California

Big Dairy Is Milking California Dry

June 22, 2023 Ian Whitaker, In These Times. Resist! California, Dairy, Environment, Food and Agriculture

Planada, Calif. — Rita Rodriguez had prepared everything for her 57th birthday, a backyard family cookout with wine, hot dogs, popcorn, kebabs and a projector to watch Pete’s Dragon under the stars. Then came the smell of manure. “It just hits and you can’t really do anything about it,” Rodriguez says, recalling how they were forced to move inside because of the industrial Hillcrest Dairy nearby. “It was just so toxic that we couldn’t sit out there.” When Hillcrest Dairy arrived in Merced County in 2002 — originally permitted for a herd of 3,885 cows — lifelong residents Rita and husband David thought nothing of it. By 2012, though, the number of cows had more than doubled.

Who’s Unhoused In California?

June 22, 2023 Sam Levin, The Guardian. Educate! California, Homelessness, Housing, Racial disparities

Nearly half of all unhoused adults in California are over the age of 50, with Black residents dramatically overrepresented, according to the largest study of the state’s homeless population in decades. University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) research released on Tuesday also revealed that 90% of the state’s homeless population lost their housing in California, with 75% of them now living in the same county where they were last housed. The study further found that nearly nine out of 10 people reported that the cost of housing was the main barrier to leaving homelessness.

A Juneteenth Call To Close Prisons

June 20, 2023 Mansa Musa, The Real News Network. Resistance Report California, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Human Rights, Juneteenth

Juneteenth has become a federal holiday—yet prison slavery under the 13th Amendment continues. Uprooting the prison industrial complex is vital to completing the abolition of slavery. In California, the Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) coalition aims to close 10 state prisons in the next 5 years as part of the People’s Plan for Prison Closure. CURB Executive Director Amber-Rose Howard joins Rattling the Bars to discuss this bold plan. Amber-Rose Howard is a poet, public speaker and organizer from Pomona, California. She currently serves as Executive Director of CURB.

Intolerable Conditions Drive ‘Shortages,’ Transit Workers Say

June 20, 2023 Sultana Adams and Richard Marcantonio, Labor Notes. Resist! Bus Drivers, California, Transportation, Worker Rights and Jobs

Why are public transit operators struggling to retain workers and hire new ones? Workers at AC Transit say one major factor is intolerable working conditions—overwork, inadequate breaks, safety hazards, and a pervasive culture of disrespect. And these problems affect not only workers, but also bus riders across California’s East Bay. Every week many scheduled runs are canceled without notice when there’s no backup for an operator who is out sick. At a transit board meeting in March, riders asked the agency to restore service on the 80, a route that had been cut when Covid struck. Management’s response: we don’t have enough workers to run it.

California’s ‘Local Food Producers’ Hope New Label Will Boost Support

June 13, 2023 Naoki Nitta, Modern Farmer. Create! California, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Food Sovereignty, Local Economy

Despite offices being closed, Sundays are the busiest day of the week at the Marin County Civic Center. Located half an hour north of San Francisco—and within a couple of hundred miles of California’s many agricultural regions, including the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys and the North and Central coasts—the Sunday Marin Farmers Market is the third largest among the state’s 655 open-air greenmarkets. On busy weekends, crowds of locavores routinely swell to 15,000. “Customers come from all over,” says Gha Xiong, owner of Xiong Farm. He’s one of nearly 150 regional farmers, ranchers and food purveyors who set up Sunday shop in the sprawling parking lot, in clear view of the Prairie-style dome and spire designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

California Set Minimum Staffing Levels For Overworked Nurses

June 11, 2023 Mark Kreidler, Capital and Main. Create! California, Health Care, Nurses, Workplace Safety

When Catherine Kennedy began her career as a registered nurse in California in 1980, staffing situations often resembled the Wild West. On some overnight shifts in San Francisco, Kennedy said, she and one other RN shared responsibility for a 48-bed facility. Their only help was four aides. “It was unmanageable,” Kennedy remembered. “You would work as a team, get through the night, and pray nobody would code [i.e. suffer a cardiac or respiratory arrest].” It took years of prodding, much of it coming from union-organized RNs, to get state legislation passed that mandated far stricter nurse-to-patient ratios than those Kennedy and her colleagues faced back then.

Activists Organize Direct Action Against Logging In California

June 5, 2023 Noa Cykman, Resilience. Strategize! California, Environment, Forest Defenders, Logging

A customer entering Home Depot, the largest home improvement retailer in the United States, will find elegant redwood with a certification of “sustainable forestry” available. Humboldt Redwoods Company (HRC) provides this shiny commodity. The company claims to be reducing the use of herbicides, and selecting trees for cutting, rather than “clear-cutting” (general clearing of an area). The agent that creates the concepts and criteria of selection and of sustainability, however, is the company itself.[3] For instance, they commit not to cut “old growth trees,” despite there being no scientific or consensual definition of the age or conditions that would characterize those.

Graffiti Writers Paint Over A Pro-Police ‘Street Art’ Campaign

May 24, 2023 It's Going Down. Resist! California, Capitalism, Graffiti, Police, San Francisco

A “street art” campaign backed by Welsh tech billionaire and venture capitalist Michael Moritz is being targeted by graffiti artists in San Francisco, California. The campaign features posters and even wheat-pastes which call for a “law and order” approach to homelessness and fentanyl related deaths in San Francisco. Moritz, in an effort to further social cleanse the poor from urban core areas, along with many on the Right, have rushed to blame “the Left” for rising homelessness, crime rates and drug use in San Francisco. In February, the New York Times published an editorial by Moritz entitled, Even Democrats Like Me Are Fed Up With San Francisco, which echoed far-Right talking points demonizing those most displaced and excluded from the capitalist system.

