Labor

Meister: Walker won in Wisconsin, but so did labor

Zelda Bronstein
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15

By Dick Meister

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

Yes, labor lost its attempt to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, one of the most virulent labor opponents anywhere.  But as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka declared, the heated election campaign was “not the end of the story, but just the beginning.”

The campaign, triggered by Walker all but eliminating the collective bargaining rights of most of Wisconsin’s 380,000 public employees, showed that labor is quite capable of mounting major drives against anti-labor politicians, a lesson that won’t be lost on unions or their opponents.

And labor’s political enemies, while perhaps emboldened by labor’s failure in Wisconsin, undoubtedly will hesitate, lest they be confronted with similarly heavy union opposition in their attempts to restrict the bargaining rights of public employees.

Think of it: Labor was outspent hugely by outside corporate interests that funneled $50 million into Walker’s campaign, outspending labor seven-to-one. Yet labor managed to capture nationwide attention and support, and though losing the gubernatorial race, managed to wrest control of Wisconsin’s State Senate from Walker’s Republican allies.

Trumka was rightly awed by “the tremendous outpouring of solidarity and energy from Wisconsin’s working families, against overwhelming odds. Whether it was standing in the snow, sleeping in the Capitol, knocking on doors or simply casting a vote, we admire the heart and soul everyone poured into this effort” in response to “a gargantuan challenge” to labor.

The Senate victory was almost as important as recall of Walker would be. It gave Democrats a one-seat majority in the 33-seat Senate, which will make it much harder for Walker and his Republican allies to enact his anti-labor agenda.

Trumka says he believes  “the new model that Wisconsin’s working families have built won’t go away after one election – it will only grow.” The election, he adds, was “an important moment, and an important message has been sent: Politicians will be held to account by working people.”

Walker, as Trumka says, was forced “to answer for his efforts to divide the state and punish hard-working people.” Trumka optimistically believes that inspired working people elsewhere, union and non-union alike, will follow the lead of the anti-Walker forces and “forge a new path forward.”

Trumka concludes that the challenge to labor and its allies in Wisconsin and everywhere else is “to create an economy that celebrates hard work over partisan agendas.” He said the recall election moved that goal closer.

Of course Richard Trumka is highly partisan, as he should be. But that doesn’t necessarily lessen his credibility. Facts are facts. Although not victorious, labor waged an extraordinary campaign that laid the groundwork for future campaigns that could result in important labor victories.

That would at the least increase the strength of the nation’s working people and diminish the strength of those who, like Scott Walker, would weaken the vital rights of workers and their unions.

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

Sutter’s CPMC deal isn’t healthy

Zelda Bronstein
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28
Sutter’s CPMC deal isn’t healthy

At 10am on Friday, June 15, at the main chambers of the Board of Supervisors, the first of a series of public hearings will be held on specific aspects of the  development agreement governing the $1.9 billion Sutter Health/California Pacific Medical Center proposal to expand and centralize the giant health-care outfit’s health center by building a new 555 bed hospital at Geary and Van Ness. The deal involves demolishing the existing 220-bed hospital at St. Luke’s at Mission and Cesar Chavez and rebuilding a new 80-bed facility, expanding the Ralph K. Davies hospital at Duboce and Noe and closing down the old Children’s Hospital in Laurel Heights.

The hearing will be the first before the Board of Supervisors. Thus far, the project has been before only the executive branch: the Planning Commission and the mayor. After a brief introduction on the overall project the hearing will focus on the issue of jobs.

This is the largest project to be negotiated by the Lee administration — and although the mayor introduced it to the board in May, not one supervisor has yet joined him to sponsor the legislation. That’s an an odd situation given the importance of the project – and the fact that Mayor Lee can usually count on an automatic four votes from the conservative faction of the board. But not this time.

The hearing was requested by a coalition of more than 60 community, neighborhood, labor, and environmental organizations — San Franciscans for Healthcare, Housing, Jobs and Justice (SFHHJJ) — which has been closely following the project for the last two years.  Members of the coalition have already appealed the project’s environmental impact report, passed last month by the Planning Commission, and SFHHJJ has developed a series of amendments to the agreement that it has been pressing on the Board of Supervisors.  Board President David Chiu agreed to set a series of hearings on the project before it voted on, along with the determination of the appeal of the EIR, in  late July.  SGHHJJ hopes to use the hearings to get across the serious shortcoming of the agreement.  In addition, depending upon the appeal of the EIR,  a law suit may well be filed by some members of the Coalition.

In short, what starts next Friday is a big deal.

Not only is it a big deal in the development war that is at the heart of San Francisco politics, but it also is a big deal given what may well be done by the Supreme Court in deciding the constitutionality of all or part of the Affordable Health Care Act. If Obama’s health reform is struck down by the court, in all or in part, which seems almost certain, Sutter/CPMC’s plan will most definitely take on even more importance for the future of health care and its costs in San Francisco.

Sutter currently controls about a third of the market for health care in San Francisco.  With the construction of this project, it will control about 40 percent — a portion most knowledgable observers feel will give it market dominance  and an ability to actually set health care costs in San Francisco. Sutter’s business model — as shown in Berkeley when it took over Alta Bates and elsewhere in the state – demonstrates that  with a dominate market position, it jacks up prices.

As the San Francisco Chronicle noted in 2010: “…Sutter Health Co. has market power that commands prices 40 to 70 percent higher than its rivals per typical procedure — and pacts with insurers that keep those prices secret”.

A US Supreme Court that weakens or strikes down health care reform will simply re-establish the status-quo ante, a situation in which Sutter will thrive.

And that’s why the board’s conservative members are not supporting Mayor Lee’s deal: it simply does not protect the city — itself a major health care consumer for both its workforce and Healthy San Francisco — from Sutter’s history of turning market power into high health care charges.

SFHHJJ want the development agreement amended to place a cap on the costs charged to the city, allowing Sutter no more than 115 percent of the average charged  by  San Francisco’s other private, nonprofit hospitals.  It also wants Sutter/CPMC low charity care payments pegged at an average of what other nonprofit hospitals contribute, and it is calling for rebuilding St. Luke’s in San Francisco medically underserved south east to 180 beds, not the sure-to-fail size of 80 beds.

But there’s even more to deplore about the proposed deal.

In housing, although the EIR showed that a demand would be created for some 1,500 new two-bedroom homes, Sutter/CPMC agreed to only provide funds to build about 90 such homes. Such a massive shortfall will boost housing prices all other San Franciscans will pay.

The project’s impact on public transit at the Geary / Van Ness intersection will be large and ongoing. More than 20,000 new car trips will be generated at that intersection by the new hospital. Plans for a Bus Rapid Transit raised roadway for the 38 Geary — the most used bus line in the city — will have to be altered at an unknown price since the project calls for all auto traffic to enter the site on the Geary Avenue side.

Again, San Francisco taxpayers will be on the hook to pay for these new costs.

But it is the jobs aspect of the deal that is the most distressing. Sutter/CPMC has a long history of labor disputes with its workforce. Last year it replaced nurses who took a day off to protest their working conditions, and a replacement nurse hired by Sutter accidentally killed a patient. Sutter/CPMC refuses to agree to hire all of its 6,000 current employees for the new facilities. It’s requiring them all to apply as new workers, losing all of their seniority, with a real prospect that many currently employed San Francisco residents will lose their jobs once the new facility opens. All that Sutter/CPMC has agreed to do is hire 50 residents a year for four years – 200 new local jobs, total.

