The E.V. Nautilus comes to AltaSea pg. 3 QFilm Festival focuses on trans lives pg. 20
Take a self-guided tour of San Pedro pg. 13
The Fight for 15 New Organizing Revives an Old Labor Vision By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
By Christian L. Guzman, Contributing Reporter
[See River page 6]
The Local Publication You Actually Read
More than a 100 bicycle riders gathered at Riverfront Park in Maywood, an East Los Angeles community bordering the Los Angeles River in July. Riders young and old, from throughout the county, were checking and rechecking their equipment and provisions such as bottled water and snacks. They were preparing for a 17-mile bike journey along the Los Angeles River to Long Beach. Although it was a sunny summer day, this wasn’t a ride to simply take in the beauty of the local environs. This was a bike ride intended to uncover the ugly environmental injustices committed in this part of Los Angeles. Mark Lopez, the director of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, along with the organization’s young members, organized this LA River Toxic Tour. A native Angeleno, Lopez noted that he’s driven every stretch of freeway
On the weekend of Aug.13, the Fight for 15 movement hosted its first national convention in Richmond, Va., the capital of the Confederate rebellion. The event drew more than 3,000 low-wage workers from around the country in a demonstration of the movement’s growing strength, vitality and ambition. On Aug. 23, the National Labor Relations Board handed down a decision recognizing graduate students at Columbia University as workers with the right to form a union, reversing a 2004 Bush-era decision, and reinstating rights originally recognized in 2000. These two actions — a national gathering of grassroots activists and a decision by the nation’s “Supreme Court” of labor law — underscore both the scope and the swiftness with which a new round of unconventional labor organizing has begun to alter the landscape of working America. It reverses decades of decline. “Labor is definitely rethinking the way that they organize — from a traditional model, where it’s a high density as in manufacturing jobs, and moving over into exploring new terrain and new areas, and new industries which they can organize,” said Robert Nothoff, director of the Don’t Waste LA campaign, and former director of the Raise the Wage campaign in Los Angeles and San Diego. Here in California, those local successes have been followed by a statewide minimum wage rising to $15 per hour through 2022 for businesses with more than 25 employees and by 2023 for smaller firms. But raising the floor, even dramatically, hardly means there’s nothing left to be done, especially in the logistic sector connected to the local ports. If anything, American labor history teaches us the exact opposite: There’s always more to be done, and complacency invites unpleasant surprises. First, it makes sense to focus on where the fire is hottest right now.
The Fight For 15
[See Fight page 12]
September 1 - 14, 2016
East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice community organizer Hugo Lujan across the LA River from the Tesoro refinery, where an explosion took place on Aug. 26. East Yard asserts that Tesoro has expanded its operations by purchasing BP’s former Carson site. Photo by Linnea Stephan.
The Fight for 15 movement, backed by the Service Employees International Union, began in 2012 with just a few hundred fast food workers in New York City. They were striking for $15 an hour and union rights. Now, that fight has spread to more than 300 cities on six continents. It’s drawn together underpaid workers ranging from janitors, security officers and airport workers, to home-care and child-care workers and even adjunct professors with
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