Employment

Those crazy San Franciscans

Zelda Bronstein
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63
Those crazy San Franciscans

Joe Eskenazi has an SF Weekly piece that pretty much repeats what he’s been saying for years: That San Francisco has too much government. This time he goes after all the boards, task forces and commissions — and yeah, there are a lot of them, and yeah, some of them might not be necessary. I could also argue, though, that San Francisco is one of the most politically active cities in the world, and that having a whole lot of ways for residents to plug in to what’s going on in their city isn’t a bad thing at all.


Whatever. Here’s the stuff that drives me nuts:


Last month, the volunteer body appointed by the Board of Supervisors advocated curtailing all pet sales in the city — including guppies, goldfish, and live rodents meant as snake food. Coming on the heels of a proposed criminalization of circumcision, San Francisco was, once again, reduced to an international punchline — many were left to wonder whether a ban on circumcising goldfish is our logical next step. Disbelieving articles poured in from around the globe. Perhaps none was as caustic as a piece in London‘s Telegraph titled “San Francisco goldfish ban exposes the pathology of America’s bourgeois liberal nutjobs.”


Ah, yes, Joe: Those crazy San Francisco liberals and their madcap ideas.


I’m not for banning pet sales (although I think banning puppy mills — also a wacky idea that came out of the Animal Control and Welfare Commission — is a fine thing). And I’m not for the circumcision ban (although, geez, it has lead to some interesting commentary that gives new meaning to the term “dick face.”)


But every time I hear somebody talk about how San Franciscans should stop it with the nutty ideas, I think about a few I’ve followed over the years — and how they’ve changed the way the entire nation thinks. Let me suggest a few for Eskanazi to look at:


“Those crazy San Franciscans don’t want to build freeways.” Yep — in the late 1950s and early 1960s, while the rest of the country (and in particular, California) was rushing to build freeways as fast as possible, people in this city decided to say No. The freeway revolt and the movement that grew out of it changed the way Americans view cities. Wacky shit.


“Those crazy San Franciscans think homosexuals should have the same rights as married people.” Yep, back in the 1970s San Franciscans started talking not only about nondiscrimination — they actually said that gay people who live together should have health insurance benefits. Imagine that.


“Those crazy San Franciscans think that women should make the same amount of money as men.” When then- Sup Nancy Walker introduced legislation in 1985 making “comparable worth” (the notion that men and women who do jobs that require comparable skills should be paid the same) it made headlines all over the country — and was universally derided by the same set that now complain about “liberal nutjobs.” It cost the city a lot of extra money (money that the Eskinazi crew of the day said was too much for a broke city) and led to all sorts of comments about social engineering. San Francisco was the first to push the issue, and it’s now considered mainstream employment policy.


“Those crazy San Franciscans think we ought to give bicycles the same rights as cars.” All the way back in the mid-1980s, bicycle advocates were talking about bike lanes, bike maps, bike racks and alternatives to the automobile. What were they drinking?


“Those crazy San Franciscans think that transgender people ought to get health benefits.” This was as recent as 1993 — and if you think circumcision and pets put SF in the right-wing-talk-show and late-night-comedy targets, imagine when the city decided “to use taxpayer dollars to fund sex-change operations,” as the detractors insisted. Guess what? It turned out to be a major step forward for transgender rights.


“Those crazy San Franciscans think gay people should be allowed to get married.” We did. We do. We were first. The rest of the country is following.


“Those crazy San Franciscans want to ban plastic bags.” We did. For good reason. So did L.A. In another few years, it will be national policy.


“Those crazy San Franciscans want to ban happy meals.” Guess what — McDonald’s got the message. 


I could list plenty more.


Yeah, we’re ahead of the curve. Yeah, sometimes our shit seems crazy. But it’s the crazy shit that makes the world change — and over time, the world catches up to San Francisco. And if we weren’t doing it, the world would get better just a little more slowly.


 


 


 

Dick Meister: New hope for domestic workers

Maria Poblet
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0

 

With a lot of luck, we may finally take decisive action to guarantee decent treatment for the world’s highly exploited housekeepers, maids, nannies and other domestic workers. There are an estimated 100 million of them, working in more than 180 countries.

Their pay is generally at the poverty level, and very few have fringe benefits such as pensions and employer-paid health care. Few have the protection of unions or labor laws, and they’re often at the mercy of unscrupulous labor contractors.  Almost half of them are not entitled to even one day off per week. About a third of the female workers are denied maternity leave.

The hope for improving the domestics’ slavery-like conditions has arisen from action taken in Geneva this month at the annual meeting of the United Nation’s International Labor Organization – the ILO.

Delegates representing unions, employers and governments voted 396 to 16  for what’s called a “Convention on Domestic Workers.” The non-binding convention spells out how domestics should be treated in UN member countries – most importantly in the pace-setting United States.

In the U.S., as in most other countries, an estimated 80 percent of the domestics are women of color, subject to racial discrimination and physical and sexual abuse.  In the United States, most of them are immigrants as well . They’re easy targets for exploitation, especially since, as elsewhere, domestics mainly work in private unregulated households, usually alone.

What’s more, U.S. domestics lack most of the protections of state and federal labor laws that are granted most U.S. workers outside of agriculture . Most other non-agricultural workers at least have the right to unionize. But domestics don’t even have that basic right.

The National Labor Relations Act specifically denies union rights to anyone “in the domestic service of any family or person.” That’s right. The Depression-era law that was designed to pull poverty-stricken workers out of poverty and build a middle class does indeed prohibit an entire group of exceptionally needy workers  from taking a major step to improve their extremely poor working conditions. The word for that is “un-American.” 

That outrageous legal prohibition has its roots in racism. Pressures from southern states, which objected to granting union rights to the mainly black domestics, was the main reason domestics were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act.

 Some domestics have nevertheless formed union-like organizations to seek better treatment. But they need the force of law behind them.

The ILO convention calls for guaranteeing domestic workers in the United States and everywhere else some of the key rights that unionized workers invariably have, among them, regular working hours, vacations, maternity leaves and Social Security benefits.

Domestics would be promised what amount to contracts with employers that would make clear just what they would be expected to do, for how long, and for how much pay.  Their working conditions would have to include time off of at least 24 hours a week.

Migrant workers would have to be provided with a written job offer of employment or a contract before crossing  the border into another country to work.

It took several years for ILO representatives to adopt the domestic workers convention. It was finally adopted as a direct result of campaigning here and aboard by groups of activists from unions and other organizations. They will  be working for the next few years to get as many nations as possible to implement the ILO convention with their help.

The effort in this country is being led by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, with major support from the AFL-CIO, which has arranged to have some domestic workers represent themselves in ILO meetings and voting.

Among other things, proponents hope to make it clear that “domestic workers are real workers, NOT powerless individuals who are expected to remain in quiet servitude and endure long hours without overtime pay, along with hazardous working conditions without access to health and safety protections.”

Proponents also hope to end the “cultural relativity excuse that sleeping on a mattress in an unheated garage is better than he or she would get in their home country, or that the poor treatment of domestics is a tradition.”  The ILO convention says otherwise and workers in the United States and other countries where it is adopted  “will be armed with the knowledge that there is an international standard that protects them.”

Domestics already are granted labor rights in New York State, and California legislators are considering a proposal to bring them under that state’s labor laws. But winning basic rights for the badly exploited domestic workers elsewhere will be very difficult. But so was convincing ILO representatives to take on the task, the long needed task of granting domestic workers union rights and, with them, the decent wages, hours and working conditions that come with unionization.

Yes, winning the union rights for domestics worldwide will be very difficult. But we know it can be done.  And certainly we know that it should be done. 


Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century.  He can be reached through his website, dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

The long wait for sleep

Andrew Lam
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7
The long wait for sleep

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Rodney Palmer is 52, and he uses a cane because he has a bad hip. Walking is painful for the homeless native San Franciscan, but to reserve a bed at a shelter, he’s got to get up early and cover a lot of ground. “I get up at 4 a.m. and go to Glide” in hopes of getting a long-term shelter bed, he told the Guardian. “By the time I get there, there’s people sleeping on the ground.”

People arrive at the homeless assistance center so early because the shelter beds that can be reserved for 90 days free up at 7 a.m. on a first-come, first-served basis — and they’re quickly snapped up.

Palmer reached into his sock and pulled out a small plastic bag full of painkillers to demonstrate how he copes. Lately he hasn’t had any luck getting a long-term bed, so he’s devoting many hours a day to getting on wait lists for overnight beds. That means heading to drop-in centers in SoMa and the Mission, where at least there are chairs he can rest in. “It’s an all-day job,” he said. When it comes to waiting outside, “I feel vulnerable. People can die like that when the winter comes.”

 

BEYOND SHELTER

A coalition of homeless advocates is trying to change the way shelter beds are allocated in San Francisco, and District 6 Supervisor Jane Kim has taken up their cause, spearheading an initiative for the Nov. 8 ballot. The Fair Shelter Initiative would eliminate “shelter” from the definition of housing under Care Not Cash, the signature homeless policy created under former Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Since about 41 percent of shelter beds are set aside as housing for Care Not Cash recipients — who represent an estimated 7 percent of the city’s homeless population — advocates say the move would effectively free up long-term shelter space for veterans, disabled people, seniors, and others who don’t qualify for Care Not Cash. It would, they say, give everyone an equal shot at getting a bed.

At the same time, proponents say, it would solve a recurring problem of beds going unfilled even as shelter seekers wait for hours on end only to be turned away or to finally give up, discouraged by the system.

Cyn Bivens, a peer advocate at Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, says roughly 60 people sign up for shelter beds on a given day at his facility. People who are trying for the 90-day beds show up before 7 a.m.

“They may drop between one and five beds, but we may have 50 people in line,” Bivens explains. “Usually, by 7:15, I’m saying sorry, they’ve only dropped two beds.” People then continue to sign up all day in hopes of reserving overnight beds, which are released later in the day. Bivens estimates that about half the people who start out seeking a bed don’t wind up getting one.

While Kim and supporters of the Fair Shelter Initiative view the proposed change as a simple adjustment that would improve a dysfunctional system, they face opposition from Mayor Ed Lee and Human Services Agency Director Trent Rohrer, who have described it as a bid to dismantle Care Not Cash.

 

$59 A MONTH

As things stand, several hundred indigent adults in San Francisco benefit from County Adult Assistance Programs (CAAP), an umbrella encompassing General Assistance and several other programs intended for people who are waiting to receive Social Security Income (SSI) or seeking employment.

Each month, CAAP beneficiaries are allocated a maximum of $422, or $342 in the case of General Assistance recipients, but they never actually see that money. Instead, under Care Not Cash, they receive $65 and $59, respectively, since the rest is deducted for housing. Some CAAP recipients have actual housing in single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels, but roughly two-thirds are guaranteed shelter beds to meet their housing needs, according to an estimate from the Coalition on Homelessness.

The upshot of this system is that most CAAP recipients are effectively made to pay up to $357 a month from their benefits to sleep on a cot in a shelter, provided they make it there by curfew. For one frustrated homeless man on General Assistance who spoke at a July 14 hearing about the proposed initiative, living on less than $2 a day rather than closer to $11 a day was making it very difficult for him to improve his situation.

“I’m trying to look for work,” he said, adding that he’d seen job postings in other cities. “How am I going to subsidize my trip to Emeryville or San Jose? I’m stuck, and there are things that I cannot do.”

Mark Leach, another homeless CAAP beneficiary, said the low cash grant posed a vexing problem for him too: “I can’t afford to pay my phone bill.” Living on nothing more than $65 a month can mean living in isolation, with no way to receive calls in case work becomes available.

