Unions

Holding corporations accountable for job creation claims

Sasha Cuttler
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Amid the ongoing state budget impasse and an election season dominated by scapegoating public employee unions for public sector fiscal problems, Sen. Leland Yee (D-SF) today introduced legislation to hold corporations that receive tax breaks accountable for the jobs they claim to create, a bill that was quietly killed earlier this year after being approved by both houses of the Legislature.

Opposition to the bill by corporate interests should puncture the oft-repeated myth that tax breaks spur job creation rather than simply increased corporate profits, a myth that leads everyone from SF Mayor Gavin Newsom to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to push business tax breaks that have hobbled the ability of governments to effectively function.

After intense lobbying against the measure by banks and the California Chamber of Commerce, SB 1391 fell one vote short on the concurrence approval it needed on the last night the Legislature’s regular session after some Southern California legislators who had originally voted for it decided to let it die. So Yee has reintroduced the bill as SBx6 20 for consideration during the upcoming special session that the governor called to deal with tax reform, which begins when legislators return to vote on the state budget as soon as this week.

The measure would require corporations that claim job creation tax credits to annually file information with the Franchise Tax Board listing how many full-time positions they offer. If the number of jobs at the company drops over a three-year period – a common occurrence in this era of outsourcing and downsizing – the corporations would be required to pay back taxpayers for their tax breaks.

“It is wrong for California to provide upwards of $14 billion in corporate tax credits without transparency and accountability,” Yee said in a public statement, also adding, “A working mother on CalWORKS or disabled senior receiving in-home supportive services has to jump through numerous bureaucratic hoops to receive minimal life-sustaining benefits, but if you are a Wall Street bank or big corporation looking for scarce tax credits, no one asks any questions.”

Numerous studies and books such as the Great American Jobs Scam have shown how the pervasive argument that cutting business taxes promotes job growth just isn’t true, even though it is taken as an article of faith by corporation and business-friendly politicians. But one need only consider the current jobless economic recovery – in which corporate profits have rebounded while unemployment remains stubbornly high – to doubt the Chamber of Commerce messaging.

Yee’s Chief of Staff Adam Keigwin tells the Guardian the measure simply makes sense, particularly in the context of a discussion about tax reform: “Here we have found a majority vote solution to a revenue issue and a fairness issue,” he told us. “If we’re going to give these tax breaks, fine, but make sure there’s accountability.”

Adachi crosses the line

Sasha Cuttler
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87

Former Mayor Willie Brown and Public Defender Jeff Adachi – author of Prop. B, which would require city employees to pay more for their pension and health care costs – yesterday crossed a union picket line at Le Méridien, which is being boycotted by hotel workers with Unite-Here Local 2, to attend a fundraiser for the measure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6K8FkTt7pM

San Francisco Labor Council President Tim Paulson called it “such an outrageous thing in San Francisco.” Even Sup. Sean Elsbernd, perhaps the most conservative member of the Board of Supervisor, was shocked today when told of Adachi’s crossing the line, saying he would have never done so. Local 2 spokesperson Riddhi Mehta told us, “It shows their true colors. By no means are they for working families.”

Adachi has been public enemy number one of local labor leaders since he authored the measure with little input from unions or other public officials, and Paulson said this action was emblematic of Adachi’s hostility to unions, adding that it was even more surprising to see Brown, a longtime ally of unions, supporting the measure and crossing the line.

“It was not unexpected for Jeff Adachi, with the way he’s been acting lately, not caring about labor, but it was a little surprising for Willie Brown considering his career and record,” Paulson said.

Adachi told the Guardian that he was unaware at the time that it was a Local 2 picket line. “The honest truth is that when I got there, I thought it was a protest against Prop. B,” Adachi said. Yet he also that even if he had know, “I still would have went to the event.”

“I completely support the workers’ right to strike, but at the same time, I am on a mission to save the city $120 million a year,” Adachi told us. “The resources that the opponents are pouring into this are completely unreal.”

La Merdien has been on the Local 2 boycott list for several months, and both Paulson and Mehta said the picket was independent of Prop. B, although some SEIU members did show up with signs criticizing the measure. As for scheduling future fundraisers at other boycotted hotels, Adachi told us, “I’ll be more mindful of that.”

Play at work, or more at play?

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Play at work, or more at play?

rebeccab@sfbg.com

There’s a long-standing perception in San Francisco that certain development firms are treated more favorably than others thanks to insider politics. And while supporters of Mayor Gavin Newsom say he’s cleaned up the pay-to-play culture, a look at the list of contributors to Newsom’s run for lieutenant governor at the very least raises questions.

For example, according to campaign filings, Newsom received $6,500 from a business called 706 Mission Street Co. LLC, which was formed to construct a condo high-rise at Yerba Buena Center. The building would also be a new permanent home for the city’s Mexican Museum. The 706 Mission project, which has been in the works for several years, is a joint venture between developer Millennium Partners and JMA Ventures, a San Francisco-based real estate investment firm. JMA Ventures contributed $5,000 to Newsom, campaign finance records show, and the firm’s president and CEO, Todd Chapman, also made a generous donation of $1,000. Effectively, Newsom’s campaign received a total of $12,500 from individuals or firms associated with 706 Mission.

The project has been under the jurisdiction of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency since 2008, when the Redevelopment Commission authorized an exclusive negotiations agreement with the developer for the mixed-use high-rise and museum, to be partially constructed on a parcel owned by Redevelopment and later included plans to integrate the landmark Mercantile Building. The project went dormant in the face of the economic downturn, but it’s now moving forward again, and the environmental review of the proposed 600-foot tower falls under the purview of the city’s Planning Department. On Sept. 1, Newsom mentioned 706 Mission, a “new, world-class facility,” in a press release announcing a new director for the Mexican Museum.

“The Redevelopment Agency and the city are fully committed to the public/private/nonprofit partnership that will eventually bring the Mexican Museum to a new home in the heart of Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco’s premier cultural district,” Redevelopment Agency executive director Fred Blackwell proclaimed.

Another contributor that demonstrated strong financial support for Newsom’s bid is a global technical firm that has a hand in several major infrastructure and development projects throughout San Francisco. AECOM contributed $13,000 to Newsom’s campaign, and a handful of people who work for AECOM chipped in smaller amounts totaling $3,600, according to campaign-finance records. In an April 15 news release for investors, AECOM noted that it had been awarded a $26 million contract for construction management of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s Water Improvement Infrastructure Project. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported in May, the firm was also awarded a five-year, $147 million contract with the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency for construction management on the Central Subway project. AECOM is also playing a role in a number of major developments currently under review in city planning. It is the prime environmental impact report consultant for the California Pacific Medical Center proposal for a giant new hospital on Van Ness Avenue. It’s also completing a traffic corridor analysis for 19th Avenue on behalf of the developers of Parkmerced, a renovation and in-fill project on track to be one of the largest new residential developments in the city.

 

A $2 MILLION BONUS

The Parkmerced developers have helped Newsom’s campaign along too. Craig Hartman, an internationally renowned architect with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill who is a design partner for the project, dropped $1,000 into Newsom’s hat. Two executives associated with Parkmerced each pitched in another $1,000.

A smaller project that has been in the works for years also seems close to home for Newsom. Michael Yarne, of the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, is a former director of development of the Martin Building Co., the lead developer on mixed-use residential project located in Central Waterfront at 2235 Third St. The project has commendable features such as a reuse of an existing industrial building, proximity to transit, and 39 below-market-rate units — and the project developer managed to secure an incredible deal with the city.

This past April, the Planning Commission approved an unprecedented in-kind agreement with Martin Building Co. that waived nearly $2 million in development fees, including about $1.2 million for 2235 Third St. and the rest for a second Martin Building Co. project on Townsend Street, in exchange for the developer’s commitment to construct a space for a day-care facility on the Third Street site and lease that portion of the property to a childcare provider for free for 55 years. The provider would have to operate the facility without profit and would be required to have low-income child-care slots, so this bargain would serve to create affordable day care.

Yarne’s close ties to the mayor and the developer — plus a $2,000 campaign contribution to Newsom from the head of the project’s general contractor, a building company called Nibbi Bros. — could raise a few eyebrows in light of this unprecedented deal, especially given the city’s gaping deficit and the question of how else that $2 million might have been put to use. The project was also awarded more than $1.6 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to excavate lead-contaminated soil from the property and transport it away for off-site disposal. The project, which has already been approved and moved to the Department of Building Inspection phase, also incorporates a City CarShare space. Yarne’s on the board of City CarShare, too.

It’s always possible that there is no connection between Newsom’s campaign contributions, his personal staff, and contributors’ connections to the myriad development projects in the hopper — but that doesn’t stop observers from asking questions. Developers who are anxious about the economic downturn may be motivated do everything in their power to speed a project along, and it’s possible that throwing money at a political campaign is just one tool among many.

Or maybe they just think Newsom would make a great lieutenant governor.

 

PLANNERS COMPLAIN

Nonetheless, the perception that certain developers get special treatment is shared by at least two former planners in the city’s Planning Department — one of whom is facing termination in the wake of a recent investigation surrounding porn email.

Following an internal shake-up at the planning department triggered by the discovery that some staffers shared pornographic e-mails, messages started flying about what was behind the crackdown. “Porn is not the real story,” Lois Scott, a retired planner and former president of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers Local 21 wrote in an e-mail to the Guardian.

After the porn scandal broke, the hammer came down. Five people were terminated effective this past May, and another 20 or more reportedly faced some form of disciplinary action.

Some have interpreted the move as a signal that Planning Director John Rahaim, a Newsom appointee, won’t stand for inappropriate conduct on his watch. At the same time, others have contacted the Guardian to voice concerns that the firings and internal shakeup were connected to something deeper than dirty emails.

Although speculative theories abound and there is a paucity of official comments on the firings due to privacy laws, one point is abundantly clear. In a city where powerful developers will go to great lengths to secure approval for lucrative projects, there’s a great deal of wariness surrounding city planning. San Francisco is host to leagues of developers, real estate investment groups, prestigious law firms specializing in land use, technical consultants, and politically powerful associations of residential builders, building owners, and building-trade unions — all with a huge financial stake in seeing projects make it past the approval finish line and onto groundbreaking.

When it comes to a major project that will transform a city block in San Francisco, the planning department (which relies on development fees to pay the bills) inevitably encounters pressure from two sides: well-connected development teams with economic interests on the one hand, and neighborhood groups or historic preservationists who aren’t shy about hurling criticism on the other.

So it’s no surprise than anything affecting the planning staff in a major way would not pass quietly.

One of the planners affected by the firings told the Guardian that the porn investigation went on for months. There were one-on-one interviews, and some 70 staff members were called in and questioned, some two or three times. Contents of computer hard drives and city e-mail accounts were analyzed. Later, huge posters went up, displaying questions like, “How Are You Going to Make a Better Planning Department?”

“It was bizarre,” the former planner said.

According to Leigh Kienker — a former planner who recently retired and was not implicated in the computer misuse investigation — the result of all this was to create a sort of chilling effect on the planning staff, especially since she said two of the five individuals who lost their jobs had been more likely to question management and speak up when they didn’t think a project was being handled properly. When it comes to ensuring that projects conform to the planning code, “We need to be able to speak up,” she said. “This is our expertise.”