The  June 15 hearing will focus on the jobs issue and public comment is sure to be hot on this laughable “commitment” agreed to by the “jobs” administration.

Calvin Welch is a longtime community organizer living in San Francisco. He currently teachs a course in the development history of San Francisco at San Francisco State University and the University of San Francisco.

It’s the money, stupid

Zelda Bronstein
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10
It’s the money, stupid

If you want to know what American politics looks like in a post-Citizens United world, check out the June 5 elections.

It’s not that this specific court case played a role in all of the key races — the tobacco industry could have spent $47 million to defeat a cigarette tax with or without Citizens United — but around the country, you saw the role that big money played in literally altering the political landscape.

Take Wisconsin. The national news media twist on this will call it a test of Obama’s field campaign and a referendum on labor, but it was really all about money. Walker and his big-biz allies raised $30 million, a lot of it through barely-regulated super PACs, and outspent Tom Barrett by more than 7-1.

In California, Prop. 29, which would have put a $1 tax on each pack of cigarettes to pay for cancer research, was way ahead in the polls, and I was pretty sure it was going to win handily — how can you vote against a tax on a product that kills people to fund a cure for the disease it causes? Prop. 29 had a 30-point lead a couple of months ago.

Then came the blitz — $47 million in TV ads, funded by a couple of big tobacco companies. The ads were classics of the type — misdirection and confusion aimed at getting people to vote No. And it worked: Prop. 29 is going down to a narrow defeat.

In San Francisco, Prop A, with little money and not much of a campaign, never had a serious chance. But the flood of Recology money made sure it never got even 25 percent of the vote (although if you asked people, outside of the campaign, whether the garbage contract should be put out to bid, most of them would say yes).

I think Recology money had an impact on the Democratic County Central Commitee, too; Recology paid for a lot of slate cards that promoted a lot of more moderate candidates. The company also paid for progressive slate cards (the Milk Club etc.), and I haven’t counted them all, but in the end, slate cards matter in the DCCC and they may have made the difference.

The local election was so low-turnout that it’s hard to draw any serious conclusions from it. But overall, money carried the day June 5 — and that’s a scary message.

 

Wage theft task force approved

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The Board of Supervisors June 5 voted unanimously to create a wage theft task force. The task force will make recommendations to city departments concerning the prevention and correction of wage theft in the city.

Wage theft refers to employers paying less than their employees are due, and can include not paying extra for overtime, not allowing breaks, confiscating tips, and paying less than minimum wage. A 2010 study of labor conditions in Chinatown restaurants conducted by the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) found that some 76 percent of employees did not receive overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours in a week, and roughly half were not being paid San Francisco’s minimum wage.

The industries where wage theft is prominent range from restaurants and retail to domestic work. 

Approval of the task force is a step forward for groups like CPA that have been working to combat wage theft for years. It builds on the wage theft prevention ordiance, passed last July. The ordinance doubled the fine for employers who retaliate against workers that seek recourse for wage theft, and enhanced the power of the cit’s Office of Labor Standards and Enforcement (OLSE).

The Progressive Workers Alliance- a coalition of CPA, Young Workers United, the Filipino Community Center and others- advocated for the task force and helped bring in dozens of supporters to the meeting. 

Workers who suspect that their employers have violated local labor laws often come to these groups for help. Between the OLSA and advocacy groups, the people following up with these claims see a widespread problem. According to Shaw San Liu of the CPA, there are “probably hundreds if not thousands coming forward every year, and there are many more who don’t.” 

“There have been experiments in coordinating with the City Attorney and with the health department to revoke food permits,” said Liu. 

She hopes “the task force will build off these successful examples and see how we can expand them to a more comprehensive strategy.”

 

Walker winning in Wisconsin — the fallout

Zelda Bronstein
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30

AP is callling the Wisconsin election for Scott Walker, although the results will no doubt tighten up as the night goes on.  But this is a wake-up call — for all of us. It’s one of the first clear tests of what happens when you have unlimited corporate money flowing into an election (Walker outspent his opponent about 8-1) and it’s a sign of how bad things can get under Citizens United.

It’s also going to dampen the enthusiasm of labor activists for the Obama re-election. Already, commenters on DailyKos are calling for progressives not to support the Democratic Party this fall — and while that’s common and people mostly get over it, Obama has to start moving now to shore up labor support. We’re all for gay marraige, and that was a strong and much-needed (if also much-delayed) stand, but it’s not going to be enough.

There’s going to have to be a concerted effort to end the demonization of public-sector workers. This election just shows how it’s gotten out of control.

 

Turnout light in SF; eyes on Wisconsin

Zelda Bronstein
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0

My usual limited polling sample — my precinct in Bernal Heights — suggests what everyone pretty much knew: Turnout in San Francisco will be very low. Control of the local Democratic Party, and its endorsements, will be determined by a small fraction of the eligible voters.

On the national front, since the presidential primaries are long over and California has long been irrelevant, everyone’s looking at Wisconsin, where the battle to recall Gov. Scott Walker will have national implications. Walker’s trying to survive by blaming public employees for the state’s economic woes; since he ended collective bargaining, he said today, the state budget is running a surplus and property taxes are down.

If by some chance he’s thrown out of office — and it doesn’t look good right now — labor will have one of its greatest victories in years. If he becomes the first governor in US history to survive a recall, he’ll portray it as a confirmation that the public supports his attack on unions. The right-wing types have poured millions into this race — and if they get their way, a lot of labor folks are going to be asking why President Obama (who will be in San Francisco to raise money at Clint Reilly’s office building June 6) didn’t make an appearance in Wisconsin.

Labor came in big for the president in 2008, and this one is hugely important — and the White House has been entirely missing in action. And he may have to answer for it if Walker survives and GOP governors across the country take up the call and attack public-sector unions as the start of a larger attack on organized labor.

In California, I don’t care how much money the tobacco companies spent — Prop. 29, the cigarette tax, is going to win. And I think the term-limits measure squeaks through, too. Locally, we all know that Prop. A will lose under a barrage of Recology money; I hope Prop. B survives the strange last-minute money blitz.

We may not know for days how the Democratic County Central Committee races are shaking out. If it’s close, and control of the panel hangs on a couple of tight races, the absentee votes that get counted over the next few days will make the difference.

We’ll be posting updates all evening.

Dick Meister: Two big tests for labor

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By Dick Meister

 Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Helping get President Obama re-elected tops organized labor’s political agenda. But for now, unions are rightly focusing on special elections this month in Wisconsin and Arizona, where other labor-friendly Democrats are being challenged by labor foes.

Coming up first, on June 5, is the Wisconsin election to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who’s been labor’s public enemy No. 1 for his blatant anti-union policies. He’s been acclaimed by anti-labor forces nationwide and as widely attacked by labor.

Both sides see the election as highly symbolic, a possible guide for those seeking to limit the union rights of public employees and other workers or, conversely, for those attempting to halt the spread of Walker-like attacks on collective bargaining in private and public employment alike.

There are many reasons for replacing Walker with his recall election opponent, Democratic Mayor Thomas Barrett of Milwaukee. The AFL-CIO has come up with about a dozen reasons, headed by Walker’s severe limiting of the bargaining  rights of Wisconsin’s 380,000 public employees – a key action that helped trigger what Obama has described as a national “assault on unions.”