Another issue arising from the current system, according to Bob Offer-Westort of the Coalition on Homelessness, is that a disproportionately high number of beds are reserved for the relatively small number of CAAP recipients citywide, and those program beneficiaries don’t always use their beds. Some don’t make it to the shelter in time for curfew, others couch surf, and still others may prefer to sleep outside, far from the confines and crowds of the shelters. If they don’t show up to claim the bed, it will eventually become available to someone else for the night — but that can take hours. So people who either aren’t enrolled in CAAP or don’t already have long-term beds are reduced to waiting, day after day, for space to free up overnight.

If the Fair Shelter Initiative were in place, CAAP recipients “won’t be guaranteed a shelter bed” as part of Care Not Cash, says Offer-Westort. “But they’ll be competing for more beds,” he added, which “should reduce the wait time.”

In the meantime, CAAP recipients who aren’t being housed in SROs or some other transitional housing would receive the full amount of their benefits. Rohrer, the HSA director, seized on this point as problematic, saying that doling out the full cash grants would draw people to San Francisco from other counties where benefits are lower. “If we start to get folks from other counties and states … the result will be more homeless people in San Francisco and less access for folks,” Rohrer said.

Jennifer Friedenbach of the Coalition on Homelessness countered this, saying, “they have never been able to prove that people will come from out of town.” She addressed the notion that the Fair Shelter Initiative would dismantle Care Not Cash by saying, “It’s news to me — big news — that shelter is the entirety of Care Not Cash.”

Opponents of the measure who spoke at the hearing argued that $422 a month was too much to give to a homeless person because it could feed addiction. While it’s true that many homeless people in San Francisco have substance-abuse issues, many others are disabled or have just fallen on hard times. Advocates say they’ve noted a surge in newly homeless people accessing services, particularly women.

 

HUNDREDS OF BEDS CUT

Compounding the overall problem is that more than 300 shelter beds have been lost since 2004. During the hearing, L.J. Cirilo ticked off a long list of homeless service programs and facilities that had vanished in recent years due to budget cuts, going on for several minutes.

Palmer falls into the category of people who might benefit from a shorter wait time if Kim’s initiative were in place. He was just one of many who turned up at the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center — a homeless drop-in center that offers a clinic, shower, and laundry facilities — to watch a movie and eat supper. Two of the others there said they had experienced traumatic brain injuries and had been victims of identity theft. A construction worker explained that he was seeking odd jobs with little luck. Another man shuffled impatiently back and forth as he spoke, scratching incessantly, while he condemned the entire homeless services system as corrupt.

The measure has drawn opposition from Mayor Lee, who is “concerned that changes to Care Not Cash may begin a process that would unravel the program,” according to Christine Falvey, Lee’s spokesperson. “He wants to make sure we don’t do anything to prevent our department from providing the program.”

Falvey also noted that Lee was interested in meeting with advocates to find an administrative fix, rather than a ballot initiative, that could address concerns about the shortcomings of the shelter system. Kim expressed some openness to that idea at a hearing, but seemed committed to moving forward with changing the system that’s in place. “We do want to address inequity,” she said. “There absolutely should be no vacant beds.”

Killed for riding while poor

Andrew Lam
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113

OPINION We sat together: elders, youth, workers, students, and folks. We were on our way to a low-paid job, an overpriced university, a pre-gentrified home and a public school. There was laughter and shouts, murmurs and silence. Then suddenly, there were nine heavily armed police officers and fare inspectors walking through the crowded 14 Mission Muni line. One stopped in front of me and my son.

“I don’t have a transfer, I lost it,” I tentatively answered a cop who asked to see my paperwork as I clutched my son’s stroller and tried to see how close I was to the back door of the bus.

“We will have to write you a citation and you will have to step off the bus — now.” He was yelling at me and was flanked by another officer. I knew I couldn’t make a run for it, but I almost tried.

I thought of this moment when I heard about the 19-year-old man shot by the SFPD while running away from a Muni bus because he didn’t have a transfer in the Bayview July 16.

Shot and killed for not having $2 bus fare.

At a press conference held July 18 at the scene of the shooting, Joanne Abernathy from People Organized to Win Employment Rights made the point: “No one should be shot for not having enough money to ride the bus.”

For the last few years, police presence on Muni has increased — as have attacks on poor people and people of color whose only crime is not having enough money to ride the increasingly expensive so-called public transportation known as Muni. From fare inspectors working for Muni to fully armed officers, they form a terrifying mob waiting menacingly at bus stops in the Mission, Ingleside, Bayview, and Tenderloin, and then enter buses to harass, eject, and cite anyone too poor to ride.

The police said the man pointed a gun. That’s what they consistently claim when rationalizing involved shootings. Several eyewitnesses said otherwise.

But before we get caught up in whether he had a gun or not, let’s stay with the real point: this young man was shot for not having a transfer. He was shot for not having $2. How did we get here?

Even if you are a supporter of the police, you have to see the Les Miserables-esque insanity in this shooting.

Police culture enables, allows, and encourages the use of deadly force — so much so that it seems at times as if killing can happen for any old thing. Throw in institutional racism and classism, and more and more people will not only be incarcerated but killed with impunity.

“Don’t get on the bus again if you don’t have the fare or you might be arrested,” the cop on Muni told me. He ended by giving me a citation and kicking me off the bus. He should have added “killed” to his threat of what would happen to us for riding while poor.

Tiny, also known as Lisa Gray-Garcia, is coeditor of POOR Magazine.

 

Campaign for the Woolsey legacy

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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0

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Marin, Sonoma counties) is a rarity on Capitol Hill. She’s a lawmaker with guts who speaks from the heart.

Whether focusing on children and seniors at home or the victims of war far away, Woolsey insists on advocating for humane priorities. Several hundred times, she has gone to the House floor to speak out against war. She stands for peace, social justice, human rights, a green future, and so much more.

Last week, after more than 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Woolsey announced that she will not run for reelection next year.

She has set a high bar for representing the region in Congress. It’s a high bar that I intend to clear.

Back in January, I wrote in the Guardian that “if Rep. Woolsey doesn’t run in 2012, I will” (“Why I may run for Congress,” 1/25/2011).

At the time I noted that “alarm is rising as corporate power escalates at the intersection of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.” I cited such realities as “endless war, massive giveaways to Wall Street, widening gaps between the rich and the rest of us, erosion of civil liberties, outrageous inaction on global warming … “

Six months later — with war even more endless, giveaways to Wall Street even more massive, and overall conditions even worse — my grassroots campaign for Congress is well underway.

Redistricting lines are in flux this month, but the political lines are clear as corporate Democrats salivate for this congressional seat. They want it bad.

This is a grassroots vs. Astroturf campaign. I’m facing opposition with a long history of big corporate funding. But we have something much better going for us: a genuine progressive campaign that’s growing from the ground up.

Already, more than 750 people have made donations to my campaign (we topped $100,000 weeks ago) and nearly 300 have signed up as volunteers. You’re invited to join in at www.SolomonForCongress.com.

We have to hold the North Bay congressional seat for the values that Lynn Woolsey has represented. That means directly challenging the undue corporate power that stands in the way of real change.

As a member of Congress, I want to work on building coalitions to fight for a wide-ranging progressive agenda — including guaranteed health care, full employment, workers’ rights, green sustainability, full funding for public education, fundamental changes in federal spending priorities, and an end to perennial war.

On Capitol Hill, I will insist that we need to bring our troops and tax dollars home — and that caving in to Wall Street and polluters and enemies of civil liberties is unacceptable.

Every day, the ideals we cherish are up against what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism,” running amok in tandem with corporate greed.

Nuclear power is emerging as one of the big issues in this campaign. I reject the claim that we need to wait for more “studies” from nuclear-friendly federal agencies before closing down the likes of California’s Diablo Canyon and San Onofre reactors. We need to fight for serious public investment in renewable energy, conservation, and a nuclear-free future.

Overall, the obstacles to gaining electoral power for progressives may seem daunting. But the narrow definition of politics as “the art of the possible” has led to disaster. What we need is the art of the imperative. 

Norman Solomon is national co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. His books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. For more information go to www.SolomonForCongress.com.

 

The Chron is clueless

Zelda Bronstein
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8
The Chron is clueless

The ol’ Chron commissioned its former reader representative, Dick Rogers, to do a piece on the Jose Antonio Vargas story, and he concludes that Vargas was a liar whose failure to turn himself in to immigration authorities (and thus accept deportation to a country he hardly knew) undermined his journalistic work. Rogers quotes editor Ward Bushee:


“While he deserves sympathy for his efforts to become a citizen, Vargas’ lack of forthrightness in some of his reporting cannot be defended,” Bushee said. “He practiced a pattern of deception that was not only dishonest, but disrespectful of his readers and fellow journalists at The Chronicle.”


Pardon me while I puke.


I’ve already written about Vargas and about former Chron editor Phil Bronstein’s (far more nuanced) handwringing over the situation. But the conclusions the Chron reached in the Rogers article are just bizarre and reflect a creaky, ancient attitude towards journalism that makes no sense in the modern world.


I called Rogers, who is a nice guy with a long history in journalism, and we had a long talk about the situation. I asked him what the young man should have done when he found out at 16 that his parents had sent him to the Unites States illegally. Rogers, to his credit, said he didn’t know, that it was a tricky moral and legal dilmemma. “But that’s not what I was asked to write about,” he said.


The issue for him: Vargas lied when he filled out his employment application and failed to disclose to his editors that he was in the country illegally. That damaged the Chronicle. “You can’t put yourself above your newspaper,” he told me.
Okay, once again: What should Vagas have done? What should a person who is forced by stupid and inconsistent federal laws to lie about his immigration status do if he wants to be a journalist? Well, Rogers said, that’s the dilemma: “I don’t think he should have been working in mainstream journalism.”


Of course, he’s have to lie to get a job as a lawyer, or doctor, or CPA. And all of those professions also have ethical codes that discourage lying. So perhaps he should have been a bricklayer.


To be fair, Rogers doesn’t go that far — he suggested that there were other types of journalism Vargas could have done. He could, for example, have worked for the Bay Guardian. (I wish.) After we talked for a while, Rogers said that if Vargas was going to work for the Chron, he should have recused himself from any stories involving immigration.


But let’s be real here: The Chron allowed a reporter who took money from a nativist group to keep writing about immigration. Bushee, who is so outraged about Vargas, has no problem allowing an (illegally) unregistered lobbyist who gets paid to advocate for wealthy interests in the city to write a political column without ever disclosing his clients or conflicts. (Rogers told me that was a legitimate point. “Conflicts are conflicts,” he said.)


And at the same time, the Chron fired a reporter who participated in an antiwar march and wouldn’t let a lesbian reporter cover same-sex marriage.


It’s inconsistent to the point of being silly.


Look: All of us have conflicts. As the great Larry Bensky once told me, “People who have no conflicts have no interests.” Can a person who drives a car write about transportation policy? Can a person who smokes pot write about medical marijuana (or should she tell her editor, sorry boss — I’m illegally ingesting a controlled substance at night, better fire me or report me to the cops because I can’t cover this story)? Can a person with children write about whether San Francisco is a good city to raise children? Can a person with kids in the public schools write about the school board? Can a divorced person cover a wedding? Can a person who had an affair write about a politician who’s caught fooling around? Can a person who drinks beer write about the city’s alcohol tax?


I mean, let’s not be ridiculous here.