Jim Miller, who had been with the department for more than 32 years and is regarded by his peers as very outspoken, discussed his own termination in an e-mail to a number of supporters. “I was given a loose-leaf binder indicating the reasons for the firing,” he wrote. “The information contained therein was decidedly very thin. This, plus the fact that others who had a greater role in the ‘wrongdoing’ received job suspension rather than termination, leads me to believe that there is some other reason for the action taken. This reason is heretofore unbeknownst to me.”

Cynthia Servetnick, shop steward for IFPTE Local 21 planner’s chapter and a historic preservation advocate, voiced concerns about how the department dealt with the porn problem in an e-mail to Rahaim. “Frankly, the firing of so many senior Planning Department staff members not only seems like a ‘witch hunt,’ but smacks of age discrimination against a class of union-represented employees for the purpose of shoring-up budget deficits and intimidating less senior employees,” she charged. In response, Rahaim dismissed her comments as baseless accusations.

 

BADINER GETS $82,500

At a Feb. 18 Planning Commission meeting, when the department’s proposed budget came under review, commissioners noted that Rahaim was in the unenviable position of having to lay off four to six staffers in order to balance the budget. Noting that a great deal of effort had gone into attracting fresh talent and hiring younger planners, several commissioners expressed hope that they wouldn’t be the first to go. Rahaim responded that, given the union’s seniority rules, his hands were tied to an extent. In light of that conversation, Servetnick suggested that the porn e-mails presented a convenient solution for a director faced with a thinly stretched budget. All of the five who were fired were 50 or older.

At the same time, others who closely follow city planning rejected the idea of any ulterior motive. Sue Hestor, a land-use attorney who seems to have her finger firmly on the pulse of San Francisco development, told the Guardian that she’d heard plenty of rumors, but wasn’t necessarily buying the hype. Charles Marsteller, a former director of Common Cause and a keen observer of the planning process, said he had little reason to suspect that what had happened was anything more than responding to inappropriate conduct.

Zoning Administrator Larry Badiner, a 28-year veteran of the department who critics say was friendly to high-end developers, was fired in the wake of the porn investigation along with three lower-level staffers — but he appeared to walk away with a better deal than his subordinates.

A Guardian sunshine request revealed that Badiner received a six-month severance package amounting to $82,500, plus benefits he was eligible for that could have amounted to more than $57,000 (but may be significantly less). In exchange, he agreed not to sue the city. None of the other planning staffers who were terminated appear to have received such a payout.

Meanwhile, Badiner may not have been the highest-ranking city employee to be snagged in the porn investigation. An e-mail address of dlmacris[at]aol.com was included on an e-mail provided to the Guardian that contained a rather tame pornographic image.

The planner who sent the e-mail was fired after the porn investigation, and so were three of the recipients. Former Planning Director Dean Macris, who more recently served as a special advisor to Newsom, stopped working for the city around the same time Badiner and the others were terminated. Mayoral spokesperson Tony Winnicker told the Guardian he could not discuss anything related to how or why Macris left city service.

Rahaim said he had no choice in the Badiner severance. “The issue with Larry Badiner was required as part of a MEA labor contract. It requires a payout in any situation where a person is terminated or laid off.” He added that the firings were “strictly because of inappropriate use of city resources and also because of the type of material” that was being viewed. There was “absolutely no other reason.”

And he insisted that no developers get favoritism: “I have no idea who’s contributing to whose campaign.”

At least one response to the rash of firings commended the planning director for taking action. “I applaud your efforts to address hostile working conditions related to gender and sexual preference, which have long existed in the Planning Department,” a retired senior planner wrote to Rahaim shortly after the firings. “There is, perhaps as you have realized, a deep undercurrent of unresolved and unpleasant practices which perhaps finally led to the present complaints.”

Does the planning department shake-up indicate a move away from the bad old days of quid pro quo dealings and hostile working conditions, thanks to a director who’s standing strong against inappropriate conduct — or is it a move to consolidate power in a department led by a mayoral appointee at a time when the development community is particularly hungry to move new projects forward? Given the knock-down, drag-out fights that have unfolded over planning in the city’s history, and the high sums of money that are gushing into project proposals and campaign coffers, it’s no wonder the question is being posed.

“The bottom line is, the public is not being served,” Servetnick said. “Developers shouldn’t be able to come in and say, ‘Just for me!’ If everybody who pays to play gets away with that, we’re going to end up with a really ugly city.”

Labor Day heroes

David Talbot
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Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Let’s pause for a moment this Labor Day to recognize some of our most important, yet most maligned workers.

They’re teachers and librarians, police officers and firefighters.  They’re bus drivers, doctors and nurses. Judges and lawyers, landscape gardeners and arborists. They’re laborers and other maintenance and construction workers . . .

They are, of course, public employees. There are millions of them, who every day perform many thousands of the essential tasks that keep our country going.

It is they who keep our streets and highways, our parks and playgrounds safe and clean, who help educate our children, provide emergency health care, convey us to our jobs and back home, who sometimes risk their very lives to protect us from harm.

Yet for all that, public employees have come under heavy bipartisan attacks by political leaders and would-be leaders who find them an easy target to blame for the budget shortfalls that beset government at all levels. Labor costs, after all, make up the bulk of government spending everywhere.

The politicians and too many others who benefit from the public employees’ services – and, in fact, demand the services – say public employees are paid too much and their fringe benefits are way too generous, especially their pensions.

The employees’ pay and benefits were in most cases the result of democratic give-and-take collective bargaining and are guaranteed in union contracts that their government employers agreed to, sometimes after a long and difficult struggle by the workers.

But that was then, this is now. This is a time to make scapegoats of public employees, to shift the blame for economic troubles to them.

Public servants they were then, but public enemies they are now in many quarters, where they’re characterized as overpaid and underworked members of greedy and much too economically and politically powerful unions.
Their unions are now in the vanguard of the labor movement, growing larger and stronger while other unions shrink, and becoming serious new threats to anti-labor forces on Wall Street and elsewhere that seek profit from the work of others in private and public employment alike.

There’s no legitimate reason for any government entity to finance operations at the expense of its employees, whose jobs are among the nation’s most important, or to deny  them much deserved pay and benefit increases.  There’s plenty of money available to cover the costs.

And where is that treasure trove to be found?  Where else but in money-hungry corporate America. It’s simple. Repeal the huge tax cuts that President Bush and his corporation-loving, union-hating Republican colleagues bestowed on their wealthy friends.

That would bring in an estimated $3.75 trillion over the next ten years and just about erase the federal budget deficit.  But that’s not going to happen as long as Republicans retain enough votes in Congress to wage a filibuster.

GOP leaders would rather try to reduce the deficit by such outrageous steps as raising the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 70, and thus deny much-needed benefits to millions of the working class Americans who we honor on Labor Day.

None are more deserving of our appreciation, none more deserving of being honored than the men and women who do the work of government that benefits us all.

Happy Labor Day.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

SEIU and the new McCarthyism

David Talbot
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SEIU and the new McCarthyism

OPINION More than 43,000 California health care employees are currently involved in the largest union election in private industry since the 1940s, a contentious campaign that pits officials of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) against the National Union of Health Care Workers (NUHW). The outcome of the election may well determine the future of the labor movement for years to come.

The leaders of NUHW (the interim president is Sal Rosselli) are the same organizers who inspired and united us in achieving a historic victory: the five-year Kaiser Permanente contract of 2005-10. Health care workers all over the state depend on the benefits enumerated in that contract, including employment and income seniority, paid retirement, paid family health care, and employee participation in staffing and health care issues. The contract is still considered the national gold standard for hospitals.

A few years ago, our union, part of SEIU, was united and strong. The nurses, lab technicians, secretaries, operators, environmental service personnel, x-ray technologists — we were all proud to work together in a noble enterprise, fostering and saving human life. Today, SEIU is in disarray.

The decline began when Andy Stern took power in Washington. He established absentee rule of California. After he withdrew SEIU from the AFL-CIO (which prohibits union raids of other unions), Stern launched a series of raids on two sister unions, UNITE HERE and the Puerto Rican Teachers’ Union. The San Francisco Labor Council (along with the AFL-CIO) formally denounced the Stern raid on UNITE HERE. The raid cost our members millions of dollars. Stern then moved against our California locals, particularly United Healthcare Workers-West, led by Rosselli. Rosselli was the leading champion of democratic unionism in the state. In defiance of the wishes of our membership, Stern fired Rosselli.

The bitterness and hostility within our union today are a direct result of Stern’s mass purges. One hundred elected members of the executive board were removed by fiat. Hundreds of elected shop stewards were dismissed. Subsequently, 48 other stewards resigned in protest of the autocratic policies of the national office. The standard joke at California Kaiser worksites is, “Got a grievance? Call Washington!” Juan Gonzalez, the widely read columnist for the New York Daily News, called the Stern blitz “a stunning assault on democracy within his own union.”

SEIU represents a new kind of McCarthyism in the labor movement, a trend that threatens the unity of labor as a whole.

SEIU bully tactics to prevent workers from joining NUHW are so widespread, so well-documented, that Dolores Huerta, cofounder of the United Farm Workers, sent an open letter to SEIU President Mary Kay Henry, who succeeded Stern after he retired. Huerta complained that “every time workers met to talk about NUHW, SEIU staff surrounded them and began chanting and yelling insults, refusing to let workers talk.”

Even the homes of workers are not off limits. In Fresno, local TV stations (just Google “TV Coverage of SEIU Threats”) documented SEIU pressure tactics during house visits, after workers received their ballots in the mail.

The demise of our once great union has implications far beyond our locals in California. If California’s most successful, democratic labor organizers can be overthrown, If elected shop steward networks (shop stewards are the backbone of union democracy) can be dismantled by fiat, if Washington can establish absentee rule of locals from 3,000 miles away, no union is safe, and American democracy itself is diminished.

Jessica Garcia and Elaine Monney are rank-and-file members of SEIU.

Hands off social security!

David Talbot
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Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Republican leaders in Congress would have us believe that most Americans support cutting Social Security and Medicare payments as a way to cut the federal budget deficit. But don’t you believe it.

As the AFL-CIO and other labor sources have discovered, that’s at best a figment of the Republican imagination. Or, as is most likely, it’s a bald-faced political lie.

The proof came in a poll marking the 75th anniversary of Social Security this year. It was conducted by a prominent research organization, Greenberg Quilan Rosner, and commissioned by the nation’s leading public employee unions, the Service Employees International and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, joined by MoveOn.org and the Campaign for America’s Future.

The poll was in response to Republican House leader John Boehner’s call for reducing the federal budget deficit by raising the Social Security retirement age to 70, while continuing President Bush’s massive tax breaks for multi-billion-dollar corporations and wealthy individuals.

Boehner, that is, wants to lower the Republicans’ rich friends’ taxes at the expense of Americans who must rely on Social Security payments, averaging less than $14,000 a year, to meet their basic living expenses.

It would make much more sense, of course, to reduce the deficit by increasing taxes on the wealthy at least to the level they were before Bush’s tax cuts, rather than do it by raising the retirement age and making other financial cutbacks that hurt low and middle income Americans.

So, what did the poll show?

Most Democrats and independents responding wanted to end the Bush tax cuts that, if not repealed, will increase the deficit by an estimated $3.1 trillion over the next decade and reduce government revenue by more than $650 billion. That obviously would greatly curtail Social Security and other government programs for poor and middle class Americans.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that most of the Republicans polled did not want to repeal the tax cuts and thus help government provide more services to those who need them, often badly need them.

