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Santa Fe’s Plan For A Real Minimum Wage Offers Lessons For California

California has in recent years turned up its effort to establish minimum wages that allow workers to afford life in the Golden State. But the most daring experiment may well be coming not from particularly high-cost Los Angeles or San Francisco, but from a couple of states east. On Nov. 13, the City Council in Santa Fe, New Mexico, voted to integrate the cost of housing in its calculation of the citywide minimum wage going forward. According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, this marks the first time in the U.S. that a city has factored local housing costs directly into setting its minimum.

Could Cities Partner With Guerilla Urbanists For Safer Streets?

Painting a crosswalk is cheap and easy. A group of neighbors can paint an entire intersection in one morning for $100 or less. Getting the city of Los Angeles to paint a crosswalk, on the other hand, might take 14 years and the death of a 9-year-old boy. Across L.A., neighbors are banding together to paint crosswalks to protest the city’s failure to protect people outside of cars. Jonathan Hale, a UCLA law student who goes by “Jonny,” spent four Saturday mornings painting crosswalks with neighbors at Stoner Park this summer, covering each corner of the park. After the city removed them, he went to the press and vowed to repaint them.

40,000 University Of California Hospital Workers In Two-Day Strike

San Diego — As 40,000 AFSCME Local 3299 workers throughout the ten-campus University of California system launched a two-day strike on Nov. 17, two Communist Party members—Alvin, an AFSCME-represented employee at University of California at San Diego (UCSD), and another worker, an AFSCME retiree from UC San Francisco—shared their thoughts before they prepared to picket. Pay, or lack of it, is the big issue. But so is disparate treatment on a class basis.  While the university system fails to settle contracts addressing the cost of living and affordability crises facing its most economically vulnerable patient care workers, it’s also handed out six-figure salaries and housing subsidies to multiple high administrators.

Lawsuit Charges That California Law Illegally Muzzles Students, Teachers

Beginning January 1, 2026, teachers in California classrooms will be looking over their shoulders to avoid running afoul of a frightening new “antisemitism” law. On October 7, despite widespread opposition from civil rights groups, teachers’ unions, and education advocates, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 715, which amends the California Education Code to police what teachers can teach and what students can learn about Israel and Palestine. “This problematic classroom censorship bill silences Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, Jewish, and other marginalized voices in California public schools by shielding a foreign government — Israel — from legitimate criticism and criminalizes honest discussions on Palestine and other global human rights issues,” the Council on American Islamic Relations said in a statement.

What’s At Stake: USC And LMU Push Back Against Untenured Faculty Unions

Last summer, after nearly two years of organizing, hundreds of untenured faculty at Loyola Marymount University celebrated the certification of their newly formed union. In a message to the campus community, Thomas Poon, who served as LMU’s executive vice president and provost, wrote: “We honor the will of our [non-tenure track] faculty and the perspectives they expressed throughout the election campaign.” The university, he added, “will continue to engage the union in good faith and with transparency.” Poon is now president of LMU and, earlier this month, he changed his tune. Poon announced Sept. 12 that the university’s board of directors decided to invoke a religious exemption to the National Labor Relations Act.

Research And Public Service Professionals Vote To Form Union

Research and public service professionals across the UC voted Tuesday to form a new union that will represent 7,200 workers. The union, Research and Public Service Professionals-United Auto Workers, will represent workers who run “core facilities,” administer grants and analyze data, among other services. About half of those who the union will represent voted in the election, with 83% voting “yes” for the union’s formation. RPSPs have cited multiple reasons for the formation of RPSP-UAW, including stagnant salaries amid increasing workloads and a lack of administrative transparency. “In the face of federal funding cuts to higher education, many RPSPs also want a union to gain a stronger political voice,” a RPSP-UAW press release said.

The UAW Has A Vision For Green Industrial Policy In California

A consensus is emerging across the political spectrum around the need for industrial policy. Whether in the form of the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act under Joe Biden in 2022 or the haphazard tariff policy of Donald Trump implemented earlier this year, political leaders on both sides of the aisle are clearly searching for answers regarding how to revive the United States’s flagging manufacturing base. While the Trump administration places a lot of rhetorical emphasis on bringing back industrial jobs, its policies so far have displayed a profound lack of seriousness or coherence. Trump’s tariffs have not been focused on strategic industries or paired with the investment and planning required to make jobs actually materialize.

UC Berkeley Hands Over Private Staff And Student Information For Trump’s ‘Antisemitism’ Probe

The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) has provided the federal government with the private information of more than 150 students, staff, and faculty. The move comes in response to the Trump administration’s investigation into alleged campus antisemitism, which is widely viewed as a means to crack down on campus Palestine activism. The Daily Californian reports that the school’s Office of Legal Affairs sent emails to those impacted on September 4. “As part of its investigation, OCR required production of comprehensive documents, including files and reports related to alleged antisemitic incidents,” the email read.