Let me tell a perhaps hypothetical story. Suppose that, when I was working for a (socially conservative) daily newspaper in a (socially conservative) New England city in the mid-1970s, I had a colleague who was gay. And suppose she decided — correctly — that her career would be damaged (at that time, at that institution) if she was out of the closet. (For all I know, she was a criminal, too — I’m not sure when this particular state repealed its sodomy laws.) So suppose she lied — to her boss, to her coworkers, to everyone around. Did that mean she was a bad reporter? Not at all. My hypothethical friend did what she thought she had to do, at a time when the professional and political world she lived in was unwilling to accept who she was. (In fact, there were no laws back then about firing people because of their sexual orientation.) She hated it, we all hated it, and we worked to change things. But I’m not going to condemn her — or call into question the credibility of her work — because of it.


(By the way: I lied, too. I told my boss at this particular institution that I didn’t smoke marijuana. It was a job requirement. I wanted the job. I was a lawbreaker, and I still covered the cops. In fact, I wrote about pot busts. Thank god they didn’t test my pee.)


Let’s face it: Everyone at the Chron, and at every daily newspaper, has personal issues that prevents him or her from being completely objective. Jose Antonia Vargas was no different. The fact that the United States government forced him to lie is no grounds for saying he couldn’t be, and isn’t, a good, honest reporter.
 

Dick Meister: Paid sick leave is good for us all

Maria Poblet
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5

The latest figures show that some 44 million workers in private employment  – more than 40 percent of the private sector workforce – do not have paid sick days that they could use to recover from illnesses, including contagious illnesses such as the flu, or worse.

It should be of particular concern that those occupations which are currently least likely to provide paid sick days include occupations most likely to have regular contact with the public – most importantly and most disturbingly, food service and food preparation.

That raises serious health problems – especially in these tight economic times, when workers need to stay on the job as much as they can, no matter how ill they are, to earn as much money as they can. Which, of course, endangers the health of those who come in contact with them, as well as delaying their recovery from their illness.

Public health experts note that the fewer the number of workers who are able to stay at home when sick, the more likely it is that diseases will spread. In addition to the increased suffering of the public and other workers which that causes, it also causes significant economic losses.

Laws have been proposed in several states and in Congress that would require employers to grant paid sick leaves to their employees, but it seems unlikely that the measures, however much they are needed, will pass any time soon – if at all.

But there has at least been a start, however slight, toward what’s broadly needed. That’s a paid sick leave law that was adopted by the city of San Francisco five years ago – the first citywide such law in the country. If nothing else, the San Francisco ordinance proves that such laws are quite feasible, and not the “job killers” that anti-labor forces contend they would be.

San Francisco business groups fought fiercely against adoption of the ordinance and thankfully lost big time. The ordinance was approved by 61 percent of the voters in a citywide election in 2006.

Under the ordinance, workers in businesses with fewer than 10 workers can earn up to five paid sick days a year, while workers in larger businesses can earn up to nine paid sick days.  Workers accrue one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours they work. They may use the sick time to recover from their own illnesses, care for a sick family member, or seek routine medical care.

A recent independent survey of nearly 1,200 San Francisco workers and nearly 700 employers by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research came up with findings that the city ordinance was, in the words of the California AFL-CIO, “overwhelmingly positive for workers, businesses and the public.”

The labor federation called the study “further evidence policies that help working families meet their responsibilities at work and at home are good for everyone.”

The study shows, in short, that the San Francisco ordinance has had a great impact on workers’ lives but little or no impact on the city’s businesses.  They overwhelmingly report that the law has not cut into their profits. Two-thirds of them reported no problems implementing the law.

It seems likely that the reason for the slight impact on businesses business can be attributed to the fact that most workers take sick leave days only when they need them.  Even though the law allows workers five to nine sick days a year, San Francisco workers used a median of just three days a year. And one-quarter of the workers didn’t take a single sick day.

Even the major opponent of the law prior to its passage, the local, politically powerful restaurant association that led the political fight against the city ordinance, now concedes it hasn’t led to employee abuses or hurt restaurants or other business.

Most important, as the state AFL-CIO noted, the survey proved that having paid sick days makes a substantial difference for working families.  More than half the workers surveyed said they’ve benefitted from the law. Among other important things, the law has given workers who need paid sick days the most, including parent and workers with chronic health conditions, the time they need to care for their health and that of their children.

The labor federation reports that it hears regularly “the stories of parents who are forced to choose between their children’s health and the financial well-being of their family . . . who have put off visits to the doctor and sacrifice their health to avoid losing their jobs.

Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee have followed San Francisco’s lead and adopted ordinances providing paid sick leave for workers.  And some states, California, New Jersey and Connecticut among them, have adopted similar though less extensive laws.

But what’s most needed is a federal law – a law that, if properly enforced, would grant sick leave pay to all workers, helping them, their families and anyone else who might be exposed to their illness.

It’s obviously the sensible thing to do.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Farmville

Andrew Lam
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1
Farmville

le.chicken.farmer@gmail.com

CHEAP EATS I probably could have picked a better route to the restaurant. Maybe if I’d gotten off at the Powell station instead of Civic Center. As it was, at not-even-9 a.m. on a Saturday, I had to step over piles of shit and vomit.

It was like reading one of my restaurant reviews; it’s part of life, yes, but not necessarily the part you want to happen before dinner. Or in this case, breakfast.

But, so you know, I would step over dead bodies and piles of fish guts to caffeinate and chew things up with my friend Kayday. Especially at farm : table, which I had heard about and have been meaning to get to for forever. High on my list of Things To Do this year is to find my way back to my former farmerliness. Because I miss the eggs, but also because I’m tired of myself in my shit-kicking city-fried people personhood. I long for the smell of a chicken coop.

Kayday, who was essentially nudged out of San Francisco for the same reason I will be one day — for not being the cool kind of queer — was down for the weekend from Seattle. Not for Pride — for the weekend before, to consign and collect her guitars and things.

I do hope everyone had a happy and proudful Pride month, and weekend, and parade. I encourage this forward-thinking bubble, being the self-proclaimed beacon of queer acceptance that it, um, proclaims itself to be, to start opening not only its mouth but its employment opportunities, its hearts, and even in some cases (gasp) its zippers to transwomen before we lose more good guitar players to Seattle.

Mine had about a gazillion job interviews in the one year she was here, but no job offers, whereas she was one-for-one in both Los Angeles and Seattle. Which reminds me of my romantical track record, home and away. Not that we talk about this. You just can’t help wondering.

“I feel like I was dumped by San Francisco,” Kayday said.

We were sitting at the inside table. That’s officially all there is, inside, at farm : table, is one pretty big square one, seats maybe eight, and then a couple more on the sidewalk.

“That sucks,” I said, biting into my fresh pea and pecorino quiche, which didn’t. It was light and fluffy, and I could almost hear the hens that laid those eggs, clucking softly in the kitchen. I was almost halfway done with it before Kayday figured out how to even approach her baguette-bacon-hard-boiled-egg pileup. By which time everyone else at the table had weighed in with their own techniques.

“Turn the egg over and smash it into the bread,” one woman offered. Another said she just takes the pieces off and eats them à la carte.

“Me, I get the quiche,” I said, chomping on clouds. Christ, I love San Francisco. And the Tenderloin.

One nice thing about sharing a table with a bunch of strangers: Kayday was spared the gory details of my recent bad butt health. I only told her what the surgeon told me: that if it doesn’t heal in two to four weeks, the next procedure is so uncomfortable they will have to put me to sleep. Those were his words.

“I hope he doesn’t come from a veterinary background,” Kayday said.

“I know. Right?” I said. “I’m getting my affairs in order, just in case.”

FARM : TABLE

Mon.–Fri. 7:30 a.m.–6 p.m.;

Sat. 8 a.m.–6 p.m.;

Sun. 9 a.m.–3 p.m.

754 Post, SF

(415) 292-7089

No alcohol

Cash only

Beyond the Ford severance scandal

Andrew Lam
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0

Supervisor John Avalos and state Senator Leland Yee, who are both running for mayor, picked up on a populist issue last week, blasting away at Muni for paying outgoing chief Nathaniel Ford a whopping $384,000 severance. “With $384,000,” Yee’s website lamented, “the entire city of San Francisco could park free of charge for three days. Muni could be entirely free for a whole day. We could stripe seven miles of new bike lanes.”

In reality $384,000 is a fraction of Muni’s budget — less than half of 1 percent. And it’s a trivial amount compared to what CEOs get in the private sector — Peter Darbee, whose firm killed eight people and wiped out a neighborhood, walked away with $35 million when he left Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in disgrace.

But this is exactly the sort of deal that infuriates the public. When the cost of parking meters and tickets keep rising, and Muni’s on-time performance lags, why is the guy in charge, who’s leaving in part because he isn’t doing the job, getting such a nice golden parachute, courtesy of the taxpayers?

In the end, there’s not a lot Yee or Avalos can do about it. For one thing, the decision was made not by the supervisors but by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Beyond that, SFMTA had only limited choices — Ford has an employment contract. And it’s hard to fire someone in the middle of a term of contracted employment without buying out at least part of the deal.

That’s the larger issue here, one that the mayoral candidates ought to be talking about. Why does the head of Muni get a special employment contract? The heads of the Police Department and Fire Department don’t get one. In fact, most department heads don’t get contracts specifying a term of office and including severance pay.

Those contracts can be expensive — Susan Leal got $400,000 when she was dismissed as head of the SF Public Utilities Commission. Arlene Ackerman got $375,000 when she left the San Francisco Unified School District.

No rank-and-file city employees get severance if they’re fired for cause (or if they negotiate a resignation to avoid disciplinary action). City department heads shouldn’t either.

We understand why school superintendents and Muni managers want those sorts of deals: If you work for a political agency, there’s always a chance that the people who hired you will be gone at some point and you’ll be working for people with different visions and political positions. But none of these department heads are paupers — they’re well paid, and, like anyone who takes a management job, they know that their job security depends on performance.

It’s akin, in a much more limited way, to what’s been happening in the private sector, where the top people get compensation that vastly exceeds what even the people immediately below them get. Muni’s assistant general managers don’t get employment contracts with golden parachutes.

San Francisco needs a city policy on special employment contracts — and rules barring excessive severance pay for management-level employees. The supervisors ought to ask the budget analyst for a report on which city employees have contracts, what they call for, and how they compare to what similar-level employees without contracts are paid. There should be hearing on this and legislation that clears up what is now an expensive — and disheartening — hodgepodge of private deals.

 

Editorial: Beyond the Ford severance scandal

Maria Poblet
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4

Supervisor John Avalos and state Senator Leland Yee, who are both running for mayor, picked up on a populist issue last week, blasting away at Muni for paying outgoing chief Nathaniel Ford a whopping $384,000 severance. “With $384,000,” Yee’s website lamented, “the entire city of San Francisco could park free of charge for three days. Muni could be entirely free for a whole day. We could stripe seven miles of new bike lanes.”

In reality $384,000 is a fraction of Muni’s budget — less than half of 1 percent. And it’s a trivial amount compared to what CEOs get in the private sector — Peter Darbee, whose firm killed eight people and wiped out a neighborhood, walked away with $35 million when he left Pacific Gas and Electric Co. in disgrace.

But this is exactly the sort of deal that infuriates the public. When the cost of parking meters and tickets keep rising, and Muni’s on-time performance lags, why is the guy in charge, who’s leaving in part because he isn’t doing the job, getting such a nice golden parachute, courtesy of the taxpayers?

In the end, there’s not a lot Yee or Avalos can do about it. For one thing, the decision was made not by the supervisors but by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Beyond that, SFMTA had only limited choices — Ford has an employment contract. And it’s hard to fire someone in the middle of a term of contracted employment without buying out at least part of the deal.

That’s the larger issue here, one that the mayoral candidates ought to be talking about. Why does the head of Muni get a special employment contract? The heads of the Police Department and Fire Department don’t get one. In fact, most department heads don’t get contracts specifying a term of office and including severance pay.