The AFL-CIO also complains that Walker has:

*”Led Wisconsin to last place in the nation in job creation.”

*”Disenfranchised tens of thousands of young voters, senior citizens and minority voters with voter suppression and voter ID laws.”

*”Put the health care coverage of 17,000 people at risk with unfair budget cuts.”

*”Allowed the extremist, corporate-backed American Legislative Council to exercise extraordinary influence.”

*”Made wage discrimination easier by repealing Wisconsin’s Equal Pay enforcement law.”

*”Attacked public workers’ retirement security.”

*”Blocked the path of young workers to middle class jobs by repealing rules on state apprenticeship programs.”

*”Killed the creation of more than 15,000 jobs when he rejected $810 million in federal  funds to construct a passenger rail system between Milwaukee and Madison.”

*”Sponsored new tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations that will cost the state $2.4 billion over the next 10 years.”

*”Proposed cuts to the state’s earned income tax credit that will raise taxes on 145,000 low-income families with children.”

Despite all that – and more – polls show the recall vote could go either way, with lots of campaign funding for Walker flooding in from  corporations and other union opponents across the country.

Unions have lots of tough campaigning ahead, as they do in Arizona. There, on June 12, a special election will determine who will serve in the Congressional seat held for three terms by Democrat Gabrielle Giffords. She resigned in mid-term this year while still recovering from the serious wounds she suffered during a 2011 shooting in Tucson in which six people were killed.

Ron Barber, a Giffords’ staffer who was wounded in the Tucson attack, will challenge Republican Jesse Kelly in the race to elect a representative to serve the rest of Giffords’ term. Kelly, who ran a close losing race against Giffords in 2010 , opposes  much of what the AFL-CIO supports.

The labor federation is especially unhappy with Kelly’s support for GOP proposals in Congress “which would turn Medicare into a voucher system,” and for getting $68 million in federal stimulus funds for his family’s construction firm while at the same time attacking Obama for creating the stimulus program.

Apparently, says the AFL-CIO, “Kelly lining his own pockets with stimulus dollars is proper. Everything else is socialism.” The AFL-CIO is likewise unhappy with Kelly’s endorsement by organizations considered “extremist and racist” by civil rights groups.

Like labor, Barber is a strong supporter of Social Security and Medicare. But Kelly says that Social Security is a “giant Ponzi scheme” and that Medicare recipients are “on the public dole.”

He’s said health care is a “privilege” and so presumably should not be a government-guaranteed right, and claimed that “the highest quality and lowest cost can only be delivered without the government.”

Kelly wants to reduce the Federal Drug Administration “as much as humanly possible.” He’s also advocated an end to government food safety inspections, leaving individuals to do their own inspections rather than rely on “the nanny state” to do it for them.

No wonder labor is mounting major campaigns against Kelly in Arizona and Walker in Wisconsin. Labor victories are needed there to help protect unions, their members and many others from attempts to weaken the rights, protections and other essential aid provided through government.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Dick Meister: Make it a truly happy graduation day

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By Dick Meister

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

It’s that grand time of the year for high school and college seniors. Time for graduation. Time for them to enter the world of full-time work.  Conventional wisdom insists their education will enable them to find good job opportunities and financial rewards.

 A new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows, however, that recent graduates are generally having far more problems with the job market than conventional wisdom would  suggest.

 The basic economic facts make that all too clear. Consider these EPI findings :

*About one-third of high school graduates aged 17 to 20 are unemployed and more than half are underemployed – involuntarily working only part time or holding jobs that don’t require skills they’ve learned in school. The rates for African-American and Latino graduates are particularly high.

*As for college graduates, about 10 percent of them are jobless, about one-fifth of them underemployed.

College and high school graduates alike may find that their lack of on-the-job experience will cause employers to bypass them, regardless of their academic background.

Even if they do manage to find full-time jobs, graduates’ lack of seniority, as the EPI studies note, “makes them likely candidates for being laid off when the firm falls on hard times.”

Graduates aren’t the only young workers unable to find secure jobs. The unemployment rate for workers under 25, whether graduates or not, has remained at about 16 percent, or twice the rate for workers generally. That’s higher than it has been in nearly 30 years.

Unemployment is but one of the serious economic problems facing graduates. Wages for the jobs that are available to them have been steadily declining to barely adequate levels. For instance: In 2011 wages paid college graduates aged 21 to 24 averaged only about $17 an hour or roughly $35,000 for the year.

Between 2000 and 2011, college graduates’ pay dropped an average of more than 5 percent, less than 2 percent for men, 8.5 percent for women. High school graduates’ pay overall dropped by about 11 percent.

There are state and federal assistance programs that could help poorly paid graduates. But the programs often don’t cover young workers because the workers do not meet such eligibility requirements as having previously had significant work experience.

Many of the college graduates have the added burden of trying to pay back college loans. As the EPI report notes, “The cost of higher education has grown far more than median family income, leaving students with little choice but to take out loans” which they may spend years trying to repay.

What’s needed above all – and needed quickly – are government policies that, as EPI economist Heidi Shierholz says, are new policies “that will generate strong job growth overall, such as fiscal relief to states, substantial additional investment in infrastructure, expanded safety net measures, and direct job creation programs in communities particularly affected by unemployment.”

She’s right. Such government action will be essential if the promise of their education is to be fully realized by the young people who are about to graduate from America’s high schools and colleges, if all young Americans are to reach their full potential, and if the nation is to reach true prosperity.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

SEIU deal could undermine progressive coalition

Zelda Bronstein
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1
SEIU deal could undermine progressive coalition

I stumbled on the oddest deal on a union-gossip website, but I’ve checked it out and it’s really happening — and it could be a total trainwreck for progressive politics in San Francisco.

The deal, still in draft form, is an “agreement on political unity” between SEIU Local 1021, one of the most progressive unions in the state and part of the voice of the left in San Francisco, and SEIU-UHW, a much more moderate union that has been taken over by the international. (One example of the tension between the two: Local 1021 has been and remains a strong supporter of Sup. John Avalos, and UHW leader Leon Chow is challenging him in District 11, something that even Randy Shaw, who increasingly disagrees with my politics, finds distasteful.) UHW has attacked the hotel workers union and split with most of the rest of labor around CPMC.

The way the deal would work is this: Both unions would choose a candidate. If they disagreed, the head of the international, Mary Kay Henry, would appoint a mediator to essentially break the tie. That person could unilaterally “direct the joint endorsment of one candidate.”

It would be a radical change — for the first time, the members of Local 1021 would cede final control of their endorsements to the international.

Ed Kinchley, a co-chair of Local 1021’s political action commitee, told me he finds the proposal troubling. “I’m not at all interested in having the international have a say in who we endorse,” he said. “Decisions about endorsements should be in the hands of our members.”

He said he’s all in favor of trying to find areas of agreement between the two SEIU locals — “but do I want to have something enforced on us if we can’t agree? No.”

The agreement specificially exempts the Avalos-Chow race and it calls for UHW to endorse Eric Mar and David Campos. Campos is basically unbeatable, so that doesn’t matter. The nod from UHW to Mar will be helpful to him.

But overall, this could dilute the progressive force of one of the most important voices in local politics. Local 1021 is more than just a city employee union; it’s a part of the progressive coalition, part of the left in this town. Forcing a joint endorsement with a union that is distinctly not part of the progressive coalition can only undermine Local 1021’s historical role.

