I just came from the Capitol press conference on the sham of a report about the supposed cost of regulation in California. Not surprisingly conservatives and business groups are touting the study, as “evidence” that we need to de-regulate California and they took great glee in perpetuating a tired myth – California is a bad place to do business. The problems with the study are numerous, as noted in previous Calitics posts . The study takes much of its data from right-wing think tanks and Forbes magazine, not exactly subjective sources. It is purposefully vague in naming specific regulations that are supposedly so burdensome to business. It doesn’t take into account the myriad benefits of California consumer, labor, environmental and wage protections. And many of the arguments it does make are completely misleading.

The familiar refrain that California is a high-tax, high-wage-state that drives businesses away is simply not supported by the facts.

MYTH: California has the highest taxes in the nation

FACT : California is a high-income state with a wide range of revenue sources. Besides local and state taxes, California collects fees, assessments and other taxes. Taking into account all of those sources of revenue, California has a very moderate tax rate. The percentage of average income Californians pay in all taxes, which is a measure of tax burden, is reasonable compared to other states. Using that measure of tax burden, California ranks number 17 behind states like Alaska, Wyoming and North Dakota that have a higher tax burden per capita.

MYTH: California’s high-taxes and cost of doing business is driving businesses and jobs to states with fewer regulations

FACT: California loses very few jobs from businesses leaving the state. In fact, only 11,000 jobs leave the state annually out of a total of 18 million jobs. That’s only 0.06% of California’s total jobs that are lost by businesses moving out of state. The biggest job creation and loss engine are businesses opening, expanding, shrinking and closing within the state due to normal business cycles-very few businesses leave the state to our neighbors.

California has lost fewer jobs than our ostensibly “business-friendly” neighboring states. California does not rank in the Top 10 of states suffering job loss from 2008-09 and three of our five neighboring states lost more jobs than California. Our low-tax neighbors of Arizona, Nevada and Oregon had over 6.5% job loss, while California only had 4%. Even notoriously low-tax, little regulation states like Florida and the Carolinas have suffered more job losses than California.  

MYTH: Businesses will not come to California because of our high-taxes and high-wages

FACT: Businesses chose their locations for many different reasons including the tax burden, but also based on other criteria such as infrastructure, education and skill level of the workforce, access to intellectual and natural resources and many others. In that regard, California has an advantage because of our natural and human resources and the high concentration of research and technology centers. In addition, California workers are among the most productive with  an annual average output that is 13% higher than in other states.  

However, we are in danger of losing our competitive edge. Budget cuts result in crumbling roads, under-funded education systems that fail to educate the workforce, traffic-clogged highways that slow delivery and inadequate housing stock. California businesses can’t be globally competitive when they don’t have the infrastructure to perform. That is what will drive business from the state.

MYTH: California already taxes everything

FACT: Actually, California has many untapped sources of revenue that other states regularly tax. We could raise billions from the following immediate changes, with little impact on small businesses:

$855 million: Oil Severance Tax of 9.9% on any oil pumping from California soil or water (California is the only oil-producing state without one.)

$2 billion: Close the corporate loophole on Proposition 13 and raise the rates on assessments of corporate property.

$1.1 billion: Impose a tax on services, similar to the sales tax. California only taxes 21 of a possible 168 services that many states tax. In contrast, Washington and New Mexico tax 158 different services.

$470 million: Raise the corporate income tax by only 0.46% which barely keeps pace with the 557% net profit corporations saw from 2001-05 in California.

TOTAL: $5.725 Billion

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our nation’s deep financial crisis it’s that when a group of Republicans come together and start scheming about de-regulation, everyone, including small business, should be concerned. Very concerned.

Far and away the most exciting industry for the labor movement today is healthcare-and the air of historic change was in the San Francisco air this week as more than 1,200 registered nurses from across the country gathered to plan their coming merger…and to advance their patient advocate’s agenda of guaranteed healthcare on the single-payer model and of genuine labor law changes to allow every nurse to freely choose her union.  The RNs are members of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, and their guests from United American Nurses and Massachusetts Nurses Association.

The 1,200 nurses broke from their meeting to make a special house call to Dianne Feinstein, and deliver roses along with hand-written pleas for her to support the Employee Free Choice Act.  She’s in DC, but we’re sure she’ll get the message that we expect her to help nurses join unions and save lives.  That change alone will significantly improve our healthcare system.

Meanwhile:

In These Times reports on the coming RN SuperUnion and how registered nurses, together with the muscle of the AFL-CIO, will have the ability to inject a humane and pro-patient politics into our policy:

While lawmakers bicker and the public wades through a muddle of misinformation, the major nurses unions, particularly the California Nurses Association (CNA), are staking out bold positions on reform. Their efforts have culminated in a new union merger that seeks to align progressive nurses with other service workers as well as healthcare consumers.

As a critical link between physicians and patients, nurses occupy a pivot point in the reform debate. Alongside bread-and-butter campaigns on pandemic-flu preparedness and nurse-to-patient staffing ratios, the CNA has taken on universal healthcare as a labor issue, arguing that single-payer would not only serve patients’ best interest, but also make the entire system more economically viable.