Those contracts can be expensive — Susan Leal got $400,000 when she was dismissed as head of the SF Public Utilities Commission. Arlene Ackerman got $375,000 when she left the San Francisco Unified School District.

No rank-and-file city employees get severance if they’re fired for cause (or if they negotiate a resignation to avoid disciplinary action). City department heads shouldn’t either.

We understand why school superintendents and Muni managers want those sorts of deals: If you work for a political agency, there’s always a chance that the people who hired you will be gone at some point and you’ll be working for people with different visions and political positions. But none of these department heads are paupers — they’re well paid, and, like anyone who takes a management job, they know that their job security depends on performance.

It’s akin, in a much more limited way, to what’s been happening in the private sector, where the top people get compensation that vastly exceeds what even the people immediately below them get. Muni’s assistant general managers don’t get employment contracts with golden parachutes.

San Francisco needs a city policy on special employment contracts — and rules barring excessive severance pay for management-level employees. The supervisors ought to ask the budget analyst for a report on which city employees have contracts, what they call for, and how they compare to what similar-level employees without contracts are paid. There should be hearing on this and legislation that clears up what is now an expensive — and disheartening — hodgepodge of private deals.

 

Nat Ford’s contract isn’t the only problem

Zelda Bronstein
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4
Nat Ford’s contract isn’t the only problem

I’m glad Leland Yee and John Avalos are criticizing the $384,000 severance package for Muni chief Nat Ford. Yee’s even collecting signatures on a petition. None of which will matter, though — the MTA is going to approve this and Ford (who, in essence, appears to have been fired for doing a bad job) will walk away with the cash.


That’s because the MTA didn’t have a lot of choice. The guy had a contract. And it included, I’m sure, mandatory severance if he was dismissed for any reason before the end of the term.


Why do (some) department heads have employment contractsthat include severance payments? I don’t know. The police chief doesn’t have one. The director of public health doesn’t have one. In fact, most senior city employees don’t get guaranteed golden parachutes.


But the head of Muni does. The head of the Transbay Terminal project does. The last head of the SF Public Utilities Commission did; I don’t know if the current person has one, too, but it’s likely.


This is a problem.


Why should some selected department heads get special contracts, while your average department head gets nothing? Why should city employees at the top get severance when your average working city employee gets none?


There’s no clear definition of which department heads get special deals and which ones don’t. It’s up to the commissions. That’s what Yee and Avalos ought to be working on — changing the rules to get rid of these severance contracts in the first place.


 

Tipping point

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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3
Tipping point

sarah@sfbg.com

On June 14, members of the Board of Supervisors will vote to appoint a new member of the Police Commission — in the wake of a messy string of alleged police misconduct scandals that, progressives argue, underscore why having strong civilian oversight is critical to ensuring a transparent, accountable police department the public can trust.

The appointment comes less than two months after San Francisco native Greg Suhr was sworn in as chief in the wake of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to appoint former Chief George Gascón as the next district attorney — a move that has served to muddy the D.A. Office’s efforts to investigate the alleged police misconduct.

Further complicating the board’s choice is the heated battle that erupted over the appointment, led in part by members of two Democratic clubs that represent lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities.

The Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club has officially endorsed Julius Turman, a gay attorney and community activist who was a former assistant U.S. attorney and the first African American president of the Alice club. Turman currently works for Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where he represents companies in actions for wrongful termination, employment discrimination, and unfair competition. He is also state Sen. Mark Leno’s (D-SF) proxy to the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee and serves on the Human Rights Commission.

On the other side, members of the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, the voice of the city’s queer left, are supporting David Waggoner, an attorney and community activist who is a former Milk Club president. Waggoner has worked on police use-of-force policy and as a pro bono attorney for the National Lawyers Guild at the Oakland Citizen’s Police Review Board, and been a passionate advocate for the LGBT community, immigrants’ rights, people with disabilities, and the homeless.

The other two applicants for the post are Vanessa Jackson, a staffer at a women’s shelter with experience in counseling ex-offenders; and Phillip Hogan, a former police officer who serves on the board of the Nob Hill Association and has been trying to get on a commission for years.

Although both Jackson and Hogan have diverse experience with law enforcement — Jackson as an African American woman who claims the police have “no respect for people of color” and Hogan as a former police officer of Lebanese-Irish descent who manages real estate — neither has the support of the LGBT community. The position occupied by Deputy District Attorney James Hammer for the last two years, and Human Rights Commission director Theresa Sparks occupied before that, is widely considered to be an LGBT seat.

 

WHO’S THE REFORMER?

So now the fight is about whether Turman or Waggoner would be the strongest reformer.

In a recent open letter, former Board Presidents Harry Britt, Aaron Peskin. and Matt Gonzalez expressed support for Waggoner. “While most hardworking police officers perform their jobs admirably, insufficient oversight and poor management systems have led to significant problems,” their letter stated. “Despite these widely reported problems, the Police Commission has failed to adequately address these issues. San Francisco needs real reform, not more of the same. We believe David Waggoner will be that voice at this critical time.”

At the June 2 Rules Committee hearing, Waggoner proposed taking away master keys to single-resident occupancy (SRO) hotels from the police. “Significant abuse of that resulted in seriously tarnishing the department,” he said.

Turman made an equally impassioned — if less stridently reformist-sounding — speech. “Why would we allow an officer to enter a home, regardless of the master key rule, which I’m not a fan of?” Turman asked. He also said Tasers are dangerous weapons with unintended consequences. “I fear communities of color will suffer more from Taser use.”

Waggoner’s supporters noted that their candidate has more than 15 years of police accountability experience. Turman’s supporters vouched for his integrity, maturity, ability to build consensus, and “belief in strategically serving his community.”

In the end, Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Mark Farrell voted for Turman, while Rules Committee Chair Sup. Jane Kim voted for Waggoner.

That means Turman’s name has been forwarded to the full board with a recommendation. But because the Rules Committee interviewed all the candidates, the board can still appoint any of them.

At the Rules Committee, Sup. Scott Wiener voiced support for Turman. And Board President David Chiu recently told the Guardian that he has known Turman for years, has worked with him professionally, and will vote for him. “I found him to be fair, thoughtful, and compassionate,” Chiu said, noting that he believes the role of the commission is “to provide oversight and set policy.”

Sup. David Campos, one of the solid progressive votes on the board and a longtime Milk Club member, believes Waggoner would make an excellent commissioner but is a friend of Turman, and believes he’ll be a strong voice for reform. “Sean [Elsbernd] and Mark [Farrell] could be in for a big surprise if Julius gets appointed,” Campos mused shortly after Elsbernd and Farrell voted for Turman.

Campos recalled how he and Turman started working at the same firm years ago. “So I got to know him well,” he said, adding he is “like a family member.

“By virtue of his involvement with Alice, some folks think Julius will be a certain way,” Campos added. “But I believe he’ll take a progressive point of view on the issues. He has both the knowledge and the experience with the police, he understand the important role that police oversight and the Police Commission play in making the SFPD accountable.”

Kim told us that she primarily voted for Waggoner because she knows him the best, and not out of concern that Turman wouldn’t do a good job. “I’m more familiar with David and that’s what tipped the scale,” Kim said. “It’s great to have two strong LGBT attorneys who have a clear understanding of public safety issues, the law, and are advocates for the community.”

But Debra Walker, who ran against Kim last November, steadfastly supports Waggoner. “Julius has been active in the Alice B. Toklas club for a while, he’s a prosecutor, while David is more of a citizen’s defense attorney,” she said.

Turman continues to be dogged by reports of domestic violence, thanks to a lawsuit that Turman’s former domestic partner Philip Horne filed in March 2006 alleging that Turman came into his house when he was sleeping on New Year’s Day 2006 and tried to strangle him.

Horne claimed he “was terrified that the lack of air supply would cause him to pass out and potentially die at the hands of such a jealous and unmerciful former lover.” He alleged he was able to calm Turman down only to see him get enraged again and punch Horne in the face seven to 10 times. When Horne decided he needed to go to the emergency room, the complaint states, Turman grabbed his phone and keys saying, “If you leave, you’ll never see the cats (alive) again,” and “I will report you to the state bar.”

Horne claimed he ran outside screaming for help and that when SFPD arrived, they arrested Turman for domestic violence and called an ambulance for Horne.

Turman responded in July 2006 to what he described as Horne’s “unverified complaint,” arguing he acted in “self-defense” and that the conduct Horne complained of “constituted mutual combat.” He added that “damages, if any, suffered by Horne were caused in whole or in part by entities or persons other than Turman.”

In the end, no criminal charges were ever filed against Turman and the case was settled out of court. Turman now says “I’ve done nothing wrong and these allegations are false.”

Campos warns people not to jump to conclusions. “We need to remember that there is a presumption of innocence,” Campos said. “Yes, there was a court case, but there was never a conviction. Yes, there was a settlement, but people do that for a lot of reasons.”

Turman told the Rules Committee that the incident was from “an extremely difficult time that is now being used against me as a political sideshow.”

Meanwhile, Campos notes that without a reform-minded mayor, there will be only so much any board-appointed police commissioners can do. “What we really need to implement police reform is a mayor who is willing to do that,” he said. “Otherwise it’s going to be very difficult because the mayor still gets to appoint four commissioners and mayor still gets to control who is in charge of the police department.”

 

WHAT DIRECTION?

Civil liberties advocates praised as a “first step in the right direction” Suhr’s May 18 decision to issue an order clarifying that SFPD officers assigned to the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce should adhere to SFPD policies and procedures set by the Police Commission, not FBI guidelines.

But in the coming months, the commission will have to decide whether to push a Portland-style resolution around SFPD involvement with the FBI. The commission also will be dealing with fallout from the other scandals, including the crime lab, the use of force against mentally ill suspects, and videos that allegedly show police conducting warrantless search and seizure raids in single residential occupancy hotels.

These scandals have progressives arguing that it’s critical that the board’s three seats on the commission are occupied by applicants with proven track records of reform.

Waggoner notes that in 2003, voters approved Prop. H., which changed the composition of the commission from five to seven members. Four are appointed by the mayor; three by the board.

Last year, he said, the commission made significant progress in the right direction when it adopted new rules after the Jan. 2 shooting of a man in a wheelchair in SoMa. “That was not the first time an unarmed person with a disability was killed,” he said. “After Prop. H and a crisis, the commission finally took steps. It remains to be seen if Chief Suhr will implement that.”

Waggonner said the current arrangement “creates tension between people who are more willing to defer to the chief on policy issues and being in an advisory capacity, as opposed to people who want to be in the forefront of setting policy.”

That tension played out when Commissioners James Hammer, Angela Chan, and Petra DeJesus tried to find consensus on the Taser controversy last year. “Overall they worked well together. But there’s been no progress yet on Tasers,” he said, noting that the commission eventually decided on a pilot project.

Waggoner said he would be in favor of the commission having a more active role and exerting its authority under the city charter to set policy, but in collaboration with the chief.

The Police Commission’s May 18 joint hearing with the Human Rights Commission about FBI spying concerns was a symbol of the broader issue at the Police Commission. The majority of the commission didn’t see any major problems — but the progressives were highly critical. “Is the commission there to set policy and take leadership, or is it there in an advisory capacity?” Waggoner asked.

With Hammer’s departure, Chan and DeJesus, both board-appointed women of color, are the most progressive members of the commission. Chan hopes Hammer’s replacement believes in strong civilian oversight. “We should never be a rubber stamp for the police department,” he said. “We need to take community concerns very seriously. When the police department is doing great things, we should support them — but if we see something wrong, we should not be afraid to speak out.”

Turman told the Guardian that “being the voice for reform and advising are not mutually exclusive roles — and an effective police commissioner needs to be both.