And it’s odd; as the Stern Burger with Fries blog puts it:

If you’re Local 1021, why would you sign this deal? Local 1021 is a big political player in San Francisco with lots of members, money and foot soldiers. [UHW leader Dave] Regan has shown again and again that he’s hostile to the priorities of Local 1021’s members. Basically, he’s bedded down with the business community. So, if you’re [Local 1021’s Roxanne] Sanchez, why would you agree to this so-called “unity” deal? It hands over control of Local 1021’s political destiny to Regan and some SEIU bureaucrat in DC. Plus, when push comes to shove, everyone knows that [International head] Mary Kay Henry is going to back Regan over Sanchez. If Local 1021 accepts this deal, they’re basically declaring unilateral disarmament as far as their political future.

I couldn’t reach Sanchez and her phone isn’t taking messages. But I spoke with Chris Daly, the former supervisor and now Local 1021 political director, who told me he wasn’t there when the deal was negotiated. But he said “we’ve had many internal discussions on this” and that “the policy of speaking with one voice makes sense.”

When I told him I thought this was a progressive fumble, he said: “I disagree with your analysis.”

The proposal is scheduled to come before the SEIU 1021 COPE June 7.

$3,000 an hour — is that fair?

Zelda Bronstein
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51
$3,000 an hour — is that fair?

Does anyone really think it’s ok for the average CEO to make so much more money than the average worker that a person earning the median income in this country would have to work 244 years to earn what the median CEO earns in a year?

I mean, I think $3,072 an hour is pretty excessive pay for anyone, but let’s give the conseratives their due: The person worked hard, and deserves to earn what the maket will pay him or her. If the typical worker in this country earned $500 an hour, that would be fine — the person at the top ought to earn more than his or her employees (at least, that the capitalist way) — but multiples of 244-1 are excessive an unstable.

Why not link CEO pay to the pay of the average worker? Why not say that no CEO can get more than 10 times (or even 20 times) what the lowest-paid person at that company makes? Nice incentive to pay your workers more.

Have at it, trolls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Far from heaven

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Far from heaven

arts@sfbg.com

FILM Austrian writer-director Michael Glawogger’s narrative features include several comedies, which you wouldn’t necessarily guess from viewing his internationally better-known documentaries — in particular the “globalization trilogy” that began with 1998’s Megacities and continued with 2005’s Workingman’s Death. The first was a global survey of desperate lives on economic bottom-rung, from heroin-addicted NYC con artists to homeless Moscow beggars to sewer scavengers, slaughterhouse laborers, extensively pawed strippers, and so forth. The second was another look at modes of survival no one would choose, if they had a choice, from tapped-out Ukrainian coal mines to abandoned freight ships that Pakistanis risk their lives mining for scrap.

Constantly drawn to the ugly and wince-producing, these films nonetheless had a certain abstract grandeur wrought from cinematographer Wolfgang Thaler’s striking images and the director’s purist refrain from any external commentary. They were also criticized in some circles for questionably staged sequences, and for creating a sort of pornocopia of picturesque suffering halfway between Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Mondo Cane (1962).

Now Glawogger and Thaler are back with their final panel in the series. The two-hour Whores’ Glory is itself a triptych, this time limiting itself to one profession — the world’s proverbial oldest — as it portrays life and business in three prostitution districts around the world. The services performed may (or may not) be the same, but the ways of conducting trade, and the attitudes toward it, are very different.

In Bangkok’s upscale enterprise “Fishtank,” the invariably young, slim women sit behind a glass partition to be checked out by customers until their number is called; the very non-PC comments uttered on either side go unheard on the other. Employees clock-punch in and out of work, have their own on site beauty parlor, and shrug “A job is a job.” Indeed, they seem more like unusually good-looking office temps than anything else, and are treated as such in an atmosphere of well-scrubbed corporate capitalism.

Faridpur, Bangladesh’s “City of Joy” area, by contrast, is a slum whose professional denizens are quarrelsome, foul-mouthed, high-drama, and often look well underage. Though primly clad by Western standards, they labor under a heavy societal mantle of shame — several we meet arrived here after being “driven out” of multiple prior locations. Others were sold by their impoverished families into one-year contractual obligations that one suspects will drag on much longer. “The crazy girl” is forever wailing, older women hector younger ones, a lot of raunchy talk is heard (“I tell them Allah didn’t create my mouth for that purpose” is the least of it), and johns flee the camera.

One exception is a junior barber who talks about coming here once or twice a day, and says that if prostitutes didn’t exist, horny men would assault “respectable women” on the streets. Therein lies the trouble, of course: the notion that sex (good sex at least) is never respectable, or that men can’t be expected to restrain themselves when faced with that massive cock-tease comprising 51 percent of humanity.

Finally, “La Zona” in Reynosa, Mexico is home to older, hardened, philosophical women as frank as their cheerfully horny customers. It’s a falling-down-drunk party scene in which one customer allows himself to be filmed in the act, while a retired sex worker describes a particular specialty she used to perform with an ice cube (“They bleat like goats”). The men curse and complement the women in the same breaths, Madonna-whore complex operating at maximum speed; one guy cruising around in a truck works himself into such a froth just discussing the local talent that you wonder if he’ll dirty-talk himself to climax. Yet there’s a forlorn quality to it all — even when a pro proclaims “I’m paid for it, I enjoy it. I’m paid to have fun,” the surroundings suggest she’s making the best of a deal that didn’t come with any better alternatives.

As usual Glawogger allows no overt commentary or judgment in another immaculately packaged object d’verite, this one sometimes a little too chicly scored to chill room tracks by CocoRosie, PJ Harvey, and such. More than its predecessors, though, Whores’ Glory could have used a little editorializing, or at least contextualizing. Is it even desirable to artfully yet passive observe this of all trades, so frequently rife with exploitation and complex moral issues? Raising myriad questions it’s too aesthetically clean to hazard addressing, the film becomes less an inquiry into than a scrapbook of prostitution ’round the world — a duty- (as well as STD-) free form of sex tourism for anthropologically inclined First Worlders. *

 

WHORES’ GLORY opens Fri/25 in Bay Area theaters.

The battle of 8 Washington

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The battle of 8 Washington

tredmond@sfbg.com

More than 100 people showed up May 15 to testify on a condominium development that involves only 134 units, but has become a symbol of the failure of San Francisco’s housing policy.

I didn’t count every single speaker, but it’s fair to say sentiment was about 2-1 against the 8 Washington project. Seniors, tenant advocates, and neighbors spoke of the excessive size and bulk of the complex, the precedent of upzoning the waterfront for the first time in half a century, the loss of the Golden Gateway Swim and Tennis Club — and, more important, the principle of using public land to build the most expensive condos in San Francisco history.

Ted Gullicksen, director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, calls it housing for the 1 percent, but it’s worse than that — it’s actually housing for the top half of the top half of the 1 percent, for the ultra-rich.

It is, even supervisors who voted in favor agreed, housing the city doesn’t need, catering to a population that doesn’t lack housing opportunities — and a project that puts the city even further out of compliance with its own affordable-housing goals.

And in the end, after more than seven hours of testimony, the board voted 8-3 in favor of the developer.

It was a defeat for progressive housing advocates and for Board President David Chiu — and it showed a schism on the board’s left flank that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. And it could also have significant implications for the fall supervisorial elections.

Sup. Jane Kim, usually an ally of Chiu, voted in favor of the project. Sup. Eric Mar, who almost always votes with the board’s left flank, supported it, too, as did Sup. Christina Olague, who is running for re-election in one of the city’s most progressive districts.

