Category: Labor

As San Diego County supervisors seek to privatize more services, public officials elsewhere are reading the danger signs and starting to move in the opposite direction.

Like many other local and state governments desperate for budgetary quick fixes, the county board fell back on the old knee-jerk assumption that private companies can perform public services “better, cheaper and faster.” The facts show that quite often the opposite is true.

by Anna Daniels

Dear Karin Winner, Editor:

Ms. Winner, I just canceled my 15+ year subscription to the Union-Tribune. I asked to speak to a supervisor who would convey my reason for doing so to the appropriate individuals within the company. The reason I gave to Hector was the U-T’s recent decision to publish all City employee names and salary information on signonsandiego.com.

by Gary Gilmore

There’s more to our little Street Fair than chili, music, beer & good times.

What makes this whole extravaganza tick is money. That’s right, crass as it may seem, it’s money that makes the Street Fair go ‘round.

All 250 vendors (give or take a few) with their colorful booths, … had to fork over $365 bucks each …

by Gregg Robinson

Yesterday roughly 150 people showed up at the California State building on Front Street to demand rejection of Gov. Schwartzenegger’s draconian cuts to state services. Rally attendees heard speakers from religious, trade-union, and community groups speak out against the cuts.

With nearly one million children threatened …

People United Against Cuts is a local coalition formed to oppose the Governor’s recent “All Cuts” budget. The Governor’s proposed…

OCEAN BEACH, CA. Saturday, June 20th, was the first (for some) Great Graffiti Paint-out for Sunset Cliffs, marred by countless taggings. About twenty people showed up bright and early and proceeded to paint clean the entire stretch from Orchard north to the Pier. Special thanks go out to Ed Baer, Lou, and Jon Carr for making this happen. Cheers to you!

In the early Seventies, the battle for the future of Ocean Beach grew very intense, as the different warring sides squared off around the original OB Precise Plan – the urban design for the community sponsored by the elite and powerful. The OB Community Planning Group published an 8-page leaflet that was so effective, that it convinced the community to join and support the organization.

One in nine Americans are using federal food stamps to help buy groceries as the country’s deep recession forced another 591,000 people onto the federal anti-hunger program at latest count.

The unemployment rate raced to 9.4 percent, the highest since a matching rate in July 1983, from 8.9 percent in April. This reading beat the peak in the jobless rate during the 1973-1975 recession that lasted 16 months.

Some call it the “Tiananmen Square Massacre,” others say the “Tiananmen Square Crackdown,” and in China it is known merely as an “incident,” the “June 4th Incident,” or as the Chinese say, “liù-sì shìjiàn”.

No matter how you refer to the 1989 democracy protests in Beijing and the brutal response by China’s military, on Thursday, June 4th, the world marks the event’s 20th anniversary.

by Michael Moore

General Motors, as we know it, has been totaled. …

It is with sad irony that the company which invented “planned obsolescence” — has now made itself obsolete.

Despite his admission that California is ungovernable, the Governor soldiered on today, announcing the full slate of revised budget cuts to replace his proposed borrowing, since scrapped, and to fill the even larger deficit estimated by the Legislative Analyst. …

On Monday, the New York Times published a story detailing a multi-million dollar ad campaign launched by Starbucks in which the company put up advertising posters in six major cities and attempted to “harness the power of online social networking sites by challenging people to hunt for the posters on Tuesday and be the first to post a photo of one using Twitter.”

Unfortunately for Starbucks,…