“I would advocate for series of meetings with representatives from the Arab community, the SFPD, and the FBI to increase communication and understanding of each side’s perspective on exactly what we need to implement in San Francisco,” Turman said.

Asked more about Tasers, Turman said that “one of the things I would be interested in pursuing is a recognition by some that female officers are less likely to incapacitate during an arrest, which could lead to learning for the larger police force.”

But does this means Turman will turn out to be a swing vote for Tasers? Only time — and the board’s June 14 vote — will tell.

Treasure Island: So “special”

Zelda Bronstein
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2
Treasure Island: So “special”

Actually, there are a bunch of problems. The Chron says the developers want to make the place “special,” a community of its own:


Developers hope the project, which goes before the Board of Supervisors for approval today, will feel like an urban village in the middle of a bustling metropolitan area. They hope urban farms, plentiful public transit and shared community spaces will give residents of the island a sense of community not found in other developments. …


For Treasure Island to be successful, developers and city planning experts agree that the residents of the island must feel like part of a special, distinct neighborhood where people want to spend time, and not just another community of commuters to San Francisco.


But the numbers don’t add up.

The plans call for 19,000 people living on the island — and there won’t be anywhere near enough employment opportunities for even a fraction of that number. So most of the residents are going to work somewhere else. Which means that twice a day they’ll have to travel — to and from San Francisco or to and from the East Bay — and there’s just no easy way to get that many people off that island to those locations.

Ther Bay Bridge is already beyond capacity during the periods when most of these people are going to be commuting. Yes, you can add a bunch of Muni buses to carry a lot of people, but that’s going to cost a lot of money. So would increasing ferry service to the level that this project would require. And if the past 50 years of San Francisco development is any guide (and it ought to be), the developers won’t pay enough for the transportation and the city won’t have the money to do it right so it won’t happen.

And even if the project meets the developers’ dreams in 30 years, it’s going to be a long, messy slog along the way. 

How, for example, will people who live on the island get their kids to school? Given San Francisco’s school-choice system, and the fact that there won’t be elementary, middle and high schools on the island anyway, and the school district can’t pay for the bus routes it has now, much less for new buses going to Treasure Island, you’re going to have hundreds of parents going to schools all over the city — and there will be only one way to get there: In cars.

(I’m all for no-car travel, but let’s be serious: Who’s got the time to take a kindergartener on the ferry downtown and on one or maybe two bus connections to a school — then turn around and take another bus to work? It isn’t going to happen. And nobody’s sending elementary school kids on Muni to school alone.)

If the supermarket isn’t built before most people move in, then you’ve got the grocery problem: It’s hard to do a week’s shopping on Muni and then a ferry. And what happens when you forget the milk (or run out of beer on the weekend?) No way to walk to the store, so you get in the car.

To make it even worse, 80 percent of the people who live there will be rich (since that’s who can afford market-rate housing). They’ll all have cars (and the developer kindly is providing parking spaces for all of them).

I just don’t see how it’s going to work. 

Fear the beard

Maria Poblet
-
12
Fear the beard

rebeccab@sfbg.com

Christopher Hanson, a 38-year-old single father who lives in Albany, doesn’t have one of those scraggly, runaway beards that one might associate with jam bands or train hopping. He keeps his goatee neat and trimmed, sometimes using scissors to clip back the mustache. Yet Hanson says he got fired last month because his facial hair was deemed a violation of his company’s employee appearance policy. Now, he’s fighting back.

Hanson worked as an audio-video technician for Swank Audio Visuals, a company that does conferences and events at major hotels throughout the Bay Area, including the Westin St. Francis, the Claremont, and the Four Seasons. On the day he was fired, he was on his hands and knees taping down a power cord for an event that was about to start at the Claremont when his supervisor asked to have a word with him. Having spoken with his boss about the beard situation before, he got a funny feeling.

“I just knew what he was going to say,” Hanson recalled. “I thought: are these guys really going to push this, this far?”

For Hanson, having a beard is not a matter of personal expression; nor is it related to religious reasons. He has psoriasis, which prevents him from being able to shave. About a week before he was let go, his dermatologist sent a note to Swank’s human resources department explaining that although he was undergoing treatment, she had counseled him never to shave his beard. It could exacerbate the disease, she explained. Shaving the affected area could cause pain, redness, and irritation on a daily basis, as well as unsightly rash. The doctor urged Swank to grant a medical exception for Hanson.

Hanson says he reminded his boss, Ken Reinaas, and Reinaas’ boss, Todd Liedahl, about that letter when he was approached for their final conversation about the beard. “I said, ‘I have a medical condition,” Hanson recalled. But he says the response he got was, “I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.” Hanson says he didn’t yell or let himself become agitated. “I just kind of stood there and tried to keep a calm and humble mannerism,” he said.

About a week later, Swank’s human resources department issued a letter at Hanson’s request explaining why he’d been fired. It stated: “The reason for [sic] end of your employment is due to the fact that we are unable to accommodate your medical request not to shave because this is a standard of our company appearance policy.” Swank did not return multiple Guardian requests for comment.

The job, which had a strict dress code requiring AV techs to wear ties and shirts with collars, paid around $15 an hour. With a teenage daughter to support, Hanson needed every cent to make ends meet. He also had taken on substantial debt to finance an education at Ex’pression College for Digital Arts — a for-profit school in Emeryville with a tuition rate of $11,200 per semester for full-time students — and he needed to be able to pay back the student loans.

Hanson began to suspect that his former employer might have broken the law, so he sought legal representation. According to a complaint filed May 12 on Hanson’s behalf by attorney Albert G. Stoll Jr., the Claremont Hotel — which houses the Swank office where Hanson was based — has no employee restrictions against facial hair. “The manager of hotel banquets had a goatee; one of the hotel banquet employees had a goatee; another hotel banquet employee had a mustache; and at least two other employees had facial hair,” the lawsuit points out.

However, Swank employees were barred from having facial hair because company policy was pegged to the most conservative hotel employee appearance policy in the region, Hanson said.

In the case of the Bay Area, that hotel is the Four Seasons. Before being hired as a full-time AV tech based in Berkeley, Hanson took on part-time gigs for Swank to set up for hotel events as far north as Sausalito and as far south as San Jose. He says that when he was first hired, nobody informed him of the no-beard policy — and he had sported the goatee at the time he was offered the job.

The first time he learned there was a problem was when he was called on to do a job at the Four Seasons in San Francisco. He completed the first job without incident, yet when he was asked to go back a second time, Reinaas told him he would have to shave. He said it was impossible to do that, so the job went to someone else.

When the Guardian phoned the San Francisco Four Seasons to find out just what its employee appearance policy was — and to ask whether exceptions are granted for individuals who cannot shave due to medical or religious reasons — assistant director of human resources Jason Brown said he could not comment.

Months later, after Hanson had been hired as a full-time staff member based at the Claremont, Hanson says he was informed that Swank was ramping up enforcement of its no facial hair policy. He was told he’d have to comply even though he was willing to opt out of work at the Four Seasons. He asked his dermatologist to send the letter urging the company to grant an exception, and shortly after, he was fired.

The lawsuit charges that it was illegal for Swank to fire Hanson because the Fair Employment and Housing Act forbids employers from discharging an employee for designated reasons, including disability. Since Hanson’s psoriasis is a disability, the argument goes, his termination constitutes a form of illegal discrimination.

However, not all medical conditions are considered disabilities in the court of law. Under state law, a disability is considered a serious medical condition that limits a major life activity. If Hanson is successful in proving that psoriasis constitutes a disability, Swank could be ordered to make a reasonable accommodation — such as retaining him as an AV tech while allowing him to opt out of work at the Four Seasons. Hanson’s lawyer Tim Phillips describes this case as being “on the cutting edge of discrimination law.”

There have been similar face-offs over appearance policies in the past, but none that fit Hanson’s circumstance exactly — and, ironically, it seems that he might have an easier time arguing his case in court if he is unable to shave for religious reasons, or if he belongs to a racial minority that is disproportionately affected by a particular medical condition.

Not all cases brought against employers with similar policies in the past have been successful. In 1984, a Sikh machinist working for Chevron refused to shave his beard, in violation of a company policy, and wound up getting demoted to a lower-paid job as a janitor. Chevron’s no-beard rule was created to ensure that employees had a gas-tight seal on respirators worn to protect against exposure to toxic gases, but the machinist could not shave for religious reasons. The Sikh man sued Chevron and lost.

In 1999, Sunni Muslim police officers in Newark sued when they were required to shave their beards to comply with an officer appearance policy, and the court ordered the police department to create an exception for those who couldn’t shave for religious reasons.

Meanwhile, a spate of cases have been brought against no-beard policies at fire departments around the country by African American men suffering from a common skin condition called pseudofolliculitis barbae. The condition, which disproportionately affects African Americans, leaves pimply bumps on the beard area after shaving and can cause scarring over time — and the 100 percent effective cure is to refrain from shaving. No-beard policies in fire departments are borne out of the need for firefighters to wear respirators when battling infernos. While the results of those cases varied from city to city, some plaintiffs were able to show that the policies were a form of racial discrimination because they had a disparate impact on African Americans.

Meanwhile, staff attorney Linda Lye of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California was willing to weigh in. There are no laws banning no-beard policies on the state or federal level, Lye said, yet courts have ordered employers to make exceptions for religious reasons and to prevent racial discrimination in the case of the black firefighters. She added that certain municipalities such as Santa Cruz have enacted employment laws that prevent discrimination in appearance policies. In general, Lye noted, the ACLU is “troubled whenever employees are penalized because of medical conditions, race, sexual orientation, or other similar factors.” 

Dick Meister: Child Labor-Back to the 19th Century?

Maria Poblet
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Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.

Even the most casual students of American labor history undoubtedly have come across the appalling accounts of child labor, accompanied by photos of exhausted, grime-covered teen and pre-teen children staring sad-eyed into the camera.

The children stand outside the mines, mills, farms and other often highly dangerous places where they worked 10, 12, 15 hours a day, sometimes even more. They worked at home as well, in their impoverished families’ dilapidated tenement flats, rolling cigars, stitching garments and doing other work for long, miserably paid hours.

It began with the New England colonists, who brought the practice of child labor with them from England. Use of child labor regardless of the age or frailty of the child was common throughout the colonies, and remained common after independence – including in the southern U.S., where the black slaves’ children were ordered to work along with their captive parents.

Finally, in the 1840s, reform groups managed to pressure several state legislatures in New England to ban the labor of minors under 15 for more than 10 hours a day without their parents’ written consent. Yes, that’s how bad it was – so bad that allowing kids under 15 to work more than 10 hours a day was OK. All they needed was the agreement of their economically desperate parents.

The ten-hour, six-day workweek became standard for minors in most states. Again, that was considered a major reform. Most states also adopted reforms that prohibited children from working in hazardous industries. That was ignored, however, in the particularly dangerous coal mines of Pennsylvania and Appalachia.

In 1914, the federal government stepped in to levy a 10 percent excise tax on employers who hired 14-year-olds. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed a law prohibiting some employers from hiring anyone under 16. But, believe it or not, the Supreme Court voided both laws.

Child advocates couldn’t even get congressional approval for a law empowering the government to regulate the labor of minors under 18, mainly because of a business campaign that called that idea “socialism.” Sound familiar? Then, as now, that could be enough to defeat progressive measures.

But finally, with the coming of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms in the 1930s, decisive steps were taken to regulate the use of child labor. They came mainly with passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. The law, which covers workers under 18, limits the hours they can work, depending on their age and occupation.  They must be paid at least as much as the legal minimum wage, and they must be covered by the protective laws that apply to adult workers.

The idea was not only to protect children from the harmful exploitation they commonly suffered but specifically to give them the time and opportunity to get a decent education, to get enough rest and time for study.

Passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act obviously did not end the misuse of child labor. Yet it did set a standard for protecting young workers that’s been followed by states that have enacted their own versions of the act, some more liberal than the federal law.

But now come business trade associations, employer groups, reactionary Republican politicians and Tea Party activists to urge severe weakening of the state laws, and, ultimately, of the federal law. They agree with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that the child labor laws are unconstitutional for a variety of obscure legal reasons. They’ve begun their legal attacks on state laws with the laws in Maine and Missouri.

In Maine, which was among the first states to enact child labor laws, they’ve been pushing a bill that would allow employers to pay anyone under 20 a six-month “training wage” that would be more than $2 an hour below the minimum wage. They’d also eliminate rules setting a maximum number of hours kids 16 and older can work during school days and allow those under 16 to work up to four hours on school days and up to 11 p.m.

The Missouri bill is even worse. It would lift provisions in the current state law that bar children under 14 from employment, They’d be allowed to work all hours of the day and no longer need work permits from their schools. What’s more, businesses that employ children would no longer be subject to inspections by the federal agency that enforces the child labor laws.

By the time you read this, the proposed laws in Maine and Missouri may have been passed – or, hopefully, rejected. But that’s almost beside the point. What’s worse is that 11 years into the 21st century, people are actually taking seriously proposals that would send us back into the 19th century.

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 300 of his columns.

 

Supervisors and activists decry businesses that deny wages to low-income workers

Sasha Cuttler
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Supervisors and activists decry businesses that deny wages to low-income workers

For one of this country’s first government hearings regarding wage theft yesterday (Thurs/12), San Francisco activists, public employees, and politicians alike were determined to find ways to address issues surrounding low-income workers who are paid below minimum wage or otherwise deprived of money they’re entitled to.

Wage theft may involve a number of different violations including payment below the minimum wage, obligation to work off the clock, and denial of overtime and sick pay. Low-income jobs such as construction work, hospitality and domestic care are the most cited types of employment for wage theft and wage theft disproportionately affects communities of color and those with language barriers.

“We are not going to allow any worker in San Francisco to be exploited,” said Sup. David Campos said on the steps of City Hall, later presiding over the Government Audit and Oversight Committee hearing on the issue. “Wage theft affects the lowest wage workers and their ability to make a living and survive in these tough economic times.”

The pre-hearing protest and the meeting was comprised of workers with emotional stories of poverty and injustice. Other speakers included Donna Levitt, the director of the Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, the agency in charge of overseeing claims of employers withholding wages, and Rajiv Bhatia, the director of Occupational and Environmental Health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health.

Levitt said that 500 claims of wage theft have been addressed by the OLSE since the minimum wage law’s inception in 2003. Dan Goncher of Harvey M. Rose Associates, which does budget analysis for the city, cited data showing that the OLSE takes significantly longer to go through the hearing process for back wages than other agencies. However, Levitt mentioned that 97 percent of cases are settled and never go to the City Attorney’s Office for a hearing.

“Very little thought from our policymakers was made on how this was going to be enforced,” Levitt said of the current minimum wage law.

The coalition of community organizations including Young Workers United, Filipino Community Center, Chinese Progressive Association, San Francisco Tenants Association, Unite Here Local 2, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, and others joined together for the protest in order to raise awareness of some proposed amendments to the current minimum wage enforcement law.

Co-sponsored by Campos and Sup. Eric Mar, the amendments would add additional penalties such as raising the fine for employers from $500 to $1,000 for retaliating against workers exercising rights under the current law, the ability to interview employees and inspect payroll records at places of business, the requirement of notifying employees when an employer is being investigated, and to posting of a public notice when an employer fails to comply with a settlement agreement.

“We want to see the city taking a stronger commitment to addressing the issue of wage theft,” said lead organizer of the Chinese Progressive Association Shaw San Liu. “We don’t want this to be a one-day publicity stunt.”

One of the workers, who spoke about his experience of wage theft, recalled working long hours without the assurance of payment. “We would wait for hours for them to come back pay us but they never came,” Jose Cruz, a day laborer and client of La Raza Centro Legal, said about one of his jobs.

Bhatia explained to the supervisors and crowded audience in the committee hearing room that in the last week, 26 percent of the nation’s low wage workers were paid less than minimum wage. He also outlined different steps such as tracking chronic violators and training health inspectors to make referrals to local enforcement agencies in cases of non-compliance, so the SFDPH could support the community efforts in decreasing wage theft.

In addition, both Campos and Board President David Chiu made a point of speaking about how wage theft also detrimentally affects businesses.

“Most businesses play by the rules and those businesses are at a disadvantage when we allow businesses to not follow the rules,” said Campos.

“This is not about workers versus businesses,” Chiu said. “The issue of wage theft effects workers and workers’ families across the city.”

Evicting hoarders

Andrew Lam
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Evicting hoarders

news@sfbg.com

People who collect massive amounts of stuff in their apartments often suffer from a mental disability that causes them to become hoarders. Even so, they can face eviction — despite state laws that protect renters with disabilities. And when hoarders get evicted, they usually become homeless.

“Hoarding behaviors may result in a landlord issuing an eviction notice on the basis that the tenant has created a nuisance, fire hazard, or other danger in the building. If the tenant is diagnosed as disabled, the tenant may notify the landlord of the disability and request the landlord provide a reasonable accommodation to enable the tenant to remain in the apartment rather than being evicted,” reads a recent report from San Francisco’s Mental Health Association, which is seeking to educate renters, landlords, and the general public on the issue.

Evictions in San Francisco are on the rise. Between March 1, 2010 and Feb. 28, 2011, 1,370 evictions were filed, an 8 percent rise from 1,269 evictions the previous year. The Federal Fair Housing Act (FHA) and California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) offer protections to those who have a disability, but landlords say there are liability issues associated with excessive hoarding.

Tenants can fight evictions by asking their landlords for a “reasonable accommodation” whose duration depends on the situation. A reasonable accommodation could be a plan that requires 30 days of cleaning and support service for hoarders in an effort to avoid eviction.

According to Mayoclinic.com, hoarding is labeled an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). But many researchers consider it a distinct mental health problem that can be treated with therapy or counseling. California law defines a disability as a physical or mental impairment that limits one or more life activities, such as walking, seeing, hearing, working, learning, or caring for oneself.

Sandra Stark, 66, hasn’t allowed anyone in her home for five years. She collects kitchenware and antiques. Like most hoarders, she started collecting after a traumatic event. It occurred when she was in her 30s and was gaining weight. Stark had never heard of the term “hoarder” until she watched a special on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

She claims her hoarding is a symptom of depression and disability, not OCD. “I feel like, with my weight, the clutter is a barrier between me and the world that hurt me,” she told us.

Before TV shows uncovered the lives of hoarders, family and friends often were the ones to call for help. These days, hoarders often seek help themselves. A&E’s Hoarders receives 1,000 submissions every month. After we spoke to some hoarders, they were all willing to seek change.

MHA recognized the problem and created a task force in 2007. Its goal was to build a plan of action to combat compulsive hoarding in San Francisco. The task force puts the costs of compulsive hoarding at more than $6 million per year. In 2009, the task force completed its report and estimated that between 12,000 and 25,000 residents in San Francisco struggle with this condition.

Most landlords try not to evict hoarding tenants right away. “Landlords may be compassionate and, in many cases, I believe, try hard to prevent evictions. However, they still have liability insurance and strict guidelines to follow,” said Tim Ballard, a social work supervisor for the city. “It is their responsibility to protect the other tenants, and the painful result used as a means of harm reduction is often the legal option of eviction proceedings.”

He said the heavy cleaning required on a hoarder’s home can cost between $6,000 and $8,000 and can include removing trash to create safety in their home. The largest amount spent was $16,000. Currently, Ballard has 300 clients who are hoarders or clutterers in San Francisco.

On March 10, MHA hosted its 13th Conference on Hoarding and Cluttering. Keynote speaker Christiana Bratiotis, who has her doctorate in social work and is director of the Hoarding Research Project, defined compulsive hoarding as the “acquisition of, and failure to discard, a large number of possessions that appear to be useless or of limited value.”

Michael Badolato, administrative assistant of Broderick Street Adult Residential Facility, attended to find a reasonable approach to deal with a hoarding resident living in his facility. “The challenge of hoarding is the mental health issue involved,” he said. Other attendees included educators, landlords, healthcare workers, attorneys, and hoarders themselves.

One panel discussion topic was how hoarding and cluttering are portrayed in the media. The panel included Michael Gause, associate director of MHA; Robin Zasio, a physician on A&E’s Hoarders; and Kari Peterson, an organizer from Hoarding: Buried Alive. Hoarders was created to show people in crisis and prevent the behaviors through the show.

The panelists claim that in order to show what the crisis is, a sensational aspect is involved. Ceci Garnett, whose mother was featured in an episode of Hoarders, says knowing that others are out there is “worth it to let people know they are not alone.

“And at least now there is treatment,” she continued. “We have to risk sensationalism to start a conversation.”

Ray Cleary, who was on season one of TLC’s Buried Alive, also appeared on the panel. Featured before and after treatment, he is still in the process of recovering. “I didn’t have to throw everything away,” he says. “I still have boxes and don’t know what to do with them.”

Another hoarder, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid eviction, was critical of the media attention on hoarding. “It’s a cult. People are going to make a career off my circumstance — making it a disease.”

These people have “already decided it’s a pre-mental disease,” she continued.

Inside her home near Van Ness Avenue, a small path led from the door to her living room. By the door hung green bead necklaces from years of parades; yellowing stacks of paper filled every space in the rooms. An information junkie, she collects newspapers and books. A San Francisco resident for 45 years, she used to be homeless and has suffered from a head injury. “Throwing something away is like throwing away memory — and that means it’s gone forever,” she says.

When she was homeless, her belongings went to storage. But when she got housing, she couldn’t throw anything away. Everyone she knows who has suffered from a head injury has this problem as well, she says, claiming it comes from gradually mixed emotional issues from losses and her health.

For years she tried to find someone to help her recycle or donate items, but she couldn’t find the help she needed, even from her case manager. Other hoarders claim that most caseworkers aren’t aware of their condition and assume they just need to throw everything out at once — something hoarders don’t feel they can easily do.

Her landlord isn’t involved with the property and doesn’t know of the situation. She would like someone to sit and accompany her as she cleans, but she doesn’t know of any service that provides this. During the interview, she picked up a phone call from someone who was going to stop by later to help. “But they usually flake on me,” she acknowledged. Her hoarding, she says, is part of a physical health issue, not a mental health problem.

But San Francisco does offer places such as the MHA conference to discuss the issue. Hoarders‘ Dr. Zasio says the show helps the people who are willing to go on TV. In exchange for going public, the network pays for six months aftercare, including services such as home repairs and therapy sessions. Although the network recognizes that it gains ratings by sensationalizing the condition for 44 minutes, it also wants to raise public awareness.

Of the 1,370 evictions in San Francisco in the past year, 442 cases were prompted by a breach of rental agreement and 271 cases were for committing a nuisance. These cases could include hoarding, but the city doesn’t specify that in its statistics.

As Teresa Friend from the Homeless Advocacy Project said: “If the person with a disability including hoarding is without family or friends to turn to or is not part of a legal intervention process and evicted, they will end up homeless.”