Nevertheless, nearly 70 percent of the probable voters polled, whatever their political party, opposed cutting Social Security and Medicare to reduce the deficit.
What’s more, two-thirds of the Republicans also opposed raising the retirement age, despite their general dislike of the Social Security system. Raising the retirement age from 67 to 70 obviously would greatly curtail Social Security and other government programs designed to help poor and middle class Americans. But that apparently didn’t disturb many of the Republicans polled. Most of them did not want to repeal the tax cuts under any circumstance.

The AFL-CIO concluded – and quite accurately, I think – that “those conservative politicians who want to use concern about deficits as an opening to go after Social Security or Medicare risk a backlash” from voters.

The poll made clear that relatively few people are buying the Republican claims that Social Security and Medicare outlays are a major cause of the continuing federal budget deficit. Too many people have too much sense to believe that.

But what did sensible voters see as the main causes of the deficit?

Nearly half of those polled blamed the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
About a third blamed the bailouts of big banks and the auto industry.

Nearly a third blamed lobbyists and special interests for getting unnecessary spending put into the budget.

Almost as many placed the major blame on President Obama’s economic recovery or stimulus plan.

About one-fourth blamed the Bush tax cuts.  A relative few blamed the economic recession that reduced tax revenue and required costly government support for the unemployed. A relatively few others blamed the deficit on the cost of Medicare prescription drug benefits.

What it boils down to is this, as the AFL-CIO’s James Parks said in a bit of public advice to GOP Congressman Boehner:  “The public doesn’t like your plan to cut their Social Security so your rich friends can get another tax break.”

Anyone doubting the popularity and importance of Social Security need only consider a recent AARP survey that showed  “exceedingly high” support for the program.

” Clearly,” said AARP researcher Colette Thayer, ” most Americans rely on Social Security and expect it to be a source of income in their retirement. In fact, it is the most commonly cited source of retirement income.”

    Whatever their ages, whether over 30 or under, the poll – just as others like taken on the program’s anniversary dates five, 15 and 25 years ago – shows that Social Security is one of the government’s most important programs in that it provides essential retirement income to millions of Americans who would otherwise have little or no income.

The Campaign for America’s Future and MoveOn.org, will be jointly campaigning for candidates in the coming midterm elections who’ll pledge to block cuts in Social Security and Medicare and otherwise back the organizations’ liberal agendas. The unions that helped them sponsor the poll will also be waging major campaigns, as will other AFL-CIO affiliates.

They’re backing the kind of political candidates we should all back – and as strongly as we can. Our social security depends on it.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Historic election for labor

Zelda Bronstein
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Historic election for labor

Labor and Democratic Party leaders are concerned – and rightly so – that labor’s rank-and-file may not turn out in November to support labor-friendly Democrats in the massive numbers that played a major role in the election of President Obama and Democratic congressional majorities in 2008.

AFL-CIO officials are hoping to turn the anger and frustration that so many working people feel into votes, financial support and campaigning in behalf of pro-labor Democrats.  But the officials worry about an “enthusiasm gap” among unionists and their supporters stemming from the relatively slow pace of the progressive economic and political changes that they had very much expected from Obama and the congressional Democrats.

Many unionists are frustrated as usual by the lack of a viable progressive alternative to the Democratic Party. But they’d best beware, as AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says, of the serious consequences of   being less than enthusiastic supporters of Democratic candidates in November’s elections.

“The Republican Party of NO doesn’t want our vote,” says Trumka. “All they want is for us to stay home. They want us to feel hopeless and disgusted so they can come back by default.”

 Trumka acknowledges that many union members, and many of their supporters and other progressives, are frustrated with the slow pace of economic change, the continuing high unemployment rate, continuing wars and other serious, unsettled problems.

But Trumka points out that in just a year and a half, Obama has had to dig out of a huge economic hole and “face extremist opposition on every point.” Yet, Trumka notes, “We’ve halted taxpayer bailouts … no longer are losing 700,000 jobs a month but are gaining a few… And by the end of this year we will have created or saved 3 1/2 million jobs and have fulfilled the dream of every president since Harry Truman and started to move down the road to health care for all. “

Organized labor has particularly good reason to be pleased with the performance of Obama and the congressional Democrats – particularly good reason to once again deploy millions of campaign dollars and millions of campaign workers in their behalf as labor did in the 2008 elections.

The Labor Department and National Labor Relations Board, virtually tools of the anti-labor right wing under President Bush, are under Obama returning to their job of enforcing the laws that guarantee workers the right to unionize without employer interference.

 And federal agencies are once again strictly enforcing the minimum wage and hour laws and other vital pro-worker laws that had been seriously neglected under Bush’s distinctly anti-labor administration. What’s more, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is actually attempting to clamp down on the widespread violation of the job safety laws that has led to the needless deaths and serious injury of millions of American workers.

“We know you are angry,” Trumka told a recent gathering of labor leaders, “but we have made progress. No one said this was going to be easy. Ask African Americans how long they have fought and continue to fight. If they had given up after a year and a half they would still be in chains.”

 November’s election, says Richard Trumka, is  “the most crucial election in 75 years.” It will in any case be of unusually high importance to America’s working people and their unions and of exceptional importance to the rest of us as well.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www. dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Arnold’s budget casts most vulnerable as The Expendables

Sasha Cuttler
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5

As California’s Budget Conference Committee moves forward with negotiations for the 2010 budget, Assembly member Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) is promoting her movie, “Faces Behind the Governor’s Cuts,” to different Bay Area venues in an effort to send a message to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that his proposed cuts on services ignore the needs of the poor, parents who use child care facilities, and the elderly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cA3UieZCYj0

Skinner had her first screening of the movie just days after the blockbuster premiere of “The Expendables,” which includes a Schwarzenegger cameo. Yet instead of high packed action featuring a slew of legendary actions stars, Skinner presents a one minute short featuring interviews with home care workers, a single mother, a teacher, and an elder day care provider – all of whom would be severely impacted by the Schwarzenegger’s budget proposals.

The Budget Conference Committee released its balanced budget on August 4, rejecting Schwarzenegger’s cuts on jobs, senior care, and closure of child care centers – exactly the issues that the stars of Skinner’s film address. The committee suggested ways of raising revenue in lieu of cuts on vital services, such as closing the oil drilling loophole and delaying new corporate tax breaks. Despite the Committee settling on a budget with $14 billion in spending reductions and $4 billion in new revenue, Schwarzenegger still wants more cuts.

Yet Skinner says that Schwarzenegger’s plan would cost more than 430,000 private sector, local government and school jobs. The committee’s budget protects these jobs and creates thousands of new jobs from a $300 million private sector jobs fund.

“Unemployment is not the path to economic recovery,” Skinner told the Guardian. “There’s a way to craft a budget that protects people and jobs and it’s going to require a little revenue. There’s no way to do an all cuts budget – at this point in time – that doesn’t bring harm.”

Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear didn’t see Skinner’s movie, but responded to Skinner’s concerns, telling us, “We understand Assemblywoman Skinner supports a massive tax increase to protect public employee pensions and the status quo for unions. We simply disagree.”

But looking beyond tensions between Schwarzenegger’s camp and the budget committee are the people these budget decisions affect – parents who work full time and use state-subsidized care for their children and the in-home attendants who the elderly rely on for care.

Daniel McGrath is an in-home supportive services (IHSS) caregiver who takes regular trips to Sacramento to speak out about the issue. “Life and death should never be on the table,” McGrath told us. “These disabled, elderly, and sick community members – our grandparents, brothers, sisters, cousins – are the most vulnerable in our society and the fact that they have to fight for themselves is ridiculous.”

McGrath accompanies his clients, Mark Beckwith, to Sacramento despite a health condition that only allows Beckwith to move his fingers. Beckwith comes to Sacramento to send the message that “the IHSS program saves the state so much money. In institutions like nursing homes, it costs five times as more.”

In addition to cuts to elderly care, Schwarzenegger’s budget plan cuts eliminates child care programs – a blow to parents who work full time and cannot afford to pay for market rate child care and will have no choice but to quit their jobs to take care of their children full time.

Michelle Alvarez, an administrative assistant at UC Berkeley, said in a written statement, “I don’t think my family would have been able to survive with out the help of BUSD preschools and after school programs. The state childcare has allowed me to have a stable job here at UC Berkeley for the past 8 years. Without the state childcare, it would be hard for not just my family, but other low income families to keep our jobs or go to school and care for our kids.”

As the budget committee and Schwarzenegger continue to duke out their differences, the fate of these people lingers in the distance. But Skinner poses a question for Schwarzenegger to think about: “For the governor, it appears that the numbers math is easy, but what about the human math – the impact on people, their livelihood, their jobs, and the ability to live independently?”

Democrats divided

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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25
Democrats divided

Update:This online article contains a correction concerning the DCCC’s vote on Sup. Sean Elsbernd’s Muni pay guarantees (Prop. G). In the print version of this article, the Guardian reported that the DCCC had voted “to recommend a no vote” on Prop. G. This is incorrect. The DCCC voted “not to endorse” Prop. G. As Elsbernd points out, “This is a key distinction.”

Sarah@sfbg.com

With fewer than 10 weeks to go until a pivotal November election, the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) approved a package of endorsements at its Aug. 11 meeting, giving the nod to mostly progressive candidates and rejecting Mayor Gavin Newsom’s most divisive ballot measures.

This crucial election could alter the balance of power on a Board of Supervisors that is currently dominated by progressives, and that new board would be seated just as it potentially gets the chance to appoint an interim mayor.

That’s what will happen if Newsom wins his race for lieutenant governor. The latest campaign finance reports show that Newsom has raised twice as much money as the Republican incumbent, former state Sen. Abel Maldonado. But the two candidates are still neck-and-neck in the polls.

Although the DCCC supports Newsom in the race, it is resisting his agenda for San Francisco, voting to oppose his polarizing sit-lie legislation (Prop. L), a hotel tax loophole closure (Prop. K) that would invalidate the hotel tax increase that labor unions placed on the ballot, and his hypocritical ban on local elected officials serving on the DCCC (Prop. H).

Shortly after the vote, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Newsom called an emergency closed-door meeting with some of his downtown allies to discuss the upcoming election. “We just wanted to get on the same page on what’s going on locally, what’s going with the ballot initiatives, where people are on the candidates for supervisor,” Newsom told the newspaper.

DCCC Chair Aaron Peskin, who regularly battled with Newsom during his tenure as president of the Board of Supervisors, voted with the progressive bloc against Newsom’s three controversial measures. But he told us that he was glad to see the mayor finally engage in the local political process.

Sup. David Campos kicked off the DCCC meeting by rebuffing newly elected DCCC member Carole Migden’s unsuccessful attempt to rescind the body’s endorsement of Michael Nava for Superior Court Judge, part of a push by the legal community to rally behind Richard Ulmer and other sitting judges.

Things got even messier when the DCCC endorsed the candidates for supervisor. In District 2, the DCCC gave the nod to Janet Reilly, snubbing incumbent Sup. Michela Alioto-Pier, who is running now that Superior Court Judge Peter Busch has ruled that she is not termed out (a ruling on City Attorney Dennis Herrera’s appeal of Busch’s ruling is expected soon).

