Tag: living wage

The number of unhoused people dying on the street in San Francisco is triple the number who died last year at this time. During this pandemic Mayor Breed called for the shelter in place order ahead of other cities and even ahead of Gov. Newsom. She understood the deadly nature of the virus and her responsibility to protect the people of her city.

On Friday, Jan. 18, 2019, teachers from Fremont High School, along with teachers all across Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), will be holding another “sick-out.” Just like the last sick-out, this will look like multiple teachers from multiple schools calling in “sick” on Friday morning. We the teachers demand that OUSD prioritize public education for all of our students in the district. Friday will be a small taste of what OUSD teachers on strike will look like at the end of this month or early next month, in February. Yes, OUSD teachers are strike ready!

On Monday, Dec. 10, teachers from Madison Park Academy Upper joined with teachers across Oakland Unified School District to demand that OUSD prioritize teacher retention and access to student supports in order to maximize student success. Educators, students and community members rallied at Oakland City Hall, 1 Frank H. Ogawa Plaza, Oakland, beginning at 10:30 a.m.

Online progressive activists with The Digital Left are announcing a campaign to draft and elect Representative Barbara Lee to be the next speaker of the House. Within 48 hours of polls closing in the midterm elections, the group, alongside The Humanist Report, has gathered more than 5,000 signatures on an online petition calling on Democratic members of the 117th Congress to elect Rep. Lee as speaker of the House.

The love affair between Black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. What have the Clintons done to earn such devotion? Did they take extreme political risks to defend the rights of African Americans? Did they courageously stand up to right-wing demagoguery about Black communities? Did they help usher in a new era of hope and prosperity for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization and the disappearance of work? No. Quite the opposite.

This week tens of thousands of people in the United States flooded the streets to demand racial justice. It is one of many issues that have been building for years, reaching the tipping point and seeming to explode in a national awakening. We also saw that in the last two weeks with national protests for living wages. Four years ago we listed 15 crisis issues that the country needed to face; poverty wages and the injustice in criminal enforcement, including racially abusive police practices, were two of them.

Last week, the Richmond City Council voted in favor of a city ordinance that will increase the local minimum wage from $8 to $12.30 an hour by 2017. The increase will be phased in over three years and positions Richmond to have the highest minimum wage of any city in California. “I wish it could be more, but it showcases that Richmond has the political will to move forward,” said Mayor McLaughlin.

The Community-Labor Coalition to Save the People’s Post Office rallied, marched and occupied the Civic Center Post Office in downtown San Francisco to stop threats of eliminating 220,000 living-wage jobs and closing 3,700 post offices, including four in San Francisco - most in poor neighborhoods and rural areas.

The key factor thus far in failing to harness the mass support of the people is the lack of broad-based, articulable demands around which the uncommitted people who may support our message but not our movement can be educated, organized and mobilized to join the movement and transform not only the nature and structure of U.S. society, but the WORLD.

On Dec. 9, 2010, thousands of prisoners in at least six Georgia state prisons initiated the largest prisoner strike in U.S. history, uniting across racial boundaries to demand an immediate end to the cruel and dehumanizing conditions that damage prisoners, their families and the communities they return to. Readers are invited to add their names to this solidarity statement.