evidence of that. He actually claims he put Prop. F on the ballot strictly to save the Health Service System money by eliminating two of the four elections in which HSS members vote for representatives on the HSS Board. This seemingly small change would eliminate the overlapping terms that provide the continuity essential to successful negotiations with health insurers.
The savings would average a mere $30,000 a year, and would not even be available until 2016. Nor is there a guarantee that any of the money would go to the HSS. $30,000? What’s the real motive here?
As for the rest of San Francisco’s ballot measures and candidates, union supporters could hardly do better than to follow the recommendations of the AFL-CIO’s local Labor Council, which almost invariably backs the propositions most likely to be labor-friendly and opposes those that are not. This time, the Labor Council is saying “no” to those decidedly unfriendly Propositions B, G and F.
And don’t forget Props. J, K and N. Hotel workers and others are supporting Prop. J, which is meant to stop the travel industry practice of using online hotel booking to avoid paying SF’s hotel tax. Prop. J also would increase the city’s hotel tax for the first time in 14 years in order to raise some most welcome revenue for the city’s general fund.
However, Prop. K – introduced by Mayor Newsom – could stand in the way. Since Prop. K makes no change in the hotel tax rate, apparently it’s intended to confuse and distract the voters so they won’t approve Prop. J.
The other major revenue measure strongly supported by labor – Proposition N – would increase the city’s transfer tax rate on the sale of property worth more than $5 million from 1.5 percent now to a range of 2 to 2 ½ percent for a property worth $10 million or more. This would also generate millions for the city’s general fund.
Rarely has so much been at stake for San Francisco’s working people and their unions.
Dick Meister, former Labor Editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV, has covered labor and politics for a half-century, Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.