In District 6, where candidates include DCCC member Debra Walker, School Board President Jane Kim, Human Rights Commission Executive Director Theresa Sparks, neighborhood activist Jim Meko, and drag queen Glendon Hyde (a.k.a. Anna Conda), the club endorsed only Walker, denying Kim the second-place endorsement she was lobbying for.

But in District 8, where candidates include progressive DCCC member Rafael Mandelman, moderate DCCC member Scott Wiener, and moderate Rebecca Prozan, the politics got really squirrelly. As expected, Mandelman got the first-place nod with 18 votes: the progressive’s bare 17-vote majority on the 33-member body plus Assembly Member Leland Yee.

Yet because Yee supports Prozan and David Chiu, the Board of Supervisors president who was also part of the DCCC progressive slate, had offered less than his full support for Mandelman, a deal was cut to give Prozan a second-place endorsement.

That move caused some public and private grumbling from Jane Kim’s supporters, who noted that Kim is way more progressive than Prozan and said she should have been given the second-place slot in D6.

A proxy for John Avalos even tried to get the DCCC to give Walker and Kim a dual first-place endorsement, but Peskin ruled that such a move was not permitted by the group’s bylaws. Then DCCC members Eric Mar and Eric Quezada argued that Kim should get the club’s second-choice endorsement.

But Walker’s supporters argued that Kim only recently moved into the district and changed her party affiliation from the Green Party to the Democratic Party, and Kim’s supporters failed to find the 17 votes they needed.

“District 6 has an amazing wealth of candidates and I look forward to supporting many of them in future races,” Gabriel Haaland told his DCCC colleagues. “I will just not be supporting them tonight.”

Wiener told the group he would not seek its endorsement for anything below the top slot. “I’m running for first place and I intend to win,” Wiener said, shortly before Prozan secured the club’s second-choice endorsement.

In District 4, the DCCC endorsed incumbent Carmen Chu, who is running virtually unopposed. The DCCC also endorsed Bert Hill’s run for the BART Board of Directors, where he hopes to unseat James Fang, San Francisco’s only elected Republican.

The body had already decided to delay its school board endorsements until September and ended up pushing its District 10 supervisorial endorsement back until then as well because nobody had secured majority support.

“I think it’s because they want to give members of the DCCC a chance to learn more about some of the candidates,” District 10 candidate Dewitt Lacy told the Guardian. “I don’t think folks have spent enough time to make an informed decision.”

D10 candidate Chris Jackson agreed, adding, “The progressives in this race have brought our issues to the forefront.”

“I think it’s appropriate,” concurred D10 candidate Isaac Bowers. “D10 is a complicated district. It’s wise to wait and see how it settles out.”

The main thing that needs to be resolved is which candidate in the crowded field will emerge as the progressive alternative to Lynette Sweet, who has the support of downtown groups and mega-developer Lennar Corp.

After the meeting, Walker said different races require different political strategies. “I think it’s hard in the progressive community, where so many of us know each other and even our supporters know the other candidates and are their supporters in other scenarios,” Walker said.

“But the Democratic Party makes decisions not just based on politics,” she continued. “So the endorsement is about being viable and successfully involved in Democratic issues. And even though I want to encourage everyone to run, and we have that ability with ranked choice voting and public financing, when it comes to straight-on politics, the goal is winning.”

Walker said the vote on D8 reflected the reality that Mandelman was having trouble getting the necessary number of votes. “I know Rebecca and I know Rafael, and Rafael was my clear first choice,” Walker said.” Rafael asked me to consider voting for Rebecca—and I voted for her as my second choice.”

Walker predicts she’ll have union support behind her campaign, while Kim, who leads in fundraising, will have independent expenditure committees that will support her campaign.

“My consultant says it’s a $250,000 race, and unfortunately the viability is based on that reality, the funds, the money,” Walker observed.

On the fall ballot measures, the DCCC voted to recommend a no vote on Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s measure to make city employees pay more for the pension and healthcare costs (Prop. B), Sup. Sean Elsbernd’s Health Service Board Elections (Prop. F,) and Newsom’s three controversial measures. And they voted “no endorsement” on Elsbernd’s measure to remove from the charter Muni pay guarantees (Prop. G). 

But the DCCC did vote to endorse a local vehicle registration fee surcharge (Prop. AA), Newsom’s earthquake retrofit bond (Prop. A), Sup. Chris Daly’s proposed legislation to require mayoral appearances at board meetings (Prop. C), Chiu’s measure to allow noncitizen voting in school board elections (Prop. D), Sup. Ross Mirkarimi’s Election Day voter registration (Prop. E), former Newsom campaign manager Alex Tourk’s Saturday voting proposal (Prop. I) Labor’s hotel tax (Prop. J ), Mirkarimi’s foot patrols measure (Prop. M) and Avalos’ real estate transfer tax (Prop. N).

With just about everybody opposed to Adachi’s measure going after public employee unions, Walker observed that Adachi probably wishes he had done it differently now. But looking into the future, Walker sees opportunities for the party to come back together.

“There’s an opportunity to start a dialogue because everyone is hurting,” Walker said. “The more we don’t have a proactive solution, the more we get caught at the bottom.”

And in a feel-good vote for the frequently divided body, the DCCC also voted overwhelmingly to endorse the statewide initiative to legalize and tax marijuana (Prop. 19). Normally local party committees don’t take a position on state initiatives, but because the California Democratic Party took no position on Prop. 19, the DCCC had permission to weigh in.

As Peskin put it before the enthusiastic marijuana vote, “Raise your hands — high.”

Two steaming non-scandals

Zelda Bronstein
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Two steaming non-scandals

The political press is all over two of the big non-scandals of the day, Jerry Brown’s pension and Jeff Adachi’s budget. Let’s start with ol’ Jer’.


You can say a lot of things about Jerry Brown, and I’ve said a lot of them myself, but the guy has never tried to enrich himself off the public dollar. Fact is, Jerry’s about as cheap as you can get, and hates to spend money — his money, campaign money, public money. In some ways, he’s responsible for Prop. 13, because he was such a cheapskate as governor in the 1970s that he ran up a huge billion-dollar-plus surplus in Sacramento at a time when property taxes were soaring.


But Matt Drudge, playing off public anger at state employee pensions, decided that Brown was “double dipping,” citing and OC Register report, and suddenly, the former gov’s secret pension was big news. But wait, the Chron actually figured it out: Brown isn’t drawing any pension at all right now. If he were to retire after about 25 years of service as secretary of state, governor, mayor of Oakland, attorney general and a Supreme Court clerk, he’d be eligible for a pension of $78,450 — considerably less than your average San Francisco cop or firefighter. Knowing Jerry, he’ll probably decline it anyway.


In other words: No story.


Then there’s Jeff Adachi’s budget. I know, it looks bad for a guy who’s trying to cut worker pensions and health care to be seeing budget increases and still leave the city with a $2 million legal tab for work he refused to handle. But really, this is old news — Adachi’s been warning for a couple of years that he was going to have to decline cases (and thus stick the city with a private legal bill). And let’s remember: The staff in the Public Defender’s Office handles almost twice as many cases as they ought to.


Adachi’s ballot initiative annoys me — he’s going after city employee benefits instead of looking at where the city can raise new revenue. And he’s acting like a lone wolf, demanding that his office is properly staffed and launching an initiative that attacks public employee unions instead of trying to work with them.


But I don’t blame him for being agressive in pushing for adequate funding for his shop — I wish the director of public health was willing to try as hard to avoid cutbacks instead of going along with whatever the mayor proposes. And his current budget is nowhere near as scandalous as what happens every single year with police and fire.


 

Unions sue to block Adachi measure

Mary Magee
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Five city-employee labor unions have filed suit to stop  Public Defender Jeff Adachi‘s “Sustainable City Employees Benefits Reform Act” (or Prop. B) from making it onto  the November ballot.

The San Francisco Fire Fighters Local 798, International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers Local 21, Service Employees International Union Local 1021, the San Francisco Municipal Executives’ Association, and the San Francisco Police Officers Association filed suit August 10.

In a press release, Adachi said the suit attempts to discredit the Civil Grand Jury, the Department of Elections, the City Attorney and the rights of over 77,000 San Franciscan’s who signed the petition and, of course, Adachi himself..  

“The law has very specific requirements that must be followed in order to receive the approval from the Department of Elections for a measure to qualify for the ballot,” Adachi observed. 
“The democratic process by which the Sustainable City Employees Benefits Reform Act was approved both by the City Attorney through granting title and summary to the petition and by the Department of Elections when the signatures of 49,178 San Francisco voters were verified and accepted,” Adachi continued. “We as Americans have the freedom afforded to us by the Constitution to have our choices heard at the ballot box and the taxpayers have the right to address how their tax dollars are spent in San Francisco without interference from special interest groups.”

Representatives from the unions filing suit have yet to return my calls, but I’ll update this post, when they get back to me on the Adachi amendment, which is shaping up to be the hottest political potato on the November ballot.

Adachi’s pension reform and the D. 10 candidates

Mary Magee
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As pretty much everyone knows by now, Jeff Adachi collected enough signatures to place a charter amendment on the November ballot that would reform the city’s retirement and health benefits plan. His amendment has become such a hot political topic that the Potrero Hill Democractic Club asked the 15 candidates who spoke at the club’s  August 2 and 3 District 10 forums what they thought of Adachi’s “smart reform.”

By my understanding of what the candidates said, four seemed unsure what the Adachi amendment would do, or were open to the idea, while the other eleven were opposed. But read for yourself what the D. 10 candidates said and decide where they stand on this issue:

Kristine Enea: “Certainly something needs to be done. I did sign [Adachi’s] petition. Adjusting for new employees has an inherent fairness. The path we are on is not sustainable.”

Nyese Joshua: (After admitting that she didn’t know much about Adachi’s amendment), “In terms of bringing it to the ballot, I agree.”

Lynette Sweet: “What Jeff Adachi did was not a bad thing, but the way he went about it was.”

Stephen Weber: “I don’t believe it was done right way, but I like the idea. The labor leaders are willing to sit down and discuss the pension plan. They just want to discuss it with the Board that is sitting there now.”

Eric Smith. “I love Jeff Adachi. And initially it looked great. But Beyond Chron [for which Smith sometimes writes] has an interesting story: When I read it, it says the measure goes after people’s health benefits. That’s troubling. I can’t really get behind this. We need to do reform from the bottom up, not from the top down.”

Malia Cohen: “Adachi’s a great public defender, but he’s taken an approach that’s disrespectful of public policy. Instead, he’s created a policy. I’m not in favor of it, if it unfairly taxes those at the bottom.”

Steve Moss: “The labor unions are rightfully furious. Pensions need reform. Things are out of whack. But this could lead to folks losing healthcare because they have to pay more to cover their dependants.”

Geoffrea Morris: “He had a point. The unions are very powerful in the city, he didn’t want to go through the red tape. Something needs to be done to reform healthcare and pensions.”

Isaac Bowers: “I thoroughly reviewed the San Francisco civil grand jury’s ‘Pension Tsunami’ report. I don’t think his initiative is the right way to go. I fear copayments for healthcare will throw people back on the city.”

Tony Kelly: “Great guy, stupid idea.”

Espanola Jackson: “You should talk to Adachi. Don’t shoot him down.”

