Unions United defends against the Chamber of Commerce War on Workers by uniting all Unions to act together in Solidarity. We are open to AFL-CIO Unions, Change to Win Unions, and Independent Unions across America.
A Five-member panel that handles labor complaints at Los Angeles City Hall handed a stinging defeat to the city's political leaders on Monday, voting to strike down Los Angeles' bid to rein in retirement costs for civilian employees.
The Employee Relations Board voted unanimously Monday to order the City Council to rescind a 2012 law scaling back pension benefits for new employees of the Coalition of L.A. City Unions, on the grounds that the changes were not properly negotiated. That law, backed by Mayor Eric Garcetti when he was a Councilman, was expected to cut retirement costs by up to $309 million over a decade, according to city analysts.
Ellen Greenstone, a lawyer for the labor coalition, described the vote as a “huge, big deal” -- one that shows the city could not unilaterally impose changes in pension benefits on its workforce.
Coalition chairwoman Cheryl Parisi said in a statement that the reduction in benefits, which included a hike in the employee retirement age, “devalues middle-class city workers and their dedication to serving the residents of Los Angeles.
"It's appalling that city officials continue to try to make city workers pay for the city's bad financial decisions," Parisi said in a prepared statement.
Garcetti is on vacation and his spokesman has refused to say where he is. A lawyer in City Atty. Mike Feuer's office could not immediately say how the city would respond. City Administrative Officer Miguel Santana, a high-level budget advisor, said the 2012 cuts had been a critical part of "bringing the city back to fiscal stability."
"The city will explore all of its options," he said.
The city’s labor board is a quasi-judicial body that reviews complaints from unions, managers and individual employees. Under the city’s labor ordinance, the panel has the power to invalidate decisions by the council, said the board's executive director, Robert Bergeson.
If council members do not agree with Monday’s decision, they can file legal paperwork seeking to have a judge overturn it, Bergeson said.
City officials have previously argued that changes in the RETIREMENT BENEFITS of future employees do not need to be negotiated. The 2012 law rolling back benefits applied only to employees hired after July 1, 2013. Budget officials had hoped that the reductions would trim the city's retirement costs by more than $4 billion over a 30-year period.
The board’s decision comes as the city's contributions for civilian employee retirement costs have climbed from $260 million in 2005 to an estimated $410 million this year, according to a recent budget report.
Garcetti and Council members could now find themselves attempting to negotiate cuts in pension costs at the same time they are also trying to reach salary agreements with coalition representatives. The city has been trying to keep a lid on raises -- yet another strategy for containing growing retirement costs.
EFF Joins 35 Organizations, Companies, and Security Experts Calling on President Obama to
Veto CISA
EFF joined a group of thirty-five civil society organizations, companies, and security experts that sent a letter
on Monday encouraging President Obama to veto S. 2588, the
Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (“CISA”) of 2014. The letter
states:
CISA fails to offer a comprehensive solution to
cybersecurity threats. Further, the bill contains inadequate protections
for privacy and civil liberties. Accordingly, we request that you
promptly pledge to veto CISA.
But some lawmakers aren’t getting the message. The letter points out
that, while CISA has made a small number of cosmetic changes to CISPA:
CISA presents many of the same problems the
Administration previously identified with CISPA in its veto threat.
Privacy experts have pointed out how CISA would damage the privacy and
civil liberties of users.
As we've emphasized
in the past, the bill fails to provide privacy protections for Internet
users and allows information sharing in a wide variety of circumstances
that could potentially harm journalists and whistleblowers. Like its previousiterations,
it also contains overbroad immunity from lawsuits for corporations that
share information. As the letter points out, it even contains “a broad
new categorical exemption from disclosure under the Freedom of
Information Act, the first since the Act’s passage in 1966.”
You can read the full text of the letter and see the signatories here. You can also take action today:
tell your Senator to vote no on a bill that fails to make the Internet
safer and invades the privacy and civil liberties of everyday Internet
users.