At the end of the night, only Sups. David Campos and John Avalos joined Chiu in attempting to derail 8 Washington.

The battle of 8 Washington isn’t over — the vote last week was to approve the environmental impact report and the conditional use permit, but the actual development agreement and rezoning of the site still requires board approval next month.

Both Mar and Olague said they were going to work with the developer to try to get the height and bulk of the 134-unit building reduced.

But a vote against the EIR or the CU would have killed the project, and the thumbs-up is a signal that opponents will have an upward struggle to change the minds of Olague, Kim, and Mar.

 

DEFINING VOTES

The 8 Washington project is one of a handful of defining votes that will happen over the next few months. The mayor’s proposal for a business tax reform that raises no new revenue, the budget, and the massive California Pacific Medical Center hospital project will force board members to take sides on controversial issues with heavy lobbying on both sides.

In fact, by some accounts, 8 Washington was a beneficiary of the much larger, more complicated — and frankly, more significant — CPMC development.

The building trades unions pushed furiously for 8 Washington, which isn’t surprising — the building trades tend to support almost anything that means jobs for their members and have often been in conflict with progressives over development. But the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union joined the building trades and lined up the San Francisco Labor Council behind the deal.

And for progressive supervisors who are up for re-election and need union support — Olague and Mar, for example — defying the Labor Council on this one was tough. “Labor came out strong for this, and I respect that,” Olague told me. “That was a huge factor for me.”

She also said she’s not thrilled with the deal — “nobody’s jumping up and down. This was a hard one” — but she thinks she can get the developer to pay more fees, particularly for parking.

Kim isn’t facing re-election for another two years, and she told me her vote was all about the $11 million in affordable housing money that the developer will provide to the city. “I looked at the alternatives and I didn’t see anything that would provide any housing money at all,” she said. The money is enough to build perhaps 25 units of low- and moderate-income housing, and that’s a larger percentage than any other developer has offered, she said.

Which is true — although the available figures suggest that Simon Snellgrove, the lead project sponsor, could pay a lot more and still make a whopping profit. And the Council of Community Housing Organizations, which represents the city’s nonprofit affordable housing developers, didn’t support the deal and expressed serious reservations about it.

Several sources close to the lobbying effort told me that the message for the swing-vote supervisors was that labor wanted them to approve at least one of the two construction-job-creating developments. Opposing both CPMC and 8 Washington would have infuriated the unions, but by signing off on this one, the vulnerable supervisors might get a pass on turning down CMPC.

That’s an odd deal for labor, since CPMC is 10 times the size of 8 Washington and will involve far more jobs. But the nurses and operating engineers have been fighting with the health-care giant and there’s little chance that labor will close ranks behind the current hospital deal.

Labor excepted, the hearing was a classic of grassroots against astroturf. Some of the people who showed up and sat in the front row with pro-8 Washington stickers on later told us they had been paid $100 each to attend. Members of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, to which Snellgrove has donated substantial amounts of money in the past, showed up to promote the project.

 

BEHIND THE SCENES

But the real action was behind the scenes.

Among those pushing hard for the project were Chinese Chamber of Commerce consultant Rose Pak and community organizer David Ho.

Pak’s support comes after Snellgrove spent years courting the increasingly powerful Chinatown activist, who played a leading role in the effort that got Ed Lee into the Mayor’s Office. Snellgrove has traveled to China with her — and will no doubt be coughing up some money for Pak’s efforts to rebuild Chinese Hospital.

Ho was all over City Hall and was taking the point on the lobbying efforts. Right around midnight, when the final vote was approaching, he entered the board chamber and followed one of Kim’s aides, Matthias Mormino, to the rail where Mormino delivered some documents to the supervisor. Several people who observed the incident told us Ho appeared to be talking Kim in an animated fashion.

Kim told me she didn’t actually speak to Ho at that point, although she’d talked to him at other times about the project, and that “nothing he could have said would have changed anything I did at that point anyway.” Matier and Ross in the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Ho was heard outside afterward saying “don’t worry, she’s fine.”

Matier and Ross have twice mentioned that the project will benefit “Chinatown nonprofits,” but there’s nothing in any public development document to support that assertion.

Chiu told me that no Chinese community leaders called him to urge support for 8 Washington. The money that goes into the affordable housing fund could go to the Chinatown Community Development Corp., where Ho works, but it’s hardly automatic — that money will go into a city fund and can’t be earmarked for any neighborhood or organization.

CCDC director Norman Fong confirmed to me that CCDC wasn’t supporting the project. In fact, Cindy Wu, a CCDC staffer who serves on the city Planning Commission, voted against 8 Washington.

I couldn’t reach Ho to ask why he was working so hard on this deal. But one longtime political insider had a suggestion: “Sometimes it’s not about money, it’s about power. And if you want to have power, you need to win and prove you can win.”

Snellgrove will be sitting pretty if 8 Washington breaks ground. Since it’s a private deal (albeit in part on Port of San Francisco land) there’s no public record of how much money the developer stands to make. But Chiu pointed out during the meeting, and confirmed to me later by phone, that “there are only two data points we know.” One is that Snellgrow informed the Port that he expects to gross $470 million in revenue from selling the condos. The other is that construction costs are expected to come in at about $177 million. Even assuming $25 million in legal and other soft costs, that’s a huge profit margin.

And it suggests the he can well afford either to lower the heights — or, more important, to give the city a much sweeter benefits package. The affordable housing component could be tripled or quadrupled and Snellgrove’s development group would still realize far more return that even the most aggressive lenders demand.

Chiu said he’s disappointed but will continue working to improve the project. “While I was disappointed in the votes,” he said, “many of my colleagues expressed concerns about height, parking, and affordable housing fees that they can address in the upcoming project approvals.”

So what does this mean for the fall elections? It may not be a huge deal — the symbolism of 8 Washington is powerful, but if it’s built, it won’t, by itself, directly change the lives of people in Olague’s District 5 or Mar’s District 1. Certainly the vote on CPMC will have a larger, more lasting impact on the city. Labor’s support for Mar could be a huge factor, and his willingness to break with other progressives to give the building trades a favor could help him with money and organizing efforts. On the other hand, some of Olague’s opponents will use this to differentiate themselves from the incumbent. John Rizzo, who has been running in D5 for almost a year now, told me he strongly opposed 8 Washington. “It’s a clear-cut issue for me, the wrong project and a bad deal for the city.” London Breed, a challenger who is more conservative, told us: “I would not have supported this project,” she said, arguing that the zoning changes set a bad precedent for the waterfront. “There are so many reasons why it shouldn’t have happened,” she said. And while Mar is in a more centrist district, support from the left was critical in his last grassroots campaign. This won’t cost him votes against a more conservative opponent — but if it costs him enthusiasm, that could be just as bad.

Meister: Another presidential step against anti-gay bias

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

President Obama’s bold endorsement of same-sex marriage should be only the first of his key acts in behalf of gay Americans. It’s now past time for him to redeem a 2008 campaign promise to issue an executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating against gay workers.

Such discrimination is already banned in Washington, D.C., and 21 states, including California. A presidential order would cover the millions of federal contractor employees in the other states. Building roads, bridges and dams are among the many essential tasks they perform throughout the country.