Chris Jackson: “The measure is popular, it’s polling in the 60 percent range. But Adachi never talked to the nurses and the workers who make $35,000. And then there is the fact that this in an attack on healthcare. So a large percentage of the ‘savings’ is what workers will have to contribute. It’s a move away from supporting working class individuals.”

DeWitt Lacy: “We need pension reform. But no one likes change rammed down their throats without any negotation with, or input from, the workers. It addresses an important issue, but it’s too divisive.”

Diane Wesley Smith: “It’s ridiculous. Some reform has to happen, but this isn’t it.”

Marlene Tran: “Jeff Adachi took a lot of risks in this pro-labor town. He claims a $170 million savings. I would support it, because everyone should pay into the pension fund.”

The politics of unity and division

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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The politics of unity and division

steve@sfbg.com

These are strange days for the San Francisco Democratic Party, which is seeking to overcome bitter divisions on the local level and come together around candidates for statewide office that include Mayor Gavin Newsom, whose fiscal conservatism and petulant political style are the main sources of that local division.

The tension has played out recently around the Board of Supervisors deliberations on the new city budget and November ballot measures and in dramas surrounding the newly elected Democratic County Central Committee, where the battles during its July 28 inaugural meeting previewed a more significant fight over local endorsements coming up Aug. 11.

Almost every elected official in San Francisco is a Democrat. Newsom, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, has been the main obstacle to new taxes that progressives and labor leaders say are desperately needed to preserve public services, deal with massive projected deficits in the next two years, and quit balancing budgets on the backs of workers.

“We balanced the budget without raising taxes. I don’t believe in raising taxes. We don’t need to raise taxes,” Newsom said proudly at his July 29 budget signing ceremony, during which he also effusively praised the labor unions whose support he needs this fall: “Labor has been under attack in this state and country. They’ve become a convenient excuse for our lack of leadership in Sacramento and around the country.”

That hypocritical brand of politics has been frustrating to his fellow Democrats, particularly progressive supervisors and DCCC members. At the July 27 board meeting, Sup. Ross Mirkarimi and Board President David Chiu reluctantly dropped their pair of revenue measures that would have raised $50 million, bowing to opposition by Newsom and the business community.

The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce has become such a vehicle for antitax and antigovernment vitriol that the DCCC on July 29 approved a resolution calling for the organization — which hosted a speech by Republican National Chair Michael Steele in June — to renounce the platform of the Republican National Committee.

“The Chamber is not a knee-jerk right-wing organization,” Chamber President Steve Falk felt compelled to clarify in a July 28 letter to DCCC Chair Aaron Peskin, closing with, “Anything you can do to avoid painting the Chamber as a pawn of the GOP would be greatly appreciated — because it just isn’t true.”

Yet Rafael Mandelman, who sponsored the resolution and is a progressive supervisorial candidate in District 8, told us the Chamber’s fiscal policies are indistinguishable from those pushed by Republicans. “They’re the leading force pushing the Republican agenda in San Francisco,” Mandelman said, calling the stance short-sighted. “It’s not in the long-term interests of the business community for our public sector to fall apart.”

Chiu’s business tax reform measure is a good example of how conservative ideology seems to be trumping progressive policy, even among Democrats. Only 10 percent of businesses in the city pay any local business tax, and the measure would increase taxes on large corporations, lower them on small businesses, create private sector jobs, bring $25 million per year into the city, and expand the tax burden to 25 percent of businesses, including the large banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions that are now exempt. But even the Small Business Commission refused to support the plan, prompting Chiu to drop the proposal and tell his colleagues, “There is still not consensus about whether this should move forward.”

Sup. Chris Daly, the lone vote against the budget compromise with Newsom and the removal of revenue measures from the November ballot, noted at the July 27 board meeting how the business community has sabotaged city finances, citing its 2002 lawsuit challenging the gross receipt taxes, which the board settled on a controversial 8-3 vote. “This is a large part of our structural budget deficit,” Daly said.

But antitax sentiment has only gotten worse with the current recession and political dysfunction, causing Democrats like Newsom to parrot Republicans’ no-new-taxes mantra, much to the chagrin of progressives.

“A lot of this is being driven by statewide politics. [Newsom] needs to not have taxes go up but he also needs the support of the labor unions, so we get weird stuff happening in San Francisco,” Mandelman said.

The situation has also fed Newsom’s animus toward progressives, who have enjoyed more local electoral success than the mayor. Newsom responded in June to the progressive slate winning a majority on the DCCC by placing a measure on the November ballot that would ban local elected officeholders from serving on that body, which includes four progressive supervisors and three supervisorial candidates.

Nonetheless, Newsom then unexpectedly sought a seat on the DCCC, arguing that his lieutenant governor nomination entitled him to an ex officio seat (those held by state and federal elected Democrats) even though the DCCC’s legal counsel disagreed. While noting the hypocrisy of the request, Party Chair Aaron Peskin took the high road and proposed to change the bylaws to seat Newsom.

Some progressives privately groused about giving a seat to someone who, as DCCC member Carole Migden said at the meeting, was “picking a fight” with progressives by pushing a measure she called “disrespectful and unconstitutional.” But in practice, the episode seems to have hurt Newsom’s relations with progressives without really strengthening his political hand.

Newsom ally Scott Wiener — a DCCC member and District 8 supervisorial candidate (who told us he opposes the mayor’s DCCC ballot measure) — proposed to amend Peskin’s motion to change the bylaws in order to seat Newsom with language that would allow Newsom to continue serving even if he loses his race in November.

That amendment was defeated on a 17-13 vote that illustrated a clear dividing line between the progressive majority and the minority faction of moderates and ex officio members. Even with Newsom and District Attorney Kamala Harris (who was seated as the Democratic nominee for attorney general) being seated — and counting the one absent vote, Sen. Leland Yee, who is expected to sometimes vote with progressives and sometimes with moderates — progressives still hold the majority going into the process of endorsing local candidates and allocating party resources for the fall campaign.

“Presuming that 17 people of that 33-member body all agree on something, then the presence of Mayor Newsom doesn’t change anything,” Peskin said. He also noted that even if Newsom’s measure passed and the progressive supervisors were removed, “the irony is that the chair of the party [Peskin] would appoint their successors.”

Also ironic is the political reality that it is Newsom who most needs his party’s support right now, while it is progressives who are adopting the most conciliatory tone.

“We should all be working to turn out the vote and help Democrats win,” Peskin told us. “I implore our mayor and lieutenant gubernatorial candidate to work with us and get that done.”

Yet after Newsom gave a budget-signing speech that included the line, “At the end of the day, it comes down to leadership, stewardship, collaboration, partnership,” he told the Guardian that he has no intention of removing or explaining his DCCC ballot measure, saying only, “If the voters support it, then it would be the right thing to do.”

Chiu responded to the news by telling us, “I hope the mayor can move beyond the politics of personality and build a party vehicle that is about unity.”

Newsom’s budget and DCCC hypocrisy

Sasha Cuttler
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9
Newsom’s budget and DCCC hypocrisy

Hypocrisy hung thickly in the air at City Hall today as Mayor Gavin Newsom refused to responsively address glaring contradictions on a pair of high-profile policy stances, pursuing naked self interest while cloaking himself in deceptive but high-minded rhetoric. Newsom used the city budget-signing ceremony to effusively praise the labor unions that he publicly shamed into giving back $250 million over two years to balance the budget without tax increases, a budget that cut services and increased various fees and fines.

“Labor has been under attack in this state and country. They’ve become a convenient excuse for our lack of leadership in Sacramento and around the country,” Newsom said without blushing, defending unions against pension reform measures such as Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s SF Smart Reform, which he opposes while continuing to support the need for pension reform.

But Newsom seemed unaware that the layoffs, forced furloughs, and voluntary pay cuts accepted by the unions that he publicly demonized just a couple months ago and now praises – whose support he needs for his current run for lieutenant governor – is connected to his steadfast opposition to new taxes, which he reiterated today: “We balanced the budget without raising taxes. I don’t believe in raising taxes, we don’t need to raise taxes.”

Despite the fact that just 10 percent of San Francisco businesses pay any business taxes to the city, Newsom opposed and this week helped kill a measure by Board President David Chiu to reform the business tax system in a way that would increase taxes on large corporations, lower them on small businesses, create private sector jobs, bring $25 million per year into the city, and expand the tax burden to 25 percent of businesses, including the large banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions that are now exempt. Instead, labor took a deep hit and the city still faces projected $500 million budget deficits each of the next two fiscal years.

But Newsom’s hypocrisy isn’t confined fiscal issues. After the ceremony, he told reporters that he was sticking by his November ballot measure to ban local elected officials from serving on the Democratic County Central Committee, even after last night insisting that body give him a seat, which they had to change the bylaws to accommodate.

At last night’s DCCC meeting, members of an elected committee that includes four progressive supervisors and three current supervisorial candidates called for Newsom or his proxy John Shanley to explain why he is pushing a policy to ban locally elected officials from serving on the DCCC, a body in which elected state and federal officials automatically get seats.

“This mayor is on record as saying local officials should not serve on the committee,” Sup. David Campos said at the meeting, calling for Newsom to clarify this policy contradiction and offer his reasoning for the policy: “We don’t want to do anything that is inconsistent with what the mayor has said so far.”

Chair Aaron Peskin translated Campos’s comments as indicating “some level of irony or hypocrisy,” but Campos objected, insisting “it’s not a personal attack” but a genuine desire to know why Newsom sought to ban local elected officials after progressives won a majority of the DCCC seats in June.

Both Shanley last night and Newsom today gave the same legalistic answers, noting that he’s not serving in his capacity as the mayor, but as an ex officio member who automatically gets a seat for being the Democratic nominee for a statewide office (although the DCCC legal counsel said Newsom wasn’t entitled to a seat because the bylaws only award a seat when the current holder of the office being sought is a Democrat).

But DCCC member Carole Migden objected to Shanley’s answer, saying of Newsom’s effort to unseat duly elected members, “That’s picking a fight, if we want to be clear…That effects my vote, I have to say. It’s disrespectful and unconstitutional.”

DCCC member David Chiu noted that Newsom’s ballot measure would explicitly ban supervisors and the mayor from serving on the DCCC and said that the mayor still had a few days before the deadline for him to withdraw the measure, which he single-handedly placed on the ballot using his authority as mayor.

But today, when asked by the Guardian, Newsom said he had no intention of either withdrawing the measure or explaining it to the DCCC. When we asked about the contradiction in his positions, Newsom said only, “If the voters support it then it would be the right thing to do.”

He was similarly dismissive when other reporters continued to ask about the controversy, gesturing toward me with a dismissive wave of his hand as he said, “Certain people with certain newspapers major in the minor.”

After being told that Newsom is sticking by his DCCC ballot measure, Chiu told us, “I hope the mayor can move beyond the politics of personality and build a party vehicle that is about unity.”

 

Unions say grand juror unethically helped Adachi measure

Sasha Cuttler
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57
Unions say grand juror unethically helped Adachi measure

San Francisco’s police and fire unions are taking a lead role in opposing Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s November initiative to make city employees pay more of their pension and health care costs, despite the fact that both unions have recently renegotiated their contracts to exempt their members from paying those increased costs until 2013.

