(Cross-posted from Working Californians)

Yesterday was not just a big win for workers in LAX-area hotels; it was a big win for working people throughout LA and California.  So today, let’s break down all of the moving pieces and give credit where it is due.

Big business lobbyists have now dropped their efforts to use a ballot initiative to overturn the landmark law that extended LA’s living wage ordinance to thousands of workers at hotels near LAX.  This is part of a deal reached between unions and other supporters of the living wage, Mayor Villaraigosa and members of the City Council, and business leaders.  The agreement allows for the repeal of the original ordinance and passage of a new law that will raise wages for the Century Boulevard hotel workers while providing certain assurances to business leaders.  That will not happen immediately.  It will take a few weeks for the legislation to be crafted and voted upon.

Immediately after that new bill is passed, workers will get a boost to $9.60 an hour.  There will be a second increase in July, bringing their wages to $10.64 ($9.39 for those with employer-provided health benefits).  This will bring much needed relief to the 3,500 workers in the 13 hotels along Century Boulevard even earlier than the original legislation, where the increase was to come in May.

This victory is a long time coming.  It took thousands of petitions, marches, long negotiations, but is a perfect example of what a strong labor movement can do to improve worker’s quality of life.  There were many heroes — none more so than the workers who made this their fight — but in particular, Maria Elena Durazo, the Secretary-Treasurer of the LA County Federal of Labor, deserves a lot of credit for her leadership, vision and strength.

Moreover, there is strong public support for even greater progress for working people —  as the Working Californians poll showed.

But in the meantime, winning a living wage and health care benefits to tens of thousands of workers is a great step forward that we can build on.

As Vivian Rothstein, Deputy Director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy says:

It is clear that the public cares deeply about working poverty and believes that city leaders have a responsibility to ensure that people who work hard can support themselves and their families in dignity,” said Rothstein. “The Mayor and City Council have shown tremendous leadership on this issue, and residents of Los Angeles will continue to support them in finding solutions that help create better jobs and rebuild our middle class.

That first sentense in Rothstein’s quote points to another lesson from this fight:  Advocacy efforts are immensely strengthened by accurate, timely and credible data on public opinion. That’s why Working Californians focuses on strategic research so much.

This win for hotel workers helps raise quality of life for all of LA.  Now others will be able to use this wage as leverage for their own living wage.  This is a basic building block that we hope to use for further expansion of a living wage for all Californian workers.  It is impossible to have a shot at reaching the American dream when you are working on below poverty wages.  The increases may be relatively small, but every little bit helps for workers like Maria Luisa Avalos, a housekeeper at the Hilton LAX:

It is my dream to give my children a better life.  This is what every mother hopes for, and a living wage will help me fulfill this dream. But our struggle to achieve our dreams is not over.

(cross-posted from Working Californians)

I will have more later, but we took a step forward today towards ensuring a living wage for the LAX hotel workers.  Here is the initial LAT article.

This is the main piece:

Chief among those elements would be a three-part “phase-in” of a living wage over the next year. Workers at the hotels would get a small raise upon passage of new legislation, a second raise in July that would bring them to $10.64 per hour, and finally a cost of living increase on Jan. 1, 2008.

Our poll indicates that we can do way more towards ensuring all workers earn a living wage, but this is encouraging news.

First for the meta: I have a new part-time gig blogging for Working Californians.  Like Todd does here for the Courage Campaigns expect a few cross-posts from me each week over here and at MyDD/dkos.

So what is Working Californians?  Well..here is my first post from yesterday.

You can read more about the WC mission here but, in short, WC is a strategic research and advocacy non-profit focused on quality-of-life issues for working people in LA and California. The co-chairs are Brian D’Arcy and Marvin Kropke, who deserve a lot of credit for thinking about the long-term and investing in strategic research and advocacy. Also, Working Californians was the main independent expenditure campaign that helped elect John Chiang as State Controller last year.)

Let’s kick start the discussion with today’s LAT piece on strategic research memo written by Working Californians’ strategists, using quantitative and qualitative research (ie, polling and focus groups) that Working Californians did in LA last fall. LA Times reporter wrote about it in yesterday’s paper.