Previous executive orders, first issued seven decades ago, have made it illegal for contractors to discriminate on the basis of race or religion. Recent investigations by the San Francisco Chronicle and the gay publication Metro Weekly noted that Obama made his promise to add a ban on anti-gay discrimination during a meeting with a gay rights group in Houston four years ago.

The Chronicle quoted Heather Cronk, director of the gay rights group Get Equal, as noting that a non-discrimination order “would give concrete, real-life workplace protections to people who work for federal contractors like ExxonMobil that refuse, year after year, to add those protections on their own.”

Cronk recalled that former Bay Area activist Cleve Jones recently presented Obama with a binder containing more than 40 accounts of workplace discrimination in hopes of making a decisive case for a presidential order. The president accepted the binder, Cronk said, without saying a word. But later, Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett said the president had no immediate plans to ban contractor discrimination on his own.

That was confirmed a day later by Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary. Carney claimed the president nevertheless “is committed to securing equal rights” for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. He cited Obama’s long-time support for the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act that would give federal protection to LGBT workers in government as well as private employment.

Instead of issuing an executive order, Carney added, the president’s plans are to take “a comprehensive approach” by pushing for passage of the non-discrimination act.

But, as the Chronicle noted, “the legislation has no chance of passing in the current Congress,” whereas congressional approval is not needed for an executive order to go into effect. In any case, there seems to be only a slight chance that Obama would suffer serious political harm for issuing an order, since polls show strong public support for him doing so.

The president has in fact been losing support because of his refusal to act. The Chronicle, for instance, noted the anger of Log Cabin Republicans, the gay rights group that led the legal fight against the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that had excluded gays and lesbians from military service. The GOP group complained that Obama has “turned his back on 1.8 million LGBT workers” and failed to deliver on a policy that has broad, bipartisan support among the American peopl

Harsh criticism came, too, from a former congressional staffer, Tico Almeida, who helped draft the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and now heads a group called Freedom to Work. He called Obama’s refusal to act “a political calculation that cannot stand” as he announced that his organization was launching a campaign to increase pressure on Obama to issue an order.

One prominent – and wealthy – activist who’s pledged to contribute $100,000 to the drive to get Obama to change his mind called his refusal to sign an order “craven election-year politics.”

Pretty strong language, but Obama’s inaction on such a vital issue rightly opens him to such harsh judgment. His endorsement of same-sex marriage took genuine political courage. It proved he has the strength, the will and the ability to take the country another step closer to granting true equality to all Americans. Now the president needs to take that next essential step.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Challenging the duopoly

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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4

By Adam Morris

news@sfbg.com

On May 12, the Green Party held a presidential debate between Massachusetts physician and longtime progressive activist Jill Stein and comedian turned TV star turned macadamia nut farmer Roseanne Barr. The debate was moderated by Rose Aguilar, host of KALW’s Your Call, and took place at San Francisco’s historic Victoria Theater.

Outside the theater before the event, a battalion of senior-citizen canvassers collected signatures to petition Gov. Jerry Brown to take up single-payer health care. Inside, the audience steadily grew to about 100 people, nearly filling the Victoria, but still was a grim turnout for what was once the Valhalla of progressive politics in America.

The audience was primarily gray; notably absent were the 20- and 30-something Occupiers, indebted students, and underemployed ranks of America’s youth, a political class actively courted by the Green Party and its candidates.

Barr read her opening remarks straight from her laptop computer, in a hurried monotone that nevertheless reached a crescendo as she called for “an end to the system of slavery, war, and usury” in America, and pledged to “make getting food to the hungry our final cause.” Ending hunger resurfaced later in the debate, when Barr observed that the military could be used to distribute food. She also claimed that “there would be no global warming” if humans chose to get their protein from nuts rather than eating animals. This would only happen, she charged, by getting Monsanto “off the necks of small farmers.”

Cribbing lines by turn from JFK and Jesus (via Lincoln), Barr continued, “I beseech the debt creators to ask not what this country can do for them, but what they can do for this country,” and asked America to give the 1 percent a chance to be our partners and not our adversaries, “for a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Stein’s opening statement indicted the Obama administration for adopting the policies of the Bush administration and called for a Green New Deal to reform transportation, health care, and environmental standards. Throughout the night, Stein repeatedly invoked the power of grassroots social movements witnessed across the globe, asking the audience to help her and the Greens “go viral” with their message of environmental and social reform.

Both candidates demanded vengeance on Wall Street, with Stein calling for a breakup of the banks and the establishment of public banks. Barr said that current laws allowed for the prosecuting of what she called “the biggest heist in history,” which is how she referred to the “transfer of wealth upward” of the last decade. “Everything filthy and disgusting originates right there on Wall Street,” she said, “and we want our money back.”

On the military, Stein vowed to “bring our dollars home to stop being the exploiter of the world,” and to turn the bomber factories into windmill factories for green jobs. Barr warned against the militarization of the police and the dangers of what she called the “prison-military-industrial complex,” which she said will be “holding a gun on your neighbor while your neighbor does free labor for a corporation.” Barr’s condemnation of the prison complex continued into the debate on legalization of marijuana, which Barr said would thrust the “tip of the spear into the beast” of the incarceration industry.

Stein echoed Barr’s support of legalization, leaning on her authority as a physician to proclaim that “marijuana is dangerous because it is illegal, not illegal because it is dangerous.” As a doctor, Stein also called for a real health care system involving bikeable cities and reform of the FDA to replace the current “sick-care” system favored by the major parties. Barr said that she too would “lift the curse on single payer universal health care.”

The candidates also came out strong in their support of labor reform, slamming NAFTA and suppression of workers’ rights. Stein called for “fair trade” over “free trade,” faulting the Obama administration for its recent free trade deal with a “union-destroying country” like Colombia. Barr choked up when she told the audience that she is able to “represent the people from whom I came,” quickly adding “and I’ll fight hard too—I’ve got balls bigger than anybody.” Women’s rights also drew fiery proclamations from the candidates, with Stein vowing to “resurrect the Equal Rights Amendment,” and Barr stating flatly that “patriarchy needs to go.”

The signature issue of the Green Party—the environment—was a minor if constantly underlying thread to the discussion, emerging as a topic only later in the debate. While Stein repeated Barr’s jabs at Monsanto and pledged to “deny the Keystone Pipeline on Day 1,” Barr grew solemn, acknowledging the possibility that it might be too late to save the environment from impending catastrophes. We would need to learn, she said, to create “a new system that is not money dependent.”

Both candidates broke debate protocol on time limits and turns of speech, but the atmosphere was collegial and supportive, with Barr chiming in “yeahs” to many of Stein’s remarks. Each woman repeatedly said she “agreed completely” with what the other said. “Our greatest weapon,” Barr said, is to “resist the fear they force-feed us,” linking her remarks to Stein’s claim that “the politics of fear has brought us everything we were afraid of.”

Stein railed against a mainstream press that has effectively sequestered discussion of political alternatives. “We do not have a functioning press,” she told the audience, “We have an o-press. We have a re-press.” She repeated her call for Greens to mobilize online to get the word out about alternative party movements. Barr said that she was being very careful not to bring any discredit to the Green Party. Though biting and at times sarcastic, Barr said she her campaign was “dead serious. And the message is dead serious too.”

Tax equity

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Tax equity

steve@sfbg.com, yael@sfbg.com

A broad consensus in San Francisco supports reforming the city’s business-tax structure by replacing the payroll tax with a gross receipts tax through a November ballot measure. But the devil is in the details of how individual tax bills are affected, which has divided the business community and given a coalition of labor and progressives the opportunity to overcome the insistence by Mayor Ed Lee and other pro-business moderates that any change be revenue-neutral.