The unions and Bob Muscat from the San Francisco Labor Council recently formed the group Stand Up for Working Families to run the opposition campaign to Adachi’s SF Smart Reform, yesterday holding a press conference at City Hall to highlight the allegedly unethical role that a grand juror has played in pushing the Adachi measure.

Civil Grand Jury member Craig Weber led the committee that in June released a report on the city’s pension system called “Pension Tsunami: The Billion Dollar Bubble,” warning that employee pension costs to the city would more than double in the next five years and “fundamental adjustments must be made to the City’s employee pension program.”

Yet by the time that report came out (following a similar grand jury report from a year earlier), Weber was already working as treasurer for the Adachi’s signature-gathering campaign, which City Attorney Dennis Herrera called an inappropriate conflict of interest and which Muscat says that raises questions about data manipulation and access to secret grand jury proceedings.

“I have serious concerns in this particular instance that Mr. Weber’s dual roles create a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of conflict of interest, which would undermine the integrity of any Civil Grand Jury investigation into these issues,” Herrera wrote in a June 14 letter to Presiding Judge James McBride, relating how Weber had sought advice from Herrera’s office on the matter in March and that both Weber and the Grand Jury chair refused to heed his advice that Weber recuse himself from working on the report.

“We believe he used his position on the Civil Grand Jury to manipulate the civil grand jury report,” attorney Peter Saltzman, who represents opponents of the measure, said at the press conference.

But Adachi called the charges “just smoke and mirrors,” telling the Guardian that his initiative was based on data from the Controller’s Office and that the measure was written and publicly available before the latest grand jury report was released. “We received zero information from the grand jury,” Adachi told us. “We relied on public information that we received from the Controller’s Office.”

He has claimed the measure will save the city about $167 million per year by making city employees pay more into their pensions and health care costs for their dependents, although that figure will be lower for the next two years because of exemptions that were written into five police and fire memorandums of understanding that the Board of Supervisors approved last week, agreements negotiated by the Mayor’s Office and opposed by Sups. David Campos and Chris Daly (Sup. Ross Mirkarimi also voted against the MOU for Fire Department executives) because of the exemption.

Police union head Gary Delagnes, who was at the press conference, told the Guardian that the special consideration for those two unions – both of which are key supporters of Mayor Gavin Newsom — was simply a function of negotiating their MOUs later than the other unions. “By the time we and the firefighters were in there, this thing [Adachi’s campaign] had really picked up steam,” he told us.

During the press conference, Muscat highlighted how billionaire Michael Moritz, managing partner of Sequoia Capital, put almost a quarter-million-dollars into qualifying the Adachi measure for the ballot and said, “This is a measure not in the interests of anyone in San Francisco and it represents the interests of people outside of San Francisco” who are attacking public employee unions for political reasons.

SunCal threatens to sue, as Alameda votes to kick out base developer

Mary Magee
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It took until 1 a.m. for the Alameda City Council to vote 4-0 (councilmember Lena Tam abstained) to deny SunCal’s “modified optional entitlement application,” and take the first step towards ending its four-year relationship with SunCal, an Irvine-based developer that planned to build 4,800 homes, a 60-acre sports complex, a ferry terminal, parks, schools and offices at the former Alameda Naval Air Station, which accounts for one-third of this island city.

Along the way, SunCal threatened to sue, a move that elicited boos from the 200 or so people crammed into Alameda’s City Hall chambers for the showdown.
“We are entitled to go to the end of the road on this thing,” SunCal attorney Skip Miller said. “If not, we will be in court seeking very substantial damages.”
The vote came after City staff cited a long list of concerns, including fears that the project would cause traffic congestion, lacked solid financial backing and would not deliver on jobs.

“We think there are a lot of risks, “ Alameda deputy city manager Jennifer Ott said.
Local unions expressed support for the plan, as did some environmental advocates, while opponents attacked SunCal’s poor financial record and voiced concerns about how thousands of new residents would block the island’s underground tubes, which are the only way to exit the ibase-side of the island, other than a ferry terminal,

The city council’s vote came five months after 85 percent of Alameda residents voted against excluding SunCal from the island’s ban on multi-unit housing. Since then, the relationship between the city and the developer has become increasingly hostile, city staff reported. The move leaves the city wide open to offers from other developers, although staff said at this point they have no plan to hire another master developer for the abandoned base.

 

 

Adachi and the real politics of pension reform

Sasha Cuttler
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Adachi and the real politics of pension reform

While downtown-oriented politicos and out-of-touch corporate columnists tout the political potential of targeting public employee unions with pay reductions and pension plan take-aways – and say the Public Defender Jeff Adachi may be mayoral material for doing so – they forget that electoral success requires coalitions, particularly in savvy San Francisco.

Unlike his cheerleaders, Adachi seems to understand this, downplaying the personal political upside when he talked to the Guardian and other media outlets. Sure, he might just be sandbagging, as his boosters hope he is, but there’s good reason to believe that this move could hurt Adachi’s chances of becoming mayor more than it helps it.

Much has been written and said about how Adachi’s move alienated labor unions and much of the progressive movement. “They urged me not to do it,” Adachi told the Guardian in the final days of his successful signature-gathering effort for a measure that would save the city about $167 million per year by taking that amount out of employees’ paychecks.

It’s not that pension reform isn’t needed. Indeed, San Francisco voters just approved a measure in June to increase the pension contributions for all new city employees, and politicians ranging from Sups. John Avalos and David Campos on the left to Sup. Sean Elsbernd and Mayor Gavin Newsom on the right all agree that more needs to be done, pledging to work with unions on the issue. And given the surly mood of the electorate, Adachi’s measure will probably pass.

But that still doesn’t make him mayoral material. Unlike Newsom, whose Care Not Cash initiative to take money from poor people helped propel him into Room 200, Adachi doesn’t have a strong constituency behind him, unlike the full strength of downtown and the Willie Brown machine that Newsom had behind him.

Downtown will never get behind a mayoral campaign for Adachi, a heavily tattooed defender of criminals who has a strong independent streak, even if they like the fact that he’s socking it to the public employee unions, an effort they helped fund. And progressives will now have a hard time ever trusting Adachi to work with them, seeing him now as someone hostile to political process and coalition-building, much like Newsom.

And even Newsom has come out against Adachi and his proposal, even though he loves the pension reform issue and shares some stylistic similarities with Adachi, including a certain political petulance. “Mayor Newsom has been clear that effective, long-term pension reform will come by doing it with our public employee unions, in partnership, not to and against them, in contrast to the Adachi measure,” Newsom Press Secretary Tony Winnicker wrote to the Guardian this week. It was a laughingly hypocritical statement from a mayor who has repeatedly demonized unions and refused to work cooperatively with them, but it’s a true statement nonetheless.

Finally, while socking it to public employees may be in vogue right now, during this moment of real economic uncertainty and political myopia, this sort of divisive politics might come to be seen more as opportunistic than courageous. And it’s hard to see how the approach that Adachi has taken will somehow add up to an effective political coalition capable of stealing the Mayor’s Office from wily politicians like Mark Leno, Leland Yee, or Aaron Peskin.

Consider the fact that even the Police Officers Association – the most conservative, downtown-oriented employee union in San Francisco – also opposes the Adachi measure and other efforts to blame the city’s fiscal problems on employees, rather than the large financial institutions that don’t even pay any kind of business tax to the city.

So I leave you with the words of POA President Gary Delagnes, writing in the May issue of the POA Journal, sounding a bit like a Guardian editorial writer on this politically sensitive issue: “Even more problematic is the rapidly developing notion that public employee pensions serve as the root of all evil, and are almost solely to blame for all of our economic woes.

“Opportunistic Wall Street insiders, politicians, and robber baron CEOs have manipulated and pilfered our country’s financial well-being. They have unconscionably – if not also illegally – lined their deep pockets with the hard-earned savings and pensions of the middle class working man and woman. Accountants from coast to coast have coached multi-millionaires on the art of avoiding paying their true tax obligations. Millions of people were allowed to qualify for mortgage loans by greedy bankers and mortgage brokers that led to trillions of dollars in bailout money. The result is a public incensed about fat cats taking advantage of them. Now, the backlash has set up public pensions and the unions that negotiated them as the scapegoats for his anger.

“Those of use who long ago made the decision to forgo large salaries in exchange for a life of public service, are now being portrayed as greedy and self-centered, taking unwarranted pensions and benefits after 30 years of service as firefighters, police officers, teachers, and nurses. These are shameful accusations, and utterly without merit.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves, but unlike one of our editorials, this is the perspective of cops and other unions and progressive constituencies that will shape their actions in elections to come.

The martyrdom of Mooney and Billings

David Talbot
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Dick Meister , former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

It was an unusually hot July day in San Francisco.   There was a parade on that day in 1916 – a “Preparedness Day” parade organized by local Republican businessmen. It was intended to drum up support for U.S. entry into World War I and embarrass Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, who was running for re-election on a platform that stressed,  “He kept us out of war!”

A lot of people supported neither the war nor the parade, however. The opponents particularly included the union organizers who were the radicals of that period – “reds” who were trying to establish the right of unionization in the face of often violent opposition from the business interests who controlled the city and who most assuredly supported the war.

Many thousands of spectators, as many as 100,000 by some accounts, lined the parade route down Market Street, cheering and enthusiastically waving American flags. At precisely 2:06, less than a half-hour after the parade of more than 25,000 marchers had begun, just as contingents from the Grand Army of the Republic and Sons of the American Revolution were passing the crowded corner of Steuart and Market  streets. . . Boom!

It was the thunderous blast of a bomb that had either been thrown into the crowd or planted there.  The horrific explosion killed 10 bystanders and seriously wounded 40 others.

Within a few hours, the authorities had their culprits. Not surprisingly, all of those arrested as suspects were union organizers. Among them were two men who were especially despised by the city’s virulently anti-labor business establishment — Tom Mooney, 34, a burly Irish-American organizer for the International Molders Union who was one of San Francisco’s most prominent labor activists, and his close friend, slim, short, boyish Warren Billings, a 23-year-old shoe factory worker.

Mooney and Billings were San Francisco’s “most notorious reds,” declared the SF Chamber of Commerce in one of its typically frenzied assessments of those who dared challenge the status quo in which workers were treated as mere chattel.

The others who were arrested were soon freed, but Mooney and Billings were put on trial and eventually found guilty. Mooney was sentenced to death by hanging, Billings to life imprisonment.

There’s absolutely no doubt Mooney and Billings were framed. Federal investigators, investigative newspaper reporters and others proved that beyond any doubt.  The city’s famously corrupt district attorney, Charles Frickert, was found to have suppressed evidence that proved the pair’s innocence, joining with corrupt policemen to fabricate evidence that supposedly proved their guilt, and failing to call witnesses who, as he knew, had solid evidence that they were not guilty. Frickert hired other witnesses and coached them to give perjured testimony implicating Mooney and Billings.

Eventually, every major witness confessed to lying to the juries at both the Mooney and Billings trials. Some of them claimed to have seen the men plant the bomb on the day of the explosion, although it turned out the supposed eye-witnesses hadn’t even been in the city at the time.

Some gave their perjured testimony in exchange for such favors as the parole of relatives who were serving prison sentences, others for the pay District Attorney Frickert offered them. All were after the $17,500 reward posted for evidence leading to the conviction of Mooney and Billings.

 The judge who presided over Mooney’s trial told California’s governor he had determined through personal investigation that “every single witness who testified against Mooney had lied.” Mooney’s lawyer declared them “the weirdest collection of God-damned liars” he’d ever seen.