 

Northwest passage: Kelly Reichardt on “Meek’s Cutoff”

Sue Vaughan
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Northwest passage: Kelly Reichardt on “Meek’s Cutoff”

Over the past decade, Kelly Reichardt has consistently created an alternative cinema that is in opposition to modern Hollywood blockbusters. Her films, which emphasize minimalist and highly visual storytelling, transcend even the industry’s edgiest darlings (think Darren Aronofsky and Quentin Tarantino). Her films Ode (1999), Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008), and now Meek’s Cutoff (2010) cannot be categorized in the decade’s overhated mumblecore movement of Andrew Bujalski or the Duplass Brothers. Neither are they part of the world of extreme experimental artists, a la James Benning or Sharon Lockhart.

Somehow Reichardt has found a cinematic middle ground, balancing quiet and poetic allegories with accessible and emotional journeys — an achievement that present and future audiences will be hypnotized by for generations to come. After interviewing her for Wendy and Lucy, I spoke with her after Meek’s Cutoff played the 2011 Sundance Film Festival; it recently had its local debut at the San Francisco International Festival, and opens theatrically Fri/6.

San Francisco Bay Guardian: I recently saw your earliest films at the Pacific Film Archive retrospective and your adaptation of the Robby Benson-starring Ode to Billy Joe (1976), Ode (1999), was amazing! You shot the whole thing on Super 8, right? Do you like your earlier films?

Kelly Reichardt: Ode is very near and dear to my heart. It set me on my own way of making films. I don’t think I’m naturally a non-narrative person. And definitely not as much as I revere those kind of filmmakers like my colleagues: Peggy Ahwesh, Peter Hutton. I love seeing how their films unfold and really make the viewer be interactive in deciding what they’re about and what they mean to them. That’s what I’d like to do as a filmmaker. But I can see myself learning in all of my films, which is painful. A couple of students walked out of that screening of my earliest short films and I wanted to run out after them and say, “I totally understand!”

SFBG: You and [screenwriter] Jon Raymond seem to be consciously aware of just that! I know I have told you this before but I find your films so inspired. Your films are like the kind of classes I always wanted to have in college. You’re never telling me what to think, yet you are very precisely leading me towards something extremely imminent. And along the way, I get to experience my own journey with these characters and situations. Do you run into problems getting your films made and released because of this structure?

KR: That part of it, the endings, is [an element] coming from the world of non-narrative filmmaking. It doesn’t hand things over to the audience. It’s like a series of questions unfolding which is like a dream, which is something I want to bring into a more narrative form. It opens up the traditional genre a little which you already know how its’ suppose to go. Meek’s Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy were both released through Oscilloscope, while Old Joy was distributed by Kino. These are all small independent distributors and the things that they are looking for are not for everyone.

The hard part with filmmaking is getting the money to make the film. Everybody has a camera now. You can shoot a video. But if you’re not into naturalism and you’re trying to make things that are more extravagant, that vision is going to be much harder to just do on your own. If I were a student right now, my biggest fear would be how to rise up out of such a huge sea of voices. When I submitted my first feature, River of Grass, to Sundance in 1994, they had 600 entries that year which seemed overwhelming and huge. Six hundred and they were only gonna pick 16. And what was it this year? Didn’t they have something like 6,000 entries?

Getting your film out … worry about that later. Get your film made first. Plus there’s always the fear of even having something to say at the age of 20! Before you’ve lived on your own and been connected to the big black hole of employment, and public transportation and all those things. That could be good “big” fear to have as a young filmmaker.

SFBG: In your Q&A after the screening of Meek’s Cutoff at the Egyptian Theatre [in Park City, Utah], I was very excited about your bringing up forgotten and unavailable older films like Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952).

KR: Me too! I was trying to make that point and I became so distracted by the woman sitting behind you filming. It’s just such a weird thing to look out and see 15 people videotaping you and you realize that no experience can ever just be with the people in the room again. Everything has to be some bigger purpose and I completely quit thinking about the film and the interaction. I think it’s a bizarre that people feel completely free about videotaping you and posting it on the Internet without asking me.

SFBG: Not only is it exciting that your films feel influenced by older cinema but you do it in a way that’s very much like Peter Bogdanovich, where it feels as if you truly understand the film’s themes and goals and you’re not just making a mixtape of your favorite scenes. Wendy and Lucy feels like a Vittorio De Sica neo-realist film, while Meek’s Cutoff feels like an existential William Wellman Western by way of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922). I mean, you even used the old Hollywood aspect ratio of 1.33:1 on Meek’s Cutoff! And it doesn’t come off kitschy; in fact, it feels even futuristic.

KR: It’s funny that you mention the aspect ratio. If anything is kitschy, and when you read back about the period, widescreen was what was kitschy. It was a gimmick! It’s what 3D or IMAX is to us today. What did Fritz Lang say, “Widescreens are for funerals and snakes.”

It’s funny now that this memory of widescreen is so embraced but it’s such a diminished landscape in a way. That question is always being asked to me in some tone of like, “When you accidentally picked the wrong aspect ratio did you have to just keep going with it?” (laughs) Though I knew going into it that it would limit the amount of theatres we can play Meek’s at. Sadly, very few theaters have the capabilities. 

SFBG: I’ve been watching a lot of Westerns this year and your horizons in every single shot of Meek’s Cutoff are truly spectacular. Your multi-layered colors! Your floating cowboys! The lined-up pioneers! I could just go on. All of it is so particular. How did you design this film? Did you do it on the landscape or storyboard it first?

KR: I storyboard but I can’t draw. (laughs) I have many different notebooks. Color is an early thing. But everything comes first from relentless scouting.  Scouting, scouting, scouting, scouting. I get familiar with the light and the colors of the day. The places you’re gonna be shooting in at certain times of the day. These locations were really remote and very hard to get to. And we ended up spending such a huge amount of time in that desert.

SFBG: Did you have to sleep out on the plains?

KR: We stayed in this town, Burns, Oregon. It’s a good two-street town and we’d drive off-road for two hours into the desert each day. This is where the actual wagon train got lost. There was nothing out there. We were actually finding pieces of wagon from the 1840s! So it would eat up a huge amount of our shooting day, which is already short because when you’re shooting in the mountains, the sun is gonna go behind them. So that’s four hours already out of your day.

My shooting schedule was so restricted that other producers would have said “You are sinking your ship by shooting out on these locations.” Fortunately my producers backed me and off we went, for better or worse. So you have to be on top of it when you’re there, knowing that there will be unexpected things to occur especially when you are dealing with oxen and mules and donkeys. All of that is to be embraced.

I also have to have a plan because we move so quickly. My DP [Chris Blauvelt] and I are talking, talking, talking. I have some books that are references, that I’ll steal frames from. Some that are location photos, people standing in the locations, some from old films. And some are just really crappy drawings I’ve done because I cannot draw, which I consider a huge handicap as a filmmaker. People always ask “Are you improvising?” We don’t have time for improv! Of course because of the weather, and the terrain, and rattlesnakes and the animals there’s certainly a certain amount of adjustment because when I storyboarded this, it wasn’t snowing. But you can’t go out there without a plan. The camera for me is the storyteller.

SFBG: Now you edit your own movies. Is that because you are a tyrant and you have to have it your own way or have you tried working with others? And by “tyrant,” I mean it in the nicest way possible.

KR: (laughs) You go through different stages: I have my writing partner [Jon Raymond] and that’s one stage and then it becomes very public and you’re working with a bunch of people when filming. Then editing is where you get your film back and it’s when I get to find my film. It’s a great moment when I’m in the editing room an I can say, “Oh yeah, that’s what Jon was originally talking about!” or “I felt that in Jon’s short story!”

But when you’re in production, there’s just so much going on! And editing is where you learn where you fucked up and should have put the camera. It’s the big payoff for me and I don’t want to hand it over to anyone else. It’s the interesting part of filmmaking. It’s where you can manipulate space and completely change the dynamic of a conversation or situation just by adding or taking away time. It’s not fun to edit with me, so I stopped using editors (laughs).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEmL9at6JT0

Meek’s Cutoff opens Fri/6 in Bay Area theaters.

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is the Film History Coordinator at the Academy of Art University and programs the film series Midnites for Maniacs.

Are you really middle class?

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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Are you really middle class?

A fascinating article appeared in the New York Times a couple days ago about the bias people tend to have when it comes to beliefs about their own economic standing in relation to the rest of society. It seems a trio of researchers found that Argentinians tend to view their personal economic classifications in much the same way people in the United States do: Everyone believes they are middle class.

The bias works differently depending on one’s income bracket, apparently: “Poor people consistently overestimated their rank, and rich people consistently underestimated their rank.”

According to the article, “Respondents were eventually informed about whether their own rankings estimates were too high or too low. This news changed people’s policy attitudes. People who thought they were relatively richer than they actually were started to demand higher levels of income redistribution when told they were actually relatively poor. After all, learning that they were poorer than they had believed also meant they’d be more likely to benefit from redistributive policies than they originally believed.”

This got me wondering what income distribution actually looks like in the San Francisco Bay Area, and how people view themselves within that spectrum. I went to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to find the most recently available data for earners in this designated metropolitan area, which includes San Francisco, Oakland, and Fremont.

The data was from May of 2009. Taking into account all occupations and nearly 2 million earners, the mean annual wage was $58,250. That’s the number in the exact middle, but most earners were in employment categories which made less than that on average.

To better understand how it breaks down, I scrolled through the various employment categories. The data showed that around 6.8 percent of all earners worked in management — the bosses of all stripes — making an average of $126,260 per year. People working in the computer and mathematical science sector, such as programmers or database administrators, made an average of $91,440 a year, representing about 4.3 percent of all earners. The accountants, budget analysts, and others in business and financial occupations accounted for about 6.8 percent, earning an average of $84,330 per year.

Meanwhile, around 59 percent worked in employment categories with average earnings of less than $58,250. That’s not to say every single one of those earners made less than that — police officers, for example, registered at an average of $79,080 annually, while their “protective services” employment category had an annual average of $52,260. But it does suggest that at the end of the day, quite a few people fell below that middle income line.

The greatest areas of employment by far were office and administrative support services (around 16 percent of all earners; bringing in an average of $41,670 annually), sales (nearly 10 percent; earning an average of $45,860 annually), and food service (around 8.4 percent; earning an average of $23,740 annually).

People working in education, a category that includes teachers and instructors as well as librarians and curators, had median incomes that very closely reflected the exact middle — $58,880. That category made up around 6 percent of all earners.

Of course, there are flaws in any data set, it can only really reveal so much, and even this one was titled “wage estimates.” A study of San Francisco by itself would likely portray a different picture, with a higher mean annual wage. There are outliers, like Pacific Gas & Electric Co. CEO Peter Darbee, who made more than $10 million in 2009. And all of this should be considered in the context of an official 9 percent unemployment rate for San Francisco (actual unemployment rates tend to be higher than official estimates).

On a broader scale, we also know that 1 percent of the nation’s population takes nearly a quarter of the wealth.

The research cited in the NYT article offered this theory about why people are tend to be biased about where they stand: “If you’re mostly exposed to people earning about as much as you, you’re likely to think your earnings are average.”

Last stand against Lennar

Andrew Lam
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Last stand against Lennar

news@sfbg.com

Hunters Point, the last major swath of usable land in San Francisco, appears at first glance to be a developer’s dream — a prime piece of real estate with sweeping views of the bay, ample space, and a city government eager to capitalize on its potential.

But community groups have filed lawsuits challenging the project’s many uncertainties, such as the fate of the toxic stew beneath the former U.S. Navy base in the heart of the project area, and both sides are now awaiting a court ruling on whether more studies are needed.

As an EPA-designated Superfund site, the 500-acre plot is home to an abundance of buried chemical contaminants, radioactive waste, and other unknown toxins, and the Navy has been slow to clean it up. Concerned that development plans have been premature in the face of this lingering mess, opponents filed lawsuits against developer Lennar Corp. and the city last year.