The Wall St. Journal writes up how these pro-patient policies lead to nurses pushing Obama for better healthcare proposals:

At a conference for registered nurses in San Francisco, Geri Jenkins watched President Barack Obama’s televised speech with several others from the California Nurses Association. After the speech ended, the knot of nurses was left disappointed.

“You have to give him credit for standing up and trying to tackle the problem,” Jenkins said after it was over. “But it just needed to go a step further.”

Jenkins would have liked to see Obama’s plan place greater restrictions on how much insurance companies can charge consumers. Her 29-year-old stepdaughter, who was born with a heart condition, has gone without health insurance for a year because she could no longer afford the $7,000 annual catastrophic coverage.

Other nurses also felt the president’s proposals did not go far enough.

The San Francisco Chronicle let CNA/NNOC executive director sum it up:

“The problem with other solutions like the public option is that they leave in place the real problem: The insurance companies,” DeMoro told us.  

As the Washington Independent reports, those insurance companies are the subject of a new investigation by California Attorney General (and future and past Governor) Jerry Brown, after CNA/NNOC uncovered data that they reject on average 22 percent of all claims-and that jumps to 40 percent for the worst company, PacifiCare.

While the Christian Science Monitor notes the ongoing viability of the single-payer reforms nurses are dedicated to…it’s popular in the states and HR 3200 contains an amendment to empower states to that kind of experimentation:

The California Nurses Association was also instrumental in lobbying for an amendment, added by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D) of Ohio to a House version of the federal healthcare reform bill, that would remove potential legal impediments for states to pass single-payer bills by waiving federal exemptions that apply to employer-sponsored health plans from the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA)…. There are also strong prospects for single-payer healthcare in California, where the legislature has twice passed single-payer, only to have it vetoed both times by Governor Schwarzenegger.

Next week, we’ll be taking the fun to Pittsburgh where we will host the U.S. premiere of Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story at the national AFL-CIO convention, and use the occasion to throw a huge single-payer party

Check out more pix here.

Something bad happened in the past 10 years to young workers in this country: Since 1999, more of them now have lower-paying jobs, if they can get a job at all; health care is a rare luxury and retirement security is something for their parents, not them. In fact, many-younger than 35-still live at home with their parents because they can’t afford to be on their own.

These are the findings of a new report, “Young Workers: A Lost Decade.” Conducted in July 2009 by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO and our community affiliate Working America, the nationwide survey of 1,156 people follows up on a similar survey the AFL-CIO conducted in 1999. The deterioration of young workers’ economic situation in those 10 years is alarming.

(Cross-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog.)

Nate Scherer, 31, is among today’s young workers. Scherer lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he shares a home with his wife, his parents, brother and his partner.  He spoke at a media conference at the AFL-CIO today to discuss the report.

After getting married, my wife and I decided to move in with my parents to pay off our bills. We could afford to live on our own but we’d never be able to get out of debt. We have school loans to pay off, too. We’d like to have children, but we just can’t manage the expense of it right now…so we’re putting it off till we’re in a better place. My [work] position is on the edge, and I feel like if my company were to cut back, my position would be one of the first to go.

During yesterday’s press briefing, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka summed up the report’s findings this way:

We’re calling the report “A Lost Decade” because we’re seeing 10 years of opportunity lost as young workers across the board are struggling to keep their heads above water and often not succeeding. They’ve put off adulthood-put off having kids, put off education-and a full 34 percent of workers under 35 live with their parents for financial reasons.

Just last week we learned that about 1.7 million fewer teenagers and young adults were employed in July than a year before, hitting a record low of 51.4 percent.

As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said:  

Young workers in particular must be given the tools to lead the next generation to prosperity. The national survey we’re releasing today shows just how broken our economy is for our young people…and what’s at stake if we don’t fix it.

Some of the report’s key findings include:

• 31 percent of young workers report being uninsured, up from 24 percent 10 years ago, and 79 percent of the uninsured say they don’t have coverage because they can’t afford it or their employer does not offer it.
• Strikingly, one in three young workers are currently living at home with their parents.
• Only 31 percent say they make enough money to cover their bills and put some money aside-22 percentage points fewer than in 1999-while 24 percent cannot even pay their monthly bills.
• A third cannot pay their bills and seven in 10 do not have enough saved to cover two months of living expenses.
• 37 percent have put off education or professional development because they can’t afford it.
• When asked who is most responsible for the country’s economic woes, close to 50 percent of young workers place the blame on Wall Street and banks or corporate CEOs. And young workers say greed by corporations and CEOs is the factor most to blame for in the current financial downturn.
• By a 22-point margin, young workers favor expanding public investment over reducing the budget deficit. Young workers rank conservative economic approaches such as reducing taxes, government spending and regulation on business among the five lowest of 16 long-term priorities for Congress and the president.
• Thirty-five percent say they voted for the first time in 2008, and nearly three-quarters now keep tabs on government and public affairs, even when there’s not an election going on.
• The majority of young workers and nearly 70 percent of first-time voters are confident that Obama will take the country in the right direction.

