Category: Labor

By Jim Miller

As the Salon story reposted here on Black Friday noted there were about 1,500 protests around the country on our annual day of consumer madness mostly designed to shine a light on the horrendous corporate practices of Walmart, America’s beloved externalizing machine. While Walmart’s propaganda insists that the company is a provider of good jobs and many benefits to our communities, the facts suggest otherwise.

By Jim Miller

Last Tuesday, fortune favored the bold. David Alvarez defied the pundits and political insiders and beat the prohibitive favorite, Nathan Fletcher, in the race to face Kevin Faulconer in the run-off to be San Diego’s next mayor. This was a seminal moment for San Diego—perhaps the biggest political upset in history of the city.

It just wasn’t supposed to happen.

By Matthew Wood

Growing up in the Ocean Beach area, Ryan Ybarra had a dream in life: To become a fire fighter at the OB Fire House No. 15. He waited for his opportunity, even enduring a hellacious commute from a job at a fire department the Los Angeles area back to his wife and kids in OB.

Finally, about two years ago, a position opened up at the OB station on Voltaire and Ebers and Ybarra grabbed it. Didn’t matter to him that he lost the seniority he had built up. Or that he had to go through training and the department’s probation program. He knew he was home.

“And I’ll probably finish here,” he said with a smile. “As a kid, I always wanted to work in OB. That commute (from L.A.) just about killed me. But it was definitely worth it.”

Ybarra is an engineer on the 12-man crew at OB fire house. The guys were nice enough to give me access to their daily routine, and even ride along in the fire truck to their daily workout regimen.

Here’s a bit about how it works:

The lines are being drawn for a ‘Grand Bargain’ and the Democrats’ continued willingness to give away role as defenders of safety net and earned benefit programs, say critics, is deeply worrying

By Jon Queally / Common Dreams

If U.S. citizens are increasingly concerned that the Democratic Party is no longer willing to fight off the right-wing attack on Social Security, Medicare, and other key social programs, Sen. Dick Durbin, President Obama and other party leaders have recently offered plenty of evidence to increase that worry.

Since the end of the government shutdown and standoff over the debt limit ended last week, Obama has repeatedly said that he wants to find a “balanced” solution to the ongoing budget debate with Republican lawmakers.

“Meet and Greet” Is Covered by Famous OB Rag Columnist

A “meet and greet” was held on Sunday, Oct. 13th, in Ocean Beach to introduce us to David Alvarez, a candidate running for the position of Mayor of San Diego.

It was the first time that many of the attendees had ever met Mr. Alvarez, and there was great interest from the over 50 people in attendance in what he had to say, how he said it, and what he sees for the future of San Diego. He gave willingly of his time, and spent almost three hours answering every question asked. It is interesting to note that at no time did he evade the questions, and from this observation was honest and sincere in what he said.

Wednesday, October 2nd at 7pm at DG Wills Book Store
By Jim Miller

San Diego City Works Press is proud to announce the publication of The Encyclopedia of Rebels by local author and UCSD writing teacher, Mel Freilicher. The book plays with the intersections between history, fiction, memoir, fantasy, and mystery. As Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout puts it, “You could call this both an outrageous comedy and a credible look at the world we live in.”

Mel Freilicher will read from his new book this Wednesday, October 2nd, at 7 PM at D.G. Wills Book Store at 7461 Girard Ave in La Jolla as part of the San Diego City College International Book Fair.

By Jim Miller

Last Friday evening, after five grueling hours of candidate interviews and spirited debate, the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council overwhelmingly endorsed David Alvarez for mayor.

This decision came after weeks of intense lobbying on the part of former labor leader Lorena Gonzalez, who, along with other powerful Democratic power brokers and money people were seeking to clear the field of genuinely progressive candidates in order to anoint Nathan Fletcher as the “only choice.”

Indeed, while Democratic money bundler Christine Forrester was writing to her well-heeled contacts praising Fletcher as “an astute business leader, worthy of representing and evolving Qualcomm’s business interests” and someone “well-suited to find common denominators between left and right” in order to create a “bipartisan platform from which San Diego can soar,” Gonzalez was repackaging him as a working class hero about whom she said to her list of labor folks, “the more he learned about economic justice issues, the better champion he became.”

By Jim Miller

Today is Labor Day, but how many of us have any idea where the holiday came from or what it celebrates?

The first Labor Day was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5th, 1882 in New York City and was proposed by the Central Labor Union (CLU) at a time when American workers were struggling for basic rights such as the eight-hour day. The CLU moved the “workingman’s holiday” to the first Monday in September in 1883 and urged other unions to celebrate the date as well.

The movement grew throughout the 1880s, along with the American labor movement itself with 23 states passing legislation recognizing Labor Day as a holiday. By 1894 Congress followed suit and Labor Day became a national holiday.

By Bob Dorn

Debby, or Debra, Flores is 20 and has a 2-year-old daughter. She works at Wendy’s downtown, First and Broadway from 11 am to 3 p.m. only four days a week, which means she’s part-time and enjoys no company benefits. She makes $8 per hour from the Wendy’s she’s part of. So, during the week at Wendy’s she’s making $32 a day, taking home $128.00 per week, less taxes.

She pays taxes because she has ANOTHER job at a hookah lounge delivering food and tobacco starting at 7 pm and continuing through the night to 6 am.

Think of it. This slight, lean young girl human on a typical day of the week puts in 15 hours of work a day, commutes to her mother’s home and spends just about 3 hours a day with her child, starting at 3 pm. Sometimes, on a good day, she grabs maybe five hours of sleep, if she can sleep.

“It’s a big challenge,” she says, with a shrug. Her mother, with whom she lives, takes care of the baby. If it weren’t for that, Debby would be at home, fulfilling the prophesies of trickle-down Republicans who believe those damned minorities are just welfare cheats.

By Jim Miller

In the aftermath of the Filner resignation, a group of Democratic Party insiders and money people are continuing to run around with their hair on fire trying to anoint Nathan Fletcher as our savior and discourage other truly progressive candidates from entering the field.

Of course this includes folks like Christine Forrester, who runs a marketing consulting firm that connects businesses with hedge fund money, and former Labor Council leader Lorena Gonzalez, who has long been championing her personal friend, the former Assemblyman with an 18% labor voting record over the vociferous objections of many in labor.

Thursday, Aug. 15th at 7pm
Point Loma United Methodist Church
1984 Sunset Cliffs Blvd, OB

Step back in tome with Jim Bregante’s historical presentation of San Diego’s waterfront and Little Italy. Take this historical journey with an experienced speaker and Docent for the San Diego Maritime Museum and his PowerPoint presentation.

By Jim Miller

This summer few people outside of the Bay Area probably noted what was one of the most important stories about higher education in America: City College of San Francisco (CCSF) is losing its accreditation.

After years of wrangling, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), one of the seven regional accreditors in the western United States whose job it is to ensure the quality of higher education programs announced that CCSF was losing its accreditation in July of 2014.

Why should you care? Because ACCJC’s decision had very little to do with the quality of instruction and much more to do with imposing a new business model on community colleges that narrows their mission and opens the door to more privatization in American higher education. And San Francisco is being used as an example to intimidate other colleges to fall in line with ACCJC’s questionable “reform” agenda. Thus, what happened in San Francisco could happen in San Diego.

The reaction to this extreme punishment for CCSF, an institution that serves 90,000 students, many of them working class, immigrant, or in adult education, and had never been sanctioned before last year, was outrage.