Service Employees International Union Local 1021, San Francisco’s biggest city employee union, last month launched a campaign demanding that the measure increase city revenue, setting a goal of at least $50 million, which represents the amount the city has lost annually since 2001 when 52 large downtown corporations sued to overturn the last gross receipts tax. The union is threatening to place a rival measure on the fall ballot.

“This call for it to be revenue-neutral didn’t make a lot of sense given all the reductions in city services in recent years,” said Chris Daly, the union’s interim political director. “It’s fair to at least get the money back that we lost in 2001.”

The union and the city recently agreed on a new contract that avoids more of the salary cuts that SEIU members have taken in recent years, but workers could still face layoffs under a new city budget that Lee is scheduled to introduce June 1. Lee, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu, and business leaders working on the tax-reform proposal have until June 12 to introduce their ballot measure.

But they don’t yet have an agreement on what the measure should look like — largely because the technology sector (led by billionaire venture capitalist Ron Conway, the biggest fundraiser for Lee’s mayoral campaign last year), the traditional businesses represented by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and the small business community are pushing different interests and priorities.

“The technology industry has to realize they have a tax obligation like any member of the business community does,” Jim Lazarus, the Chamber’s vice president for public policy, told us.

Conway is reportedly using his influence on Lee to push for a model that keeps taxes low for tech companies — even if that comes at the expense of other economic sectors, such as commercial real estate and big construction firms, which will likely see their tax obligations increase. Yet some Chamber counter-proposals could end up costing small businesses more money, creating a puzzle that has yet to be worked out.

But one thing is clear: The business leaders don’t want to see overall city revenue increase. “If there’s anything that is unifying in the business community is that it’s revenue neutral,” small business advocate Scott Hauge told us. “We’re not going to increase revenues, that’s just a given, so if we have to do battle then so be it.”

SEIU and other members of progressive revenue coalition that has been strategizing in recent weeks are hoping to exploit the divisions in the business community and arrive at a compromise that increases revenue, and if not then they say they’re willing to go to the ballot with a rival measure.

“We’re working on trying to recover what we lost in the 2001 settlement and then some,” Sup. John Avalos, who has been working with the progressive coalition, told us. “We have to have something going to the ballot that is revenue generating.”

 

 

LABOR’S CAMPAIGN

For labor and progressives, this is an equity issue. Workers have been asked to give back money, year after year, despite the fact that big corporations have been doing well in recent years but haven’t contributed any of that wealth to the cash-strapped city. Labor leaders say that after they supported last year’s pension-reform measure, it’s time for the business community to support city services.

“When we talked about Prop C, we said if our members are doing this with our pensions now, we’ll see next year what businesses do with business tax,” said Larry Bradshaw, vice president of SEIU Local 1021. “Then we read about secret meetings where the labor movement was excluded from those talks.”

Anger over the “secret meetings” of business leaders that Lee assembled to craft the tax reform measure — meetings at which no labor leaders were included — helped inspire the fierce protest campaign that defined the SEIU’s recent contract negotiations.

In the first weeks of negotiations, workers were already up in arms. Protest marches at SF General Hospital and Laguna Honda Hospital brought hundreds of hospital workers to the streets. These hospitals serve some of the city’s poorest populations: Laguna Honda patients are mostly seniors on Medi-Cal and General is the main public hospital serving the city’s poor.

On April 5, city workers got creative with a street theater protest that involved six-story projections on the iconic Hobart Building. Protesters dressed as rich CEOs and handed out thank-you cards to commuters at the Montgomery transit station. SEIU’s “The City We Need, Not Downtown Greed” campaign included a website (www.neednotgreed.org), slick video, and direct mailers portraying CEOs as panhandlers on the street asking city residents, “Can you spare a tax break?”

The most dramatic civil disobedience came on April 18, when more than 1,000 workers rallied outside City Hall — along with several progressive supervisors — and then marched to Van Ness and Market. Protesters blocked the street, resulting in 23 arrests. At that point, increases in health care cuts and pay cuts to city workers were still on the table.

That was followed the next week by hundreds of workers staging noisy demonstrations in City Hall, and then again on May Day when SEIU workers were well represented in actions that took over parts of the Financial District.

In the end, the demands of union representatives were met in the contract agreement. Health care cost increases and pay cuts were eliminated, and a 3 percent pay raise will kick in during the two-year contract’s second year, a deal overwhelmingly approved by union members. Labor leaders hope to use that momentum to force a deal with the Mayor’s Office on the tax reform measure — which some sources say is possible. Otherwise, they say the campaign will continue.

“We may end up on the streets gathering signatures soon,” Daly said. “We need to figure it out in the next few weeks.”

 

 

THOSE DEVILISH DETAILS

The Controller’s Office released a report on May 10 that made the case for switching to a gross receipts tax and summed up the business community’s meetings, and the report was the subject of a joint statement put out by Lee and Chiu. “After months of thorough analysis, economic modeling and inclusive outreach to our City’s diverse business community, the City Controller and City Economist have produced a report that evaluates a gross receipts tax, a promising alternative to our current payroll tax, which punishes companies for growing and creating new jobs in our City'” the statement said. “Unlike our current payroll tax, a gross receipts tax would deliver stable and growing revenue to fund vital city services, while promoting job growth and continued economic recovery for San Francisco.”

Daly and Avalos say progressives agree that a gross receipts tax would probably be better than the payroll tax, and they say the controller’s report lays out a good analysis and framework for the discussions to come. But despite its detailed look at who the winners and losers in the tax reform might be, Daly said, “We haven’t seen an actual proposal yet.”

Lazarus made a similar statement: “Nobody likes the payroll tax, but the devil is in the details.”

But it’s clear some businesses those with high gross receipts but low payrolls — would pay more taxes. For example, the finance, insurance, and real estate sector now pays about 16 percent of the $410 million the city collects in payroll taxes. That would go up to about 21 percent under a gross receipts tax.

“Several industries that could face higher taxes under the proposal, such as commercial real estate, large retailers, and large construction firms, felt the increase was too sharp,” the report said under the heading of “Policy Issues Arising From Meetings with Businesses.”

The report highlighted how the change would broaden the tax base. Only about 7,500 businesses now pay the payroll tax (others are either too small or are exempt from local taxation, such as banks), whereas 33,500 companies would pay the gross receipts tax, which the report identified as another issue to be resolved.

“While some businesses appreciated the base-broadening aspect of the gross receipts proposal, others felt that too many small businesses were being brought into the Gross Receipts tax,” the report said. Hauge also told us that he fears a tax increase on commercial real estate firms could be passed on to small businesses in the form of higher rents. “I don’t want to see the business community split,” Hauge said, although it’s beginning to look like that might be unavoidable. The big question now is whether progressives and labor can find any allies in this messy situation, and whether they’ll be able to agree on a compromise measure that all sides say is preferable to competing measures.

Live Shots: The Drums and Craft Spells at Great American Music Hall

Tony Robles
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“Let’s just have a good time tonight,” said Jonny Pierce, the singer of the Drums, one song into a sold-out show at the Great American Music Hall on Saturday. He paused briefly to let the applause fill an appropriate amount of space and added, “This next song is about a dead person.”