 A federal fact-finding commission concluded that “there was never any scientific attempt made by either the police or the prosecution to discover the perpetrators of the crime. The investigation was in reality turned over to a private detective, who used his position to cause the arrest of the defendants.” 

Fremont Older, the crusading editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, concluded that the authorities “conspired to murder a man with the instruments that the people have provided for bringing about justice. There isn’t a scrap of testimony that wasn’t perjured.”

The cases quickly drew widespread national attention, right up to the White House. President Wilson argued against Mooney’s hanging on grounds that there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support his guilt.

It was obvious that the Chamber of Commerce’s so-called Law and Order Committee had played a major role in framing Mooney and Billings as part of the chamber’s drive to change San Francisco’s status as one of the country’s most heavily unionized cities. 

Mooney and Billings, of course, had been attempting to enhance that status, in part by helping wage major organizing drives among the city’s vital transit workers and the equally vital employees of the company that supplied the city’s gas and electricity. Which was a very good reason the utility company – Pacific Gas & Electric – hired the private detective cited by federal fact-finders to help District Attorney Frickert and the police fabricate evidence against Mooney and Billings.  Not incidentally, Frickert was backed financially by Pacific Gas & Electric in his election campaigns for district attorney.

 The convictions prompted protests across the United States and worldwide, much like those raised five years later in behalf of two other union radicals, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vinzetti, who were executed in Massachusetts for a murder they clearly did not commit.

The Mooney and Billings case was dubbed internationally as “America’s Dreyfus Case,” a comparison to the famous French case that also drew worldwide protests. The protests stemmed from the rigged conviction of Jewish French Army Captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894 for allegedly attempting to turn over secret military documents to the German government. Although the “Dreyfus Affair,” as it was called, was based on another issue – anti-Semitism – it similarly involved the use of false evidence against an innocent man by powerful authorities.

 Protestors in the United States and abroad quickly formed a network of defense committees in behalf of Mooney and Billings, and mounted rallies and other noisy and highly visible public demonstrations. 

 Freeing the two men became labor’s cause célèbre. Unions everywhere voiced loud and frequent protests, as did all other segments of the left, ranging from liberal to Communist. Eventually, they helped force California authorities to reduce Mooney’s death sentence to life imprisonment, ironically on the basis of evidence that should have freed him.

 President Wilson’s request that Mooney be spared was probably the main reason his sentence was commutated, but the heavy pressures of the Mooney-Billings defense committees and the American Federation of Labor, which Wilson most certainly felt, also had much to do with it.
   
Mooney finally was freed in 1939, twenty-one years later. Culbert Olson, California’s first Democratic governor in 44 years, granted him a full and unconditional pardon. Mooney, said Gov. Olson, was “wholly innocent,” and his conviction  “wholly based on perjured testimony.” 

Mooney’s release sparked great celebration among his supporters, who had fought so long for his freedom. Thousands paraded up Market Street behind Mooney shortly after his release, the street cleared for them by police, past the site of the explosion 23 years earlier that had sent Mooney to prison.

The next day, Mooney joined a picket line of striking department store employees on Market Street and donated to their cause half of the $10 the state had given him on his release from San Quentin Prison. Mooney sent the other half to Newspaper Guild members who were waging a major strike in Chicago.

Tom Mooney hadn’t much time to enjoy his freedom. His health had been broken in prison and he soon was hospitalized with a serious stomach ailment. He remained in a hospital bed until his death at age 60, less than two years later.

Billings got his freedom a few months after Mooney left San Quentin. Gov. Olson commutated his life sentence to time served – 23 years for a crime that no one really believed he or Mooney had committed.  Finally, in 1961, Gov. Edmund G. Brown granted Billings a full pardon. But, as Billings complained, it was granted on grounds that he had been “rehabilitated” rather than because he was innocent.

After leaving prison, Billings married and settled down in San Mateo, working in  San Francisco as a watch repairman, a trade he had learned in prison, and later set up his own repair business at home.  Billings quickly resumed his labor activism, as a member of the Watchmakers Union executive board and delegate to the San Mateo Labor Council. He was active as well in the anti-Vietnam War movement and various other political, economic and social causes. 

I interviewed Billings just before his death in 1972 at age 79. I expected to encounter a bitter, angry old man. Yes, he was old, but his spritely manner belied that basic fact of his life, and he showed absolutely no bitterness over the great injustice that had been done him – none! He talked instead of injustices that were being done to others, and of joining in efforts to help overcome them.

“I don’t have anything against anybody about anything,” Billings told me. “The people who testified against me were after that reward, but it all went to the police who arrested me. I’ve never felt any bitterness, but the fact that the witnesses against me didn’t get any of the reward money should make them bitter.”

Warren K. Billings was a great inspiration to me and others who knew him, and to many who just knew of him. He was a man possessing a spirit that could not be broken by circumstances far more severe than most of us have ever had to endure.  A man who would not even raise his voice in anger or bitterness against the terrible injustice that was done him. A man who maintained his convictions through it all. A strong and courageous man, but kind and gentle, and possessed of an incredible measure of tolerance and understanding.

The Preparedness Day bombing has never been solved.

NOTE: For more on the Mooney-Billings case, See “Frame-up” by Curt Gentry, an extraordinary work of investigative journalism book covering all aspects
of the case.

Dick Meister , former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Bad faith

Jesse Hawthorne Ficks
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Bad faith

steve@sfbg.com

Mayor Gavin Newsom and his business allies are actively trying to sabotage the various revenue measures that have been put forth by the labor movement and progressive members of the Board of Supervisors, employing deceptive rhetoric, sneaky tactics, and a refusal to bargain in good faith.

In fact, Newsom — the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor — is so averse to supporting anything that could be called a “tax” that he rejected a hard-won compromise measure created by powerful developers, affordable housing advocates, a pro-business think tank, the building trades, and his own directors of housing and economic development.

Just as that story was breaking in the New York Times (produced by Bay Citizen) on July 9, members of the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee discovered that Newsom’s proposed ballot measure to close loopholes in the city’s hotel tax that favored airline employees and online travel companies — a widely supported change, but one worth just $6 million per year — contains language that would nullify any increases in the hotel tax. Earlier in the week, labor unions turned in signatures on an initiative to increase the hotel tax by 2 percent, which would bring in more than $30 million per year.

“This poison pill is an intentionally deceptive, underhanded move,” Gabriel Haaland, an organizer with Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which sponsored the hotel tax, told us. “It’s so frustrating. It’s not even a good faith fight. He’s trying to create confusion and fool the voters. If our measure passes fair and square, it should be implemented.”

Meanwhile, Newsom and business groups have been attacking a reform measure by Board President David Chiu that would make the currently flat payroll tax more progressive, exempt more small businesses from paying it, and create a commercial rent tax to spread the tax burden more widely than the 10 percent of businesses who now pay tax to the city.

Critics complained that the measure would hurt local businesses — but that’s just not true. The city’s Office of Economic Analysis concluded that Chiu’s original proposal would have no effect on private sector jobs and would generate $34 million annually for the city, preserving some government jobs and spending.

Then Chiu amended the measure to spare even more small businesses. Now the OEA says that the measure would actually create private sector jobs — and still bring $28 million in to the city. Yet Newsom and the business community are still withholding their support.

This trio of Machiavellian moves comes just a week after Newsom pulled out of budget negotiations with board progressives concerning about $40 million in board add-backs to programs that Newsom proposed to cut after they wouldn’t agree to his precondition that they withdraw unrelated measures proposed for the November ballot, such as splitting appointments to the Rent, Recreation and Park, and Municipal Transportation Agency boards and requiring police officers to do foot patrols.

The series of events has led many progressives to say that conservative ideological blinders — a knee-jerk opposition to anything that saves government jobs and services or that Republicans might criticize — is the only logical explanation for the intransigent stance adopted downtown and by Newsom.

“It’s ideological. It’s not economic, and it’s not even political,” said Calvin Welch, the affordable housing activist who helped negotiate the transfer tax compromise with developer Oz Erickson, San Francisco Planning Urban Research Association director Gabriel Metcalf, Mayor’s Office of Housing Director Doug Shoemaker, and others.

That measure would have created a transfer tax on sales of properties over $875,000 and generated approximately $50 million annually for affordable housing (funds that were drastically reduced in Newsom’s proposed 2010-11 budget) while cutting in half the current requirements and fees on market-rate developers to create below-market-rate units. The plan would have stimulated both types of housing and created desperately needed construction work — an approach those involved called an elegant solution to several problems.

“To me, this was a win-win, solving two problems that are each a big deal,” Metcalf told us. “I don’t know what his reasons were for not supporting it. I was surprised.”

But Welch said, “It collapsed straight up because the mayor didn’t want to support a tax.” Although Newsom told the Times it was because there wasn’t broad enough consensus yet, “the mayor’s reason is whole-cloth bullshit,” Welch said, noting the role of the Mayor’s Office in brokering the deal. “The mayor walks away from it because everyone wasn’t in the room? Well, it’s your room, motherfucker. Show some leadership.”

Newsom Press Secretary Tony Winnicker refused to discuss these issues by phone, responding to our written inquires by noting that Newsom opposes taxes and thinks the best way to address budget deficits are privatizing city services and pension reform (although he opposes Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s initiative, the only pension reform measure on the fall ballot).

“The mayor is opposed to the Board of Supervisors’ proposals to increase taxes because they’re not needed to balance the budget and they will strangle our still young economic recovery,” Winnicker wrote, refusing to answer follow-up questions or support a statement about Chiu’s measure that the OEA concludes is not accurate.

Like many political observers of all stripes, those from downtown and progressive circles, Welch criticized Newsom for his lack of engagement with city business and its long-term fiscal outlook, contrasting him with former Mayor Willie Brown, who met regularly with former Board of Supervisors President Tom Ammiano even as the two ran a bitter campaign for mayor against one another in 1999. “They dealt with the city’s business like two adults who cared about the city,” he said.

Welch acknowledged that there was still work to be done building political support for the transfer tax measure. He and other progressives would have had to win over city employee unions who wouldn’t like the budget set-aside aspect, and Erickson and Metcalf would need to placate some of their downtown allies who oppose taxes on ideological grounds. But given how downtown groups are behaving right now, that might not have been an easy sell.

“There are members of the small business community that are averse to any taxes,” said Regina Dick-Endrizzi, director of the city’s Office of Small Business and staffer to the Small Business Commission, which was withholding a recommendation on the Chiu measure but planned to meet again to consider it July 12 (look for an update on the sfbg.com Politics blog). She said the small business community is having tough times and “they are just not sensitive to keeping city workers employed.”

Larger commercial interests are being even more forceful in opposing the revenue measures. While a parade of workers, social service providers, and progressive activists testifying at the July 9 Budget Committee hearing implored supervisors to place all the proposed revenue measures on the ballot, representatives from the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) and San Francisco Chamber of Commerce were the only two speakers urging supervisors to drop the measures and focus instead on creating private sector jobs.

“You’re trying to create a little revenue here and it’s not going to work,” said Ken Cleaveland, director of BOMA SF, arguing that big banks and financial services companies — entities exempt from the payroll tax that Chiu is hoping to target with the commercial rent tax — will buy their buildings to avoid paying the tax. “They aren’t going to create more jobs and they really aren’t going to create more revenue.”