Los Angeles unions enjoy a decided “brand advantage” over corporations among city voters, and the labor movement should use that popularity to advance “union-led solutions” to key public policy issues in 2007, a memo written by top labor strategists says.

The two-page memo, which was obtained by The Times, argues for broader, more straightforward engagement on policy issues than many unions have undertaken in the past. Some labor leaders prefer to focus on their own contract issues, and even those who are active in politics often soft-pedal the “union” label.

The document demonstrates labor’s confidence as it heads into a new year of big battles over politics, contracts and organizing.

The bottom line is that unions are a trusted communicator for LA voters and we can use that to advocate effectively on behalf of the working men and women in California.

“There is a significant opportunity for organized labor in Los Angeles,” the memo says. “In particular, we’d highlight these factors: unions’ fundamentally positive image and ‘brand advantage’ over business corporations; the overlap between union priorities and the key concerns of voters across the electorate in L.A., and the opportunity to expand public understanding of the connection between local government and the full range of quality-of-life issues.”

Public support for unions in LA is growing, and that presents a great opportunity for the effectiveness of labor sponsored advocacy campaigns.

Binder’s poll found that unions have more public support in Los Angeles than in other areas of the state and country. Among city voters surveyed, 55% agreed that “without unions, there would be no middle-class left in America.”

Reflecting the labor movement’s influence in city politics, the memo argues for talking up local government’s ability to deal with issues such as the economy, healthcare and the environment, which generally are considered federal and state matters.

The memo calls “for a public education campaign focused on union-led solutions to the quality-of-life issues that Los Angeles voters regard as most important.” The memo suggests that such a campaign be conducted before 2008, when state and national election campaigns will probably consume union energy.

“Los Angeles, against its own history, is a labor town now,” said Cherry, one of the strategists, who was a key figure in the successful effort to defeat Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s slate of ballot initiatives in 2005. “One of the things that comes through in the poll is that people really see the potential of unions to take up the cause of ordinary people on quality-of-life issues.”

That is at the heart of what we do at Working Californians.  Labor campaigns do not just lift up union members, but all those working men and women that are at the heart of what makes California great.  Without a vibrant union movement and solutions to high housing costs, health care, transportation, the environment and other quality of life issues, people will continue to leave this state in droves.  We cannot afford to squeeze out our middle class.

(As usual, this is x-posted from Ruck Pad

I didn’t have time to blog this article when it first came out, but this is too important not to go back and post on.  The living wage battle in LA, centered around the workers at LAX area hotels just stepped up a notch.  The big hotels have organized into the ironically named “Save LA Jobs” coalition.  They appear to have more than enough signatures to place an initiative on the ballot to repeal the big living wage victory for the hotel workers.

Opponents of the city’s expansion of the “living wage” ordinance to workers at LAX-area hotels have gathered twice the number of signatures required to qualify a referendum for the ballot, according to people familiar with the effort.

The foes’ political committee, which is called Save LA Jobs and is backed by hotel owners and business groups, has scheduled a news conference for this morning at the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. The group is expected to say that they will turn in more than 100,000 signatures.

That is more than double the amount they need to place it on the ballot.  The City Council now has the option to rescind the law or put the initiative up for a citywide vote.  May 2007 would be the earliest date for such an election.

The city’s living wage ordinance, which was passed a decade ago, requires that workers at companies that contract with the city be paid wages and benefits equal to $10.64 per hour.

The new law, which is strongly backed by Los Angeles’ labor movement, for the first time expands that worker protection to businesses – a dozen Los Angeles International Airport-area hotels – that have no formal financial relationship with the city.

Many workers at the hotels already make a living wage, but labor has embraced the law as a means to pressure the hotels to recognize an ongoing effort to organize their workers.

The hotels have resisted that effort, with some suspending or firing employees involved in the effort.

They are not challenging the constitutionality of the law.  The big hotels simply want to be able to pay their workers below poverty wages.  They are illegally resisting the worker’s attempts to unionize by firing and suspending the workers in retaliation.  Of course, the toothless NRLB will be useless and they will not be held accountable for such actions.