There may have been some intentional, practiced irony at play, but the space between those two statements is the key to everything that is great about the Drums. Sure, Pierce has one of the most perfect, near angelic voices in pop music – witness enraptured fans, hands out toward the stage, looking for a hold – but more importantly, he also has one of the best deadpans.

When he’s performing, his facial expressions vary more in intensity than emotion. If you catch him smiling, it’s inward. Happy? Sad? Blah. When the band is playing bright, uptempo, yet often melancholic music, and the lyrics send conflicting cues on how to feel, the singer seems careful to pivot just right, not tip his hand.

After singing “Book of Revelation” off of the recent album Portamento, which includes the lines “I’ve seen the world and there’s no Heaven and no Hell” and “I believe when we die we die, so let me love you tonight,” Pierce said, “That last song was really important to me, so to hear you guys singing that…thank you.”

On stage, The Drums* won’t tell you how to feel about typical pop topics like love and heartbreak anymore than less typical ones like, say, being an atheist and having an existential crisis, but Pierce is seemingly happy to show what you can do in the mean time, as he’s otherwise constantly moving about the stage, calmly dancing with his own confusion.

Openers: Part Time recalled a less drugged out (or just more doobied) version of Ariel Pink, but that may have just been the lead singer’s technicolor dream coat. Also on the style watch, the drummer looked like one of Biff’s lackeys in Back to the Future (but that may have just been the glasses.)

Craft Spells’ Justin Paul Vallesteros gave a shout out to Stockton, where he started the band before relocating to Seattle. Someone in the crowd said he’d “discovered the band last year, and it turned out to be the perfect summer soundtrack.” Based on the way that the intro to “After the Moment” – from last year’s “Idle Labor” – was recognized with cheers, he wasn’t the only one that feeling that way. And given how well new tracks “Warmth” and “Still Left With Me” were live, it could be the soundtrack for this summer as well.

*Truth is the whole band has deadpan solidarity, particularly co-founder Jacob Graham who, whether playing keys or conducting a bank of analog synth – as he did for the encore opener “Searching for Heaven” – has an ever-present, captivating stillness.

Dick Meister: Union rights are civil rights

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By Dick Meister

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

The right of U.S. workers to organize and bargain collectively with their employers unhindered by employer or government interference has been a legal right since the 1930s. Yet there are workers who are unaware of that, and employers who aim to keep them unaware, meanwhile doing their utmost to keep them from exercising what is a basic civil right.

Many employers often claim working people are in any case not much interested in unionization, noting that less than 15 percent of workers currently belong to unions.

But as anyone who has looked beneath the employer claims has discovered, it’s the illegal opposition of employers and the failure of government regulatory agencies to curtail the opposition that’s the basic cause of the low rate of unionization.

If most workers do indeed oppose unionization, then what of the recent polls decisively showing otherwise? And why do so many employers go to the considerable trouble and expense of waging major campaigns against unionization ? Why do they take such illegal actions as firing or otherwise penalizing union supporters?

Could it be that union campaigners might be able to persuade workers to vote for unionization, despite what their employers might have to say? Or despite employer threats to punish them for voting union?

Some employers have now taken the outrageous step of trying to keep employees from even knowing of their legal right to unionization.

Under a National Labor Relations Board ruling last August, employers were to be required as of this April to post notices at their workplaces telling employees of their union rights.

The ruling stemmed from the labor board’s finding that young workers, recent immigrants and workers in non-union workplaces were generally unaware of the labor laws’ guarantees and protections – including, of course, the basic right of workers to unionize.

As the New York Times observed, “the backlash was furious.” The notoriously anti-union National Association of Manufacturers and U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed suits in two federal courts, claiming the law does not expressly permit the NLRB to require employers to post such notices. An appeals court has postponed the effective date of the rule pending further appeals.

The Times noted that the case involves more than “the legality of having to hang a poster in the coffee room. It’s about industry’s attempt to delay rules whenever it cannot derail them outright. It is about preventing workers from gaining knowledge and support to help them press their concerns.”

So unless and until a court rules otherwise, workers will have the right to protections from the labor laws, but not the right to be informed of that through workplace notices and otherwise. Bizarre, certainly, is the word for that.

What workers need above all, even above the right to know their legal rights, is a firm strengthening of those rights. Why not add the right of unionization specifically to the Civil Rights Act? It is, after all, on a par with other basic civil rights such as the right to an education free of discrimination.

The Civil Rights Act, which makes it illegal to discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, ethnicity, gender, religion or national origin, should be expanded to include a specific prohibition of discrimination against pro-union workers.

No less a civil rights champion than Martin Luther King Jr. would agree to that. He knew that the right to unionization is one of the most important civil rights. Virtually his last act was in support of that. For he was slain by an assassin’s bullet in 1968 as he was preparing to lead yet another of the many demonstrations he had led in behalf of striking black sanitation workers in Memphis who were demanding union recognition.

That was but one of many examples of King’s support for workers seeking union recognition as their civil right – a right guaranteed not only by the 77-year-old National Labor Relations Act but also by the Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of freedom of association.

King declared that the needs of all Americans “are identical with labor’s needs: Decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old-age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children, and respect in the community.”

There could be no civil right greater than the right of working people to try to meet such paramount needs, as well as to be clearly informed of their right to

do so through unionization.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

What are “old-fashioned” SF values?

Zelda Bronstein
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What are “old-fashioned” SF values?

Michael Breyer, who has never held elective office in San Francisco and is running for state Assembly, is getting a fair amount of press — and although he has nowhere near the visibility of Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting, he has the support of Sen. Dianne Feinstein and may throw a boatload of money into the race. He’s already sent out one flier that features very little about him but a lot about his (more famous) family — his father, Steven Breyer, is a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and his uncle, Charles Breyer, is a federal judge.

But here’s what intrigued me about the mail piece: It says that

“Sacramento needs a fresh perspective. It needs old-fashioned San Francisco values.”

What, exactly, are “old-fashioned San Francisco values?” One could certainly argue that the message harkens back to a day when the city was less diverse, less progressive, less open to the sometimes-radical ideas (remember this one?) that have changed the nation and the world. Of course, exploiting the workers and destroying the environment in the name of extracting riches was a famous SF value during the Gold Rush era; so was the Chinese Exclusion Act. On the other hand, resisting the Red Scare was a great traditional SF value in the 1950s, as were civil-rights sit-ins. Free love, free drugs and free lunch were vintage SF values a decade or so later. Labor struggles against capital are also a great San Francisco value.

So what, exactly, is Mr. Breyer talking about?

I called his campaign manager, Michael Terris, who wrote the piece, and asked him if Breyer was longing for a more conservative, less diverse era. “Not at all,” he said. “Old-fashioned values mean family, schools, neighborhoods, quality-of-life issues. Those are shared by the many diverse communities in the 19th District.” He added: “The West Side sees things a little differently.”

And while one of Breyer’s main issues is education, the great San Francisco value of taxing the wealthy to provide public services isn’t part of his platform. Although he does support Gov. Brown’s tax plan for November, he does not support amending Prop. 13 to shift the burden of taxation back to commercial property. He has the strong support of the Building Owners and Managers Association, which is all about keeping taxes low on huge commercial properties owned by vastly rich outfits.

So he clearly doesn’t share my old-fashioned San Francisco values. What about yours?

UPDATE: My mistake — Feinstein hasn’t endorsed Breyer. She supported him for D5 supervisor but is staying out of this race.

 

 

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