Berkeley Urban Ore Workers Win IWW Union Election

May 19, 2023 Industrial Workers of the World, It's Going Down. Organize! California, IWW, Unions, Worker Rights

The Urban Ore workers of Berkeley, California won their union election with a two-thirds majority of workers’ votes on April 7, 2023. The union received confirmation of their certification from the NLRB as a bargaining unit on Thursday, April 20. The campaign went public on February 1. While one of the employers had told local media he objected to some of the ballots, he did not file any objection before the deadline with the regional National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) office. Urban Ore is a 3-acre for-profit salvage operation in Berkeley, California, founded in 1980 with its goal “to end the age of waste.” Workers describe it as an essential part of the Berkeley community.

Knights On Strike In California

May 7, 2023 Ericka Wills, Labor Notes. Resist! California, Labor Unions, Medieval Times, Strikes

Shocking video of Medieval Times strikers in Buena Park, California, run down by a car and then physically assaulted while picketing in a crosswalk had hundreds of thousands of views on social media in April. “We began to get run over by cars,” said Jake Bowman, a Medieval Times knight-turned-union organizer. “People would get out of their cars and throw picketers to the ground. Some people cared more about getting into their two-hour, completely optional entertainment venue than workers’ lives. Sometimes you may have to yell louder to convince people to care.” The assaults brought into public view the challenges that members of Medieval Times Performers United (MTU)—representing actors, stunt performers, and stable hands organizing with the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA)—have faced since their strike began February 11.

These Lawsuits Could Turn The Tide On Section 8 Discrimination

April 28, 2023 Roshan Abraham, Next City. Resist! California, Housing, New York (NY), Washington D.C.

In October, the Washington, D.C., attorney general’s office announced the largest civil award in a housing discrimination case in U.S. history. The lawsuit was filed in 2020 against D.C. real estate firms DARO Realty, DARO Management Services and Infinity Real Estate, LLC, which oversaw investing for companies. A judge ruled that DARO would have to pay $10 million to settle a lawsuit brought by holders of Section 8 vouchers, a federally-funded payment system that allows low-income people to rent in the private market. What’s more, DARO had to dissolve its property management business and certain members of leadership who were named as defendants were permanently banned from owning property management businesses in D.C.

Hotel Workers Face Unwelcome Guests: Union Busters Hired By Bosses

April 24, 2023 Michael Sainato, Portside. Educate! California, Service Industry, union busting, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

In the heart of California’s wine country, the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa offers guests access to on-site geothermal mineral pools, an exclusive golf club and farm-to-table dining. “Like the Native Americans who revered the site as a sacred healing ground, you’ll live in harmony with nature through vast open spaces, beautifully landscaped grounds, majestic redwood trees and inspiring sunsets,” boasts the resort’s website. That purported serenity on stolen Native American land has not extended to the workers at the luxury resort where union avoidance consultants hired by and staying at the hotel for the past several months have been trying to suppress their union organizing drive.

‘Strike Force’: Building The UPS Contract Campaign

April 8, 2023 Justin Alo, Labor Notes. Organize! California, Strikes, Unions, UPS, Worker Rights and Jobs

At Duke’s Hawaiian Coffee Shop and Deli in San Marcos, California, Friday mornings are abuzz with organizing talk—building unity among fellow Teamsters ahead of a potential strike at UPS. We began meeting in February, just a few of us. Soon enough, word spread about what we called “Unity Breakfast,” and the coffee shop filled up. At the first meeting, my co-worker Tim Peppers defined the main purpose: to educate members about the contract campaign and potential strike. We talked about how we are part of a movement much bigger than our own building, and why it’s important to build unity across our differences in seniority and classification.

House Speaker McCarthy Meets Taiwan’s President Tsai In California

April 6, 2023 Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com. Educate! California, China, Kevin McCarthy, Taiwan

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) met with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in California on Wednesday, marking the highest level meeting between US and Taiwanese officials since the previous House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, visited Taipei in August 2022. The meeting is historic and risks provoking a major Chinese response as it makes McCarthy the highest-level US official to host a Taiwanese leader on US soil since Washington severed diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1979 to open up with Beijing. China has warned strongly against the plans and launched a naval patrol in the Taiwan Strait ahead of the meeting. At this point, it’s not clear how far China’s military response will go.

When Wildfires Choke California, This Activist Gets Masks To People In Need

March 30, 2023 Nina Thompson, Next City. Organize! California, COVID-19, Mutual Aid, Oakland, Wildfires

Each time a fire breaks out in Northern California, local activist Quinn Redwoods and their collaborators spring into action. Walking through Oakland, Redwoods distributes masks to as many people as they can. They hand out masks in places where no one else is paying attention, like crowded underpasses where unhoused people have no options to escape the smoke. They’ll even stop UPS drivers to offer them a mask. Redwoods describes the activity as “organically emerging.” It all started back in 2017 during the Tubbs Fire, when it was so smoky in the San Francisco Bay Area it wasn’t safe to be outside.

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