Barack Obama’s Justice Department on Monday announced that Citigroup
would pay $7 billion in fines, a move that will avoid a humiliating
trial dealing with the seamy financial products the bank had marketed to
an unsuspecting public, causing vast damage to the economy.
Citigroup is the too-big-to-fail bank that was allowed to form only
when Bill Clinton signed legislation reversing the sensible restraints
on Wall Street instituted by President Franklin Roosevelt to avoid
another Great Depression.
Those filled with Clinton nostalgia these days might want to reflect
back on how truly destructive was his legacy for hardworking people
throughout the world who lost so much due to the financial shenanigans
that he made legal.
“Today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services
industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks
significant new authority,” a beaming Clinton boasted after signing the
Financial Services Modernization Act into law in 1999.Ads by save onAd Options
Called the Citigroup authorization act by some wags at the time, those
antiquated laws, the Glass-Steagall Act primarily, had put a safety
barrier between the high rollers in Wall Street investment firms and the staid commercial banks charged with preserving the savings of ordinary folk. The new law permitted them to merge.
Clinton handed the pen that he used in signing the new law to
Citigroup Chairman Sanford Weill, whose Citicorp had already merged with
Travelers Group before the law was even officially changed. On an
earlier occasion, Weill had informed Clinton about his merger plans in a
telephone conversation. After hanging up, Weill then bragged to his
fellow banking executive John S. Reed, who was on the call, that “we
just made the president of the United States an insider,” according to
Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley in her book on the Citigroup merger.
In 2000, just before leaving office, Clinton went much further in
radical deregulation of the financial industry when he signed the
Commodity Futures Modernization Act. In one swoop this eliminated from
the purview of any existing regulation or regulatory agency the new
financial products, including the mortgage-backed securities at the
heart of the financial meltdown and the subject of the $7 billion fine
levied in what has to be viewed as a copout deal.
This is not just because the fine is paltry compared with the far
greater damage Citigroup wreaked upon working Americans who lost so much
but because, without a trial, there will be no public accountability of the cynicism that Citigroup’s leaders visited upon unknowing consumers.
That cynicism begins with Robert Rubin, who was selected from his
leading position at Goldman Sachs to be Clinton’s Treasury secretary. It
was Rubin who as much as anyone is responsible for pushing through the
legislation that ended the effective regulation of Wall Street and made
the merger of Travelers Group and Citicorp possible. Rubin was a darling
of the mass media while in office, and the fawning adulation continued
even as he moved through the revolving door and took a $15 million a
year job
with Citigroup, the megabank he had helped make legal. Rubin was at
Citigroup during the years when it engaged in most of the practices
involving subprime and other questionable mortgages that resulted in the
fines the bank must now pay.
Rubin’s deputy in the Treasury Department, Larry Summers, who
replaced him for the last years of the Clinton administration, was
particularly important in pushing through the legislation that freed
Collateralized Debt Obligations from any regulation. Summers worked to
silence Brooksley Born, the heroically prescient chair of the Commodity Futures Trading
Commission who had warned of the dangers posed by unregulated CDOs. Her
reward for such insight was to be denied reappointment by Clinton and
denounced by Summers.
Summers set the gold standard for out-of-touch stupidity when he
testified before a Senate committee that the “largely sophisticated
financial institutions” were “capable of protecting themselves from
fraud and counterparty insolvencies,” and “given the nature of the
underlying assets involved—namely supplies of financial exchange and
other financial interest—there would be little scope for market
manipulation.”
Summers later made $8 million in 2008 in speaking fees from Citigroup
and other banks and consulting for a hedge fund before being tapped by
Obama to be his top economic adviser. Summers was instrumental in
guiding the Obama administration’s efforts to keep the bankers whole
while largely ignoring the fate of their victims.
The collapse of the derivative market that Summers predicted was
immune to “fraud and counterparty insolvencies” plunged U.S. household
worth