The project, approved July 2010 by the Board of Supervisors, includes plans for a new stadium for the 49ers, 10,500 housing units, parks, and commercial retail space. It has received praise from city and state government agencies as an economic and cultural boon to the community. But activist groups say the cleanup should happen before development occurs.

The Sierra Club settled its lawsuit over the project after the developer made some design changes (see “Uncertain developments,” Jan. 18), so the lawsuit filed by People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) and Greenaction is the last piece of litigation holding up the project. At the core of the legal challenge is whether the environmental impact report (EIR) properly analyzed the health impacts from toxic contamination at the site. After an April 18 hearing on the case, both sides are awaiting a ruling on whether the claims have merit and should be the subject of further study.

Activists claim the EIR violates California Environmental Quality Act protocols because it contains too much uncertainty, including the unknown fate of a large parcel of land slated for a stadium that is contingent on whether the 49ers decide to stay in San Francisco. POWER wants more details about the possible threats to human health before the 20-year project gets the final green light. But since the Navy is responsible for the cleanup, Lennar and the city have repeatedly countered that a full analysis is not their responsibility.

“The main issue that Greenaction and POWER have been concerned about throughout lawsuit is that it’s very unclear from the EIR what exactly is going to happen and what level of contamination will be left,” said attorney George Torgun with EarthJustice, which is representing the community groups. “What are the impacts of building on a federal Superfund site? There is a real lack of knowledge in the EIR.”

April 18 was the second of two recent hearings held on the case. On March 24, Judge Ernest H. Goldsmith listened to a full day of testimony before a packed courtroom. Subsequent settlement discussions weren’t successful, so both sides returned to court to seek a ruling that is expected sometime in the next two months.

Lennar attorneys offered to relinquish the possibility of a pre-cleanup early transfer of the property, which has been a major concern for POWER. Under this proposal, no development on any of the six parcels slated for transfer from the Navy could proceed until the federally mandated cleanup process was finished and certified. However, POWER does not believe this offer reduces the scope of the issues because final approval would still ultimately award control of the land to the developer based on what they believe is a flawed EIR.

“Severing any discussion of early transfer from this EIR would only serve to worsen the defects that petitioners have identified and would be contrary to the requirements of CEQA,” Torgun wrote in the April 13 letter to the court.

POWER’s counterproposal would allow large portions of the project to go through — rebuilding the Alice Griffith housing project and development on Candlestick Point — but Lennar considers it economically unfeasible. These portions of the project are not located on the shipyard but are included in overall plan.

“We want to see the project move forward with Alice Griffith and Candlestick Point,” said POWER organizer Jaron Browne. “They’ve rebuilt housing projects at Cesar Chavez and other areas in the city — why can they only rebuild this one if they can redevelop the shipyard? It’s a political game that Lennar has tied the rebuilding of it to this mammoth 770-acre development.”

Lennar representatives wouldn’t comment for this story. Community members have clashed with the megadeveloper over health issues in recent years. In 2008, Lennar was fined more than $500,000 by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District for allowing dust containing asbestos to settle on the surrounding neighborhoods. Then, in March, community organizations released a report showing e-mails from 2006 to 2009 between the EPA, the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and Lennar revealing a possible cover-up of the asbestos exposure.

“They underestimated our understanding of what is happening here,” Browne said. “The whole heart of this issue is that this is a Superfund site. Even if you remove the possibility of early transfer, they are still planning on doing work while remediation is still years to go on other parcels.”

Longtime Bayview resident and Greenaction member Marie Harrison said that not only is the EIR too fraught with uncertainty, it’s incomplete. “There are over 600 blank pages in that document,” she said. “How can you approve an EIR that is supposed to tell you what is there, what the effects will be, and what the project will be? We kept asking the supervisors: How do you convince the community that they are doing something that is good and safe when the history shows otherwise?

During both court hearings, it was evident no clear definition of the project exists since it contains many variables to account for unknowns. Attorneys for Lennar and the city argue that the EIR effectively addresses each potential use and demonstrates a full knowledge of possible contaminants.

Wilma Subra, an environmental scientist for New Orleans-based Environmental Health Advocates, has worked with POWER and Greenaction to understand the breadth of contamination and the typical process of cleanup of a Superfund site. She pointed out that the Navy’s cleanup plan is completely separate from the EIR submitted for the project.

“Those two documents don’t agree with what development will be,” Subra said. “Usually you wait much longer in the process to really know that the land is safe. In a normal Superfund process, you would first do an implementation of the remediation process, find out if it worked, then — years down the line — you would start thinking about development.”

If the EIR is deemed inadequate, Lennar and the city will be required to further analyze the contaminants, outline cleanup strategies, and resubmit a new EIR. If the judge rules the EIR satisfies CEQA, the project can move forward.

“CEQA is one of the few really democratic processes,” Browne said. “If you just have this one moment in 2011 when people are able to comment and weigh in, and then have 20 years where they are building within that, it’s not really fair.”

Seeking a watchdog’s watchdog

Andrew Lam
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Seeking a watchdog’s watchdog

rebeccab@sfbg.com

When cash pumps through the guts of city politics, the Ethics Commission is charged with keeping track of it all to help members of the public follow the money. But what happens when the public loses faith in the ethics of the Ethics Commission?

In the run-up to a hotly contested mayoral race, in a city marked by rough-and-tumble politics influenced by moneyed power brokers, the function of this local-government watchdog agency is especially critical — and to hear some critics tell it, the Ethics Commission needs reform if it is to perform as an effective safeguard against corruption.

So it was hardly surprising that an April 5 discussion at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting about whom to appoint to the Ethics Commission featured a low-level tug-of-war with some potentially high-level implications.

Sup. Eric Mar proposed that the board consider Allen Grossman for the seat. An octogenarian government watchdog unaffiliated with any political party, Grossman has gone so far as to file a successful lawsuit against the Ethics Commission for not following its own public-disclosure rules. As a potential appointee, he was widely viewed as reform-minded, following in the footsteps of others who have been purged from the body in recent years.

“Open government and good government work together, hand in hand,” Grossman told members of the board’s Rules Committee several weeks prior, interlacing his fingers for emphasis.

Grossman won the backing of Sups. John Avalos and Ross Mirkarimi. But Board President David Chiu spoke against the idea, throwing his support instead behind Dorothy Liu, an attorney and professional colleague of his through the Asian American Bar Association. The Rules Committee, chaired by Sup. Jane Kim and filled out by Sups. Sean Elsbernd and Mark Farrell, also turned down Grossman in favor of Liu.

“She’s extremely hard-working and does her homework,” Chiu later told the Guardian. He also saw it as a plus that Liu was not a political insider: “I think we need an individual on the Ethics Commission who will be impartial,” he said, adding that he’d prefer “someone who has not been involved in the rough-and-tumble of San Francisco politics.” Sup. Carmen Chu echoed Chiu’s comments during the meeting, saying she thought Liu would be an ideal candidate because she did not seem to have an agenda.

Mirkarimi and Avalos, on the other hand, said they were looking for a candidate who did possess a vision for strengthening the role of the agency as a watchdog. “I think our Ethics Commission and the department, as it stands, needs all the help it can get,” Mirkarimi said during the meeting. “I think having people who are well-seasoned with an understanding in the law of ethics and sunshine is something we should be looking for. Mr. Grossman has exhibited that well over the years in trying to do everything he possibly can to advance the cause in a nonpartisan way of making sure that we have a very strong Ethics Commission.”

Mar’s motion to consider Grossman was shot down on an 8-3 vote with Mirkarimi, Mar, and Avalos dissenting; Liu then won the commission appointment on a 10-1 vote, with Avalos dissenting.

Until recently, the Board of Supervisors seat on the Ethics Commission was held by Eileen Hansen, a progressive who had called for political reform under Mayor Willie Brown’s administration prior to being named to the post. When she was being considered for the commission, Hansen recalled, then-Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier raised an objection. “[She] thought the perfect person would be somebody who … would come essentially as a clean slate,” Hansen remembered. “Because I had been involved in organizing campaigns and had run for office, that was deemed too political.”

Yet Hansen viewed her familiarity with the system as an asset that helped her serve as an effective watchdog against corruption. During her six-year tenure, Hansen often cast lone dissenting votes against decisions she believed were weakening ethical standards. She told the Guardian she’d tried floating remedies for situations she viewed as inappropriate, only to have them summarily ignored, a role similar to that of former Ethics Commission member and staffer Joe Lynn.

In one case, Hansen recalled, she became concerned about a planning commissioner who also directed a nonprofit. To raise money, her organization held fundraisers that were ostensibly attended and funded by the very same developers and lobbyists who appeared before her at the Planning Commission. Yet Hansen said she was unable to persuade the other commissioners or staff to call for an investigation.

A more recent Ethics Commission vote underscores the same tension. On March 14, the commission voted unanimously to waive a pair of ethics regulations to allow a mayoral staff member to become executive director of the America’s Cup Organizing Committee (ACOC). Composed of highly influential business figures including at least two billionaire investors, ACOC is tasked with securing corporate donations for the America’s Cup to offset city costs of hosting the race.

Kyri McClellan, project manager with the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, helped craft a memorandum of understanding with ACOC regarding its fundraising obligations to the city. In her new job, without skipping a beat, she’ll interface with the city on behalf of ACOC. The rules that were waived for her benefit are meant to prevent city officials from holding undue influence over their former coworkers after leaving public service, and to prevent city staffers from accepting money from city contractors right after departing from city employment.

“If I had been there, there would have been at least one vote against that waiver,” said Hansen, whose term on the commission ended before this vote. “We have this law in place for a reason. By continuing to provide waivers … we create a situation where the public will not trust the Ethics Commission as a watchdog.”

Hansen said she was scouting for a new commissioner who would carry on with her work. “I was looking for and trying to recruit a visionary — someone who could really be a reformer,” she said. “We’re almost in a position now where we need a watchdog over the watchdog.” She said she saw Grossman as the right fit.

Other observers, such as CitiReport blogger Larry Bush — an investigative reporter who called for the creation of the Ethics Commission in San Francisco in the early 1990s — questioned whether Liu was the best choice after hearing her statements at the March 17 Rules Committee hearing. Liu did not come out strongly in favor of televising Ethics Commission meetings, which has long been a sticking point for open-government advocates.

“I absolutely support televising the Ethics Commission, I think it’s really important,” Kim noted when we asked her about this. She added that she would have supported Oliver Luby — a former Ethics Commission staff member and whistleblower who was ultimately ousted from the job — if he’d applied.

Kim noted that an initial concern she’d had in seeking an ethics commissioner was whether the person would vote to allow Mayor Lee to resume his job as city administrator after serving out his term as interim mayor, a key decision that the commission was scheduled to consider April 11.

Once she was advised that it would be inappropriate to ask which way they would vote when conducting candidate interviews, Kim said she withheld her question — and still didn’t know Liu’s or Grossman’s position at the time she spoke with the Guardian. “I think it’s very appropriate for him to get his job back,” Kim noted. “That vote is very important to me.”

That vote drew closer scrutiny, however, after Ethics Commission staff recommended that the exemption that would be built into the law for Lee’s benefit should be expanded to include appointed members of the Board of Supervisors. “This new proposal would convert a targeted, narrow exemption to deal with a special case into the ‘Politician Job Protection Act’ and could open the door to all kinds of unintended consequences,” charged Jon Golinger of San Franciscans for Clean Government.

Meanwhile, Luby seemed disheartened by the board’s selection of Liu for the Ethics Commission. He was looking to Grossman to fill Hansen’s shoes as the commission’s reformer — a role previously held by Lynn, Luby’s good friend and mentor who died last year.

He lamented, “This will mark the first time in over 10 years to have an Ethics Commission without someone who has past experience advocating for good government.” 

 

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