SJSU Pro-Palestine Students Disrupt Career Fair With Silent Action

San Jose, CA – On September 10, San Jose Students for a Democratic Society alongside various other SJSU students held a silent protest outside a career fair where Lockheed Martin, notorious weapons manufacturer and supporter of the Gaza genocide, had a table. San Jose State University held the “Business, Financial Services and Logistics Job and Internship Fair” at 11 a.m. in the Student Union Ballroom. The career fair on the school’s website claims to attract over 600 students. Lockheed Martin was present at the event, intent on recruiting students to participate in what they call “defense,” which is in fact the design and manufacture of warplanes, helicopters and munitions which are used by the Israeli military to bomb and murder thousands of Palestinians a month.

Hundreds Of Staff At California National Parks To Unionize

Hundreds of staff at two of California’s most popular national parks have voted to unionize, a move that comes during a troubled summer for the National Park Service, which has seen the Trump administration enact unprecedented staff and budget cuts. In an election held between July and August, more than 97% of workers at Yosemite and Sequoia & Kings Canyon national parks voted in support of organizing a union, according to a statement from the National Federation of Federal Employees. The Federal Labor Relations Authority certified the results last week. “I am honored to welcome the Interpretive Park Rangers, scientists, biologists, photographers, geographers, and so many other federal employees in essential roles at both Yosemite and Sequoia & Kings Canyon to our union,” said Randy Erwin, the NFFE national president.

Land Trust’s Pioneering Model Protects Artists From Displacement

To Meg Shiffler, every artist is an entrepreneur. The inaugural director of the San Francisco-based nonprofit Artist Space Trust knows that when artists are priced out of their communities, it’s not just a loss of cultural vibrancy; it’s the shuttering of small businesses and the weakening of local economies. Artists everywhere are on the brink. A longitudinal study of 20 million workers from 2006 to 2021 found that artists earn up to 30% less than those in other industries. Although over 5 million people work in the arts and cultural industries, they face higher unemployment rates, lower wages, and fewer benefits. And because artists are three-and-a-half times more likely to be self-employed than other workers, many lack the credit and stable income that banks and landlords require. “The displacement of artists is not just the displacement of workers,” Shiffler explains.

Indigenous Communities From Southern Mexico Refuse To Bow To ICE

In many agricultural fields of the West Coast of the United States, you’re more likely to hear Mixtec or Triqui languages spoken than Spanish. Both are common among the Indigenous people of southern Mexico, some of whom now pick grapes for Napa and Sonoma County’s prestige wineries, or apples in century-old orchards. Without their labor, rural economies in California would collapse. Yet Mixteco and Triqui migrants are being increasingly targeted in immigration raids terrorizing California’s rural communities. In farmworker families, mothers and fathers now give their children phone numbers to call if parents are abducted on the way to or from work. It can be an act of bravery simply to walk to the store, or to drive a car at night.

Anatomy Of A Red Scare

As thousands of people took to the streets of Los Angeles to defend their communities against state-sanctioned abductions of immigrants this June, the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism (SSCC) put three organizations—Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), and the independent political organization Unión del Barrio (UdB)—on notice. Led by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, the SSCC normally oversees anti-terrorism enforcement and policy, and directs the work of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Justice Department Criminal Division.

What It Will Take To Get US Citizens To Work The Farm?

The agriculture sector is on edge like never before. With ICE officers chasing undocumented immigrants through fields and barging into meatpacking plants, workers are spooked. Even before the farm raids, workforce shortages and economic uncertainty rankled the industry. Now, as harvest season arrives for many crops, concerns are growing that there may not be enough workers out there to feed the country. To Dolores Huerta, it’s an unprecedented problem caused squarely by the Trump administration. “It’s an atrocity, what they’ve been doing to the immigrant community,” Huerta said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine.

Charges Dropped Against Anti-ICE Protester Alejandro Orellana

Los Angeles, CA – On July 29, the federal government announced the conspiracy charges against Chicano activist Alejandro Orellana were dropped – a victory for Centro CSO and all freedom fighters in the immigrant rights movement fighting against ICE terror! On June 12, the FBI, National Guard, and the East LA Sheriff station raided Orellana’s home. They arrested Orellana, destroyed his family home, and locked him up at the Metropolitan Detention Center that has been the site of many anti-deportation protests. The Justice Department charged him with conspiracy to commit civil disorder and aiding and abetting civil disorder, which could have resulted in up to five years in prison for Orellana.
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