Last month the a group of hotel workers fasted to draw attention to their plight.  Hotel Workers Rising is an excellent source for more information.  Also, see the Courage Campaign’s Elliott Petty’s post.

(The movie was good, I also recommend Wake Up Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart Watch — get ready for the trolls. – promoted by blogswarm)

On November 28th, the San Diego City Council voted in favor of banning Wal-Mart Superstores (spotted by Todd Beeton at Calitics as well) citing low-wage jobs, traffic congestion and the demise of mom-and-pop stores as reason to keep the biggest of the Big Boxes outside of San Diego.  This was, perhaps sadly, one of the bigger political stories of my several years in San Diego, with friends and foes of discount superstores crowding into the public hearing to plead their cases.  That Walmart would come out on the wrong end of this in San Diego of all places is pretty impressive, as we find our progressive moments to be few and far between.  But as is generally the case when some combination of evil corporations, politics and California combine, it looks as though we’re heading for an expensive legal campaign and an even more expensive disinformation campaign as Walmart fights back.  This is a battle that we’re going to have to fight and win eventually if a progressive agenda is going to have a prayer in this country, and since the fight in Chicago has come and gone, perhaps we can seize on this one to create and hone strategy.

First, to set the stage.  The Council’s vote was 5-3 in favor, sending it to Mayor Jerry Sanders who has no interest in slowing down development or corporations.  Sanders has made clear that he’ll veto the measure in January, but if the 5 votes hold, the veto would be overriden.  This ban is very carefully designed to only ban the largest of Walmart stores, leaving untouched the “normal” sized stores and similar big-boxers such as Target, Lowes, Costco, etc.  Walmart has a long history of taking fights with local governments to the courts and the ballot boxes, and while they’re not saying anything one way or another, we can expect them to not go quietly here.

It’s clear from many of the opinions expressed at the City Council meeting and from random conversations I’ve had around town that the economic ramifications of a Walmart economy.  People are very much convinced that these low prices sustain them, and the problem of course is that in most tangible ways, that’s true.  There’s no doubt in my mind that this will be the crux of Walmart’s inevitable media blitz once the City Council reaffirms their vote.  It’s tough to combat an argument of “they want to raise prices,” especially since it sounds so much like “they want to raise your taxes.”

In an article last week running down the future possibilities, it turns out

One well-known Republican political consultant, who requested anonymity, has already tried to contact the company about working on a referendum, but said the company has not responded to his request. Others in the political community expect the company to wait for the council vote on overriding the mayoral veto — which would take just the same five votes that were needed to pass the ban — before announcing its plans.

The article goes on to suggest that local labor organizations are likely to be major players in any potential referendum action, speculating that “you would see them organize like never before.”  If it comes to this, it’s a great opportunity to roll out the growing netroots/labor ties and start building more and stronger bridges between online activism and grassroots activism.  Most importantly though, it presents an opportunity for the netroots to expand its collective purview beyond straight electoral politics.  As we continue finding our way through the inevitable post-election “what do we do with ourselves” period, I would suggest that the best way to become relevant even when there isn’t an election is to take on more of the day-to-day stuff that keeps the grassroots in business.  Not only do we build progressive infrastructure and step up the hearts-and-minds battle, but the netroots becomes an indispensable ally of the existing grassroots process.

As far as I’ve always understood it, Walmart undercuts everything about a strong and functional local economy.  When it first comes to town, people love the bargains, but as the independent stores with higher wages start getting undercut and going out of business, gradually Walmart’s prices aren’t bargains anymore.  Suddenly, Walmart is all that people can afford.  Obviously this is why a ballot proposition is the most frightening option- this economic cycle is already well established in San Diego and people rely on these prices to get by.  But an education campaign can change that.  Going forward, I mostly hope that this issue, at least broadly if not specifically in San Diego, gains more attention.  The netroots is best as the place where talking points are proposed, refined and distributed, so the more we talk about this, the better equipped people on the ground will be when we all start lobbying our friends and neighbors on this issue.  For all the expanding capabilities of the netroots, serving as a bullhorn is still what we’re best at, so let’s begin to shout.  People deserve better than a Walmart society, and San Diego is the coming battle.