Last night I had the pleasure of attending the 15th Anniversary Awards Dinner for LAANE (The Los Angeles Alliance For A New Economy), which brought 1,000 people to the Beverly Hilton (including Mayor Villaraigosa, Sean Penn, and more) and raised $500,000 for their cause.  I know I get depressed reading about endless budget fights and cutbacks to schools and health care, so it’s important to take comfort (and some valuable lessons) in those doing important work – and fighting some of the most powerful and entrenched interests in the city and the country – and winning.

LAANE is a group dedicated to fighting for economic and environmental justice by building coalitions and waging campaigns to improve the lives of people in underserved and at-risk communities.  Their success stories include some of the most astonishing victories of the last decade – the living-wage campaign in Los Angeles, the (eventually) successful grocery worker’s strike, the campaign to keep Wal-Mart out of Inglewood in 2004, the fight for justice for hotel workers near LAX.  More recently, they achieved success with a landmark blue-green alliance of nearly 40 environmental groups, community organizers and labor organizations like the Teamsters, to clean up the Port of Los Angeles, which resulted in a huge victory for clean air and clean water which will also provide good-paying sustainable jobs for truck drivers.  The Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports is a model for the nation, to combine economic security and respect for the environment at the ports, and Chuck Mack & Jim Santangelo from the Teamsters were honored last night (sporting leis flown in by a Teamster rep from Hawaii).

Another of their campaigns is the “Construction Career Policy,” dedicated to providing local residents in low-income communities the opportunity to get middle-class, union construction jobs on projects happening in their area.  This has resulted in thousands of jobs for at-risk and underserved communities of color, and the goal is for 15,000 jobs over the next 5 years.  Mayor Villaraigosa presented Cora Davis, a construction business owner and leading advocate for the program, with an award.

Finally, in the wake of the movie “Milk,” many are remembering the work of Cleve Jones, an activist in San Francisco during the era and the leader of the AIDS Quilt Project.  Today, Jones is a community organizer working for UNITE HERE, and he has worked with LAANE on their campaigns to create living-wage jobs and improve working conditions for the 3,500 hotel workers around LAX Airport.  Sean Penn, who became friendly with Jones over the last year working on “Milk,” presented him with an award for his service.  In his speech, Jones talked about these noble working-class people, many of them immigrants, “the ones who are serving you dinner tonight,” and he paid tribute to their struggle and dignity.  He also had a few words to say about the passage of Prop. 8, which left him heartbroken and drew eerie parallels to the Prop. 6 campaign he worked on with Harvey Milk in 1978.  But, Jones said, the real parallel moment is 1964, a time when civil rights for African-Americans in the Deep South appeared remote.  “Now is the time for Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to sign a new Civil Rights Act restoring fundamental rights for every American in this country.”  It’s not the tactic you hear from the leading gay rights organizations, but Cleve doesn’t hold much of a brief for them either:

The new (gay rights) activists have impressed some gay rights veterans.

“They’ve shown a clear ability to turn out large numbers of people,” said Cleve Jones, a longtime gay rights advocate and labor organizer. “It’s also clear that they are skeptical of the established L.G.B.T. organizations. And I would say they have reason to be.”

Overall, it was inspiring to see a community-based organization so dedicated to restoring fairness, justice, dignity and respect to a part of a population that frequently doesn’t have a voice in political affairs, and more important, to see them get results.  LAANE is doing some great work.

(While it’s not state-based, I thought I’d cross-post this from my site and Hullabaloo due to the importance of this day.  Also, Dr. King was shot at 6:01pm on April 4, so blame Bono and U2 for the technical error…

– promoted by David Dayen)

…shot rings out, in a Memphis sky,

free at last, they took your life

but they could not take your pride…

And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.

And I don’t mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

And so I’m happy, tonight.

I’m not worried about anything.

I’m not fearing any man!

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!

Just to contextualize, Martin Luther King was in Memphis working with striking sanitation workers who wanted a fair contract from the city.  He was a civil rights leader but understood civil rights as an economic justice issue, as an issue of equality, not just of humanity but opportunity.  The workers were threatened and attacked and kept on marching for their rights.  King’s fight was for freedom of assembly, for equal protection, for justice in all its forms.  To me, this was actually the most powerful portion of that speech:

Now the other thing we’ll have to do is this: Always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people. Individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively — that means all of us together — collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine. Did you ever think about that? After you leave the United States, Soviet Russia, Great Britain, West Germany, France, and I could name the others, the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States, and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That’s power right there, if we know how to pool it.

We don’t have to argue with anybody. We don’t have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don’t need any bricks and bottles. We don’t need any Molotov cocktails. We just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, “God sent us by here, to say to you that you’re not treating his children right. And we’ve come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God’s children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.”

And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy — what is the other bread? — Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart’s bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven’t been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on town — downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.

The power of collective action.  The power of bottom-up organizing.  The power of seeing a world where everyone is in it together, where everyone has a stake in one another.  The power of fighting for justice and fairness and right, and moving mountains just by walking together.  We get cynical in this medium a lot, and maybe we have a right to; after all, forty years ago they shot Dr. King for leading such a movement.  But the legacy lives on, and I believe in his aphorism that “the long arc of history bends toward justice.”  This movement, this place where we’ve all gravitated, is but a small kernel of that legacy.  But it’s growing, and regardless of the President or the Congress or whoever it will continue to move forward.  And one day, we will get there.

…oh yeah, just so you know, and want to tell a friend, John McCain voted against making Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday in 1983.

When a tentative agreement on health care benefits was reported a couple weeks back, it looked as if a Southern California grocery strike along the lines of the crippling 6-month strike back in 2003-04 would be averted.  But the latest shenanigans by Ralph’s and Vons and Albertson’s have forced the UFCW to set a June 21 deadline for a comprehensive offer they can bring to their workers, or else they will vote on a walkout.

Here’s what the chains did.  The major goal of the negotiations on the labor side has been to eliminate the two-tier wage system for employees.  Under the current contract, workers hired before 2004 make more (and receive more benefits) than workers hired after 2004, even if they do exactly the same job.  This has given the chains an incentive to turn over their workers in favor of lower-paid new hires, and sure enough, over half of all current employees are in the lower tier.

This “divide and conquer” strategy worked so well last time that the chains are trying it again.

over…

From an email to supporters:

…we were shocked when the employers finally put the following wage proposal on the table: NO pay increases for anyone, and THREE wage tiers.

That’s right. Despite the negative impact the two-tier system has had on grocery workers and their families — not to mention the moral implications of creating inferior classes of workers — Ralphs, Vons and Albertsons’ contract negotiators proposed slashing wages even further with an additional third tier.

So if the employers have their way, grocery workers would be divided into the following three tiers:

One for employees hired before March 2004.

Another for employees hired after March 2004 but before the coming 2007 contract.

And yet another for everyone hired after the new contract.

And each one pays less than the one before.

These negotiations have gone on for six months, and now the chains are attempted to cut their wage outlays even FURTHER by adding a third tier.  This is absolutely unacceptable, yet the union, reeling from the unsuccessful 2003-04 strike, has little room to maneuver.  Only through collective action, and punishing these chains economically for their attempts to disrespect their employees, can there ever be any success.  And that includes not only refusing to shop at their stores; after all, most Southern Californians stayed away the last strike.  I’m talking about stock divestment, solidarity with other labor groups (like those who supply the stores through trucking) and any other means to ensure that the suits, who have the upper hand because of their size and flexibility, are permanently impacted.