Yet Chiu noted that it was the business community and fiscal conservatives who pushed to create the Office of Economic Analysis, whose work they have regularly used to attack progressive legislation. Now that the office has concluded that a piece of progressive legislation is good for the local economy, Chiu told Cleaveland and the Chamber spokesperson Rob Black at the hearing, “I ask you to respect the work this office has done.”

Black said the Chamber board will consider Chiu’s amended legislation, but said businesses are in no mood to help the city. “How many times have you gone to your neighborhood merchant and had them say, ‘Gee, my rent’s too cheap’?<0x2009>” he said during his testimony.

Yet Chiu said landlords of small tenants (those paying less than $65,000 in rent per year) are exempt from the rent tax and only 26 percent of SF businesses would pay any city business tax under his plan. “I hope the mayor will support this proposal and the business community will give it a good look,” Chiu said as the hearing ended.

At the beginning of the hearing, Chiu framed the dire situation facing San Francisco, citing Controller’s Office figures showing this year’s $500 million budget deficit (out of a $6 billion total budget) will be followed by a $700 million deficit next year and a $800 million gap the following budget cycle as a result of a deep structural budget imbalance.

“We have budget deficits as far as the eye can see,” Chiu said at the hearing. “We have to consider measures that will provide more stable sources of revenue.”

He also noted that city employee unions have agreed to give back about $250 million in salary and had their ranks reduced by about 2,000 workers in the last two years. So he and the other progressive supervisors say it’s time for the rest of San Francisco to help address the problem.

“We, as a city, should not be trying to balance this budget simply through cutting,” Sup. David Campos said.

Sup. John Avalos, the committee chair, amended his transfer tax measure in the wake of Newsom’s rejection of the deal by making it a simple 2 percent tax on properties that sell for more than $5 million, and 2.5 percent tax on properties over $10 million. He estimates it will bring in about $25 million per year from the city’s wealthiest corporations and landlords.

“That’s who we’re socking it to,” Avalos told us, saying he was disappointed the compromise fell through. “The amendment is going to be more progressive than what was originally planned.”

Even Sup. Sean Elsbernd, a strong fiscal conservative who announced early in the hearing, “You want to do that [balance future budgets] by adding taxes, but I want to do it through ongoing service cuts,” later told the Guardian that he was intrigued by the amendments Avalos and Chiu made to their measures and has not yet taken a position on them.

Sup. Ross Mirkarimi is also sponsoring a measure to increase the city’s tax on parking lot operators from 25 percent to 35 percent, the first change to that tax in 30 years, and will include valet parking for the first time. The measure would bring in up to $24 million per year, and OEA analysis shows it would decrease the number of cars trips by 1.3 percent, another benefit.

SFMTA supports the measure, with board member Cameron Beach testifying that the money will be used to subsidize Muni and “it links the use of private automobiles and is consistent with the city’s transit-first policy.” Mirkarimi, who chairs the Transportation Authority, also has proposed a $10 local vehicle license fee surcharge that would bring in another $5 million per year for Muni.

All the revenue measures require six votes by the full Board of Supervisors, which is scheduled to consider them July 20, after which they would need a simple majority approval by voters in November to take effect.

The mayor has the authority to directly place measures on the ballot, so the committee hearing on his hotel tax loophole measure and a $39 million general obligation bond that he’s proposing to create a revolving loan fund for private sector seismic improvements were mere formalities, so supervisors criticized aspects of each but were unable to make changes.

Avalos even grudgingly acknowledged the hotel tax poison pill was an effective way to kill that revenue source, saying at the hearing, “This is very smart. I don’t agree with it, but it’s very smart.”

Haaland was less charitable, criticizing a provision designed to confuse voters. “This kind of move means both measures won’t pass because now we have to oppose [Newsom’s measure],” he said, criticizing the mayor for running away from the hard decisions facing the city. “He won’t be around next year, when we have an even bigger structural budget deficit, to clean up this mess. Absent new revenue sources, this city starts to fall apart.”

Sorting out the Adachi initiative

Zelda Bronstein
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Sorting out the Adachi initiative

Lots of press on the Adachi pension-reform measure, a proposal that would amount to cutting the pay of city workers during a recession. It turns out even Gavin Newsom doesn’t like the plan:


The mayor also attacked Adachi’s pension plan, arguing that the public defender never discussed it with the employee unions, city officials or others affected by the measure and that it could have “unintended consequences” for the city.


And while I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that the Adachi measure “could reshape national politics,” Randy Shaw makes a good point:


Adachi’s measure would join with Sean Elsbernd MUNI charter amendment to create a one-two punch against public employees on San Francisco’s November ballot. The national media will have a field day with the prospect of “liberal” San Francisco, and Nancy Pelosi’s home turf, voting to cut public employee compensation.

While this is not the message Adachi wants to send, it will likely be the one that is heard. It emerges at a time when the entire Republican Party and corporate Democrats are in a full-fledged media campaign to redirect public anger over the fiscal crisis toward excessively compensated public employees, and away from banks, oil companies, hedge fund managers, and an under taxed and poorly regulated private sector.


Shaw also says that the campaign will “bitterly divide progressives,” and I’m not sure it has to turn out that way. There’s always the danger that liberal voters who work in the private sector, and are struggling to keep their jobs and health insurance, will be seduced by the notion that public-sector employees are too well paid already. And the donwtown folks, who will soon be fully on board with the Adachi measure, will seek to divide the nonprofit sector and labor by arguing that nonprofit workers don’t get the same benefits as city employees — and city funding for nonprofits is threatened by the budget deficit. Both those things are true, but it’s also true that there’s a growing movement to challenge that approach. This battle will be a test for the city’s progressive movement, but I think the overwhleming majority of progressive leaders, activists and nonprofits will stick together and oppose Adachi.


The more important political impact will be felt in the tightly contested district-election contests, where city-employee pensions could join the sit-lie measure as wedge issues that the moderates will use against progressives. When Adachi came down to see us, I asked him if he was worried about that; he didn’t really seem to think it was important.


But there’s a reason we talk about a “progressive movement” (and don’t start on the “machine” stuff again, we had that debate over here). We all ought to be concerned about how one campaign affects the larger goal of building a better and more sustainable city. And while I hate to say it, I have to agree with Gavin Newsom: This thing could have “unintended consequences.”


 

Kaiser workers seek election between rival unions

Sasha Cuttler
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Kaiser workers seek election between rival unions

Thousands of Kaiser Permanente workers have filed petitions to change unions in what could be the biggest battle yet between Service Employees International Union and its upstart rival National Union of Healthcare Workers. If called by federal regulators, the election would involve more than 45,000 workers, the biggest private sector organization since Ford Motors employees joined United Auto Workers in 1941.

“This is the election everyone has been anticipating for the last year and a half,” NUHW spokesperson Sadie Crabtree told us.

That was when Sal Rosselli and other former leaders of the Oakland-based United Healthcare Workers were ousted by former SEIU President Andy Stern and other leaders of their parent union, SEIU, and formed NUHW. Since then, the two unions have clashed bitterly and regularly, in various workplaces, through the media, in leadership battles, and in a San Francisco court case that ended in April.

“The NUHW petition, if the National Labor Relations Board agrees it was filed appropriately, could force an election between SEIU-UHW and NUHW at Kaiser. Voting for NUHW would risk all the gains SEIU-UHW members made in a hard-fought four-month contract campaign against takeaways by Kaiser,” was how an SEIU-UHW press release cast today’s action.

NUHW opted for a nod to the Fourth of July in its release: “Thousands of Kaiser healthcare workers fired the first shot today in a long-anticipated battle for independence that will determine the future of California’s largest union, SEIU. They filed a petition that will trigger elections for 45,000 SEIU members to choose between the troubled incumbent and the state’s fastest-growing union, the new National Union of Healthcare Workers.”

About 2300 Kaiser workers – representing three of the seven bargaining units – already voted in January to join NUHW, but the petitions now being turned in by the remaining four unions represent the most significant segment of Kaisier workers, including the 44,000-member service, technical, and clerical unit.

Federal law calls for elections when at least 30 percent of a union’s members ask for one, and Crabtree told us, “We have more than we need.” Now, the NLRB must verify the petitions and schedule the election.

Fiscal solidarity

David Talbot
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Fiscal solidarity

OPINION As Mayor Gavin Newsom prepares to skip town for the bleak limelight of Sacramento, he has left a resounding parting shot with massive budget cuts to those San Franciscans most in need of public aid: seniors, youth, homeless people, folks with mental illnesses, health clinic patients … the list goes on.

Newsom has balanced his final budget (and his campaign for lieutenant governor) largely on the backs of the poor, working-class, multiracial, and immigrant San Franciscans, as well as the nonprofits and city workers who deliver vital services.

The Newsom budget actually adds costs: by cutting services for the treatment and prevention of substance abuse and for youth crime prevention and supportive housing, for instance, it destabilizes lives and forces people right back into the treatment systems that are being cut — adding new human and fiscal costs.

"Every cut has a constituency," Newsom’s PR people say repeatedly. And that’s precisely what the mayor is counting on — that each "constituency" will fight on its own, for its own fiscal scraps. He’s wrong.

As members of a broad coalition of community and neighborhood-based organizations, labor unions, and civic leaders and residents across the city, we stand together in opposition to Newsom’s cuts-only budget and his attempts to divide "constituencies."

Fiscal solidarity means we recognize that an injury to one is an injury to all. "Constituencies" are in fact people whose lives cut across multiple budget line items. Cutting city parks is also a senior issue, as well as a youth issue. Closing mental health programs for the poor is not only an unnecessary moral outrage — it’s a public health and safety issue.

As members and supporters of unions and nonprofits, which are sometimes pit against each other in budget cut wars, we declare mutual support. The mayor’s cuts will mean drastically reduced services for those who need them most and deep staff cuts for city employees and nonprofit workers. We may work for different institutions under different budget line-items, but we’re fighting together as one community — one big "constituency."

Budget wars artificially divide communities that overlap and intermingle. Expressions of unity are put to the test by the budget "add-back" process that forces community groups to scuffle for scraps of cash — groups serving populations in critical need are set against each other, and whole communities are reduced to line-items.

We’re standing against fiscal wedge politics and demanding a real alternative. The budget must protect those most in need and be balanced by cutting first from the top instead of the bottom.

We are united for solutions — progressive tax measures on key wealth sectors that can and must pay their fair share to keep San Francisco the beautiful, thriving, diverse, and culturally rich city it is. We’re standing up for the city Newsom’s leaving, for the communities he’s cutting, and for progressive revenue — a tax to make downtown hotels pay their fair share, and a gross receipts tax on large businesses for starters.

Mayor Newsom: if you cut one of us, you cut us all.

This statement was signed by Christopher Cook, Budget Justice Coalition; Gabriel Haaland, SEIU 1021*; Gordon Mar, Jobs with Justice*; Eric Quezada, Dolores Street Community Services*; N’Tanya Lee, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth*; Jennifer Friedenbach, Coalition on Homelessness; Guiliana Milanese, Jobs with Justice*; Christina Olague, Senior Action Network*; Sheila Tully, California Faculty Association, SF State*; Chelsea Boilard, Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth*; Joseph Smooke, Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center*; Carl Finamore, delegate, SF Labor Council*

* names for ID purposes only

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