Trumka, who is running for AFL-CIO president without announced opposition at our convention later this month, is making union outreach to young people a top priority. He said one of the report’s conclusions is especially striking:

Young people want to be involved but they’re rarely asked. Their priorities are even more progressive than the priorities of the older generation of working people, yet they aren’t engaged by co-workers or friends to get involved in the economic debate.

Currently, 18-to-35-year-olds make up a quarter of union membership. And at the AFL-CIO Convention, we will ask Convention delegates to approve plans for broad recruitment of young workers, as well as plans for training and leadership of young workers who are currently union members. And that’s just the beginning of a broad push towards talking and mobilizing young workers in the coming months and years.

According to the report, more than half of young workers say employees are more successful getting problems resolved as a group rather than as individuals, and employees who have a union are better off than employees in similar jobs who do not.

Read the full report here.

“I am very afraid because I do not know what tomorrow will bring because I am four months pregnant and I worry for my unborn baby. Three days later [after being exposed to pesticide drift], I am still vomiting and have a major headache. My pregnancy doctor could not see me as he was going to charge me and I did not have any money to pay him.”

   — Julia Rojas Sabino, Organic Onion Worker

Pesticide drift poisonings should be a thing of the past. Agribusiness knows pesticides are dangerous. Pesticide applicators know pesticides drift. Proper precautions should be taken by applicators. Every farm should make sure supervisors know what to do in a drift emergency. It’s simple. Right?

TAKE ACTION!

Tell that to Julia Rojads Sabino and the other farm workers who were exposed to pesticide drift on Friday, July 10, while harvesting onions in Tehachapi. Julia and another farm worker were pregnant (four and five months respectively).

The workers thought they were safe. After all, they were harvestingorganic onions. They weren’t dealing with pesticides, right?

However, the orchard next door wasn’t organic.

Julia and her crew arrived at the field. Julia noticed that to the side of her crew–approximately 60 meters away–there was a man ready to spray pesticides in the apple orchard in the next field.

Julia and the crew she was part of began working at 6am, at the same time they began spraying. They began to smell a very strong odor. Julia told us, “The smell became stronger and we spoke to the crew boss. He told us it was lime [sulfur] and after a while gave us masks for our mouths.” She said these masks did nothing to protect workers against the smell or the chemical.

Workers started sneezing and vomiting and their eyes began stinging. The crew boss called the supervisor and when he arrived ten minutes later they moved the workers to another location and told them to have lunch.

Julia told us, “My coworkers were vomiting and their eyes burning. I felt very dizzy and was vomiting and I tried drinking lots of water to see if it would go away.” It didn’t.

The fire department and ambulance arrived and the sickest workers–including Julia–were put in an enclosed area, stripped down and given a high pressure bath and taken to the county hospital. Julia told us all “they did an ultrasound and gave us a glass of cold water.”

Julia is worried about the effects these pesticides, Assail 70 WP (acemidiprid) and Fujimite 5EC (fenpryoximate), might have on her unborn baby or herself. Luckily she was past her 1st trimester, so the chance of birth defects is much lower.

The laws and regulations out there say an applicator should not spray pesticides in a way that creates a danger of contaminating other people.  The laws say the employer should have moved the workers out of harm’s way and ensured they were taken to the doctor immediately.

However, a lot of this is a matter of judgment. There are no set buffer zones or required communication between separate farms about planned spraying. (If it was the same farm, there is required notification for other workers expected to come within 1/4 mile of the sprayed area.)



This is wrong. Tell the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) to make sure the county issues stiff fines. But even more importantly these rules have to stop being just a matter of judgment. Established minimum buffer zones need to be set. Communication between farms needs to be a must, not a maybe.

PLEASE TAKE ACTION!

http://bit.ly/jfrEt

The highly toxic, mutagenic, new pesticide methyl iodide is currently being given a comprehensive review by the Department of Pesticide Regulations and the agency’s registration decision is pending advice from a panel of scientists convened specifically to review this chemical.

However, according to inside sources, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is being pressured by corporate interests to fast-track registration of this toxic pesticide–despite serious concerns from the state’s own scientists at the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR).



Take action: http://bit.ly/jfrEt

“Methyl iodide is so toxic that scientists working with it in the laboratory take extreme precautions when handling it, using a ventilation hood, gloves, and special equipment for transferring it so it does not escape to the air,” notes Dr. Susan Kegley. “This degree of protection is not possible in an agricultural setting where the pesticide would be applied at rates of 175 pounds per acre in the open air. Buffer zones of 400 feet for a 40-acre fumigation would still result in a dose of methyl iodide to neighbors that is 375 times higher than DPR believes is acceptable. For workers, the numbers are much worse, with exposures estimated at 3,000 times higher than DPR’s acceptable dose for some tasks.”

Methyl iodide’s manufacturer, Arysta, withdrew its New York application for registration after state officials raised concerns about groundwater contamination and potential exposure for workers, bystanders and nearby residents–especially children, pregnant women and the elderly.

Now the industry is asking California’s governor to order DPR to fast track the registration of this deadly fumigant. This is not acceptable. Please take action and tell the Governor to keep methyl iodide of California’s fields.



Take action: http://bit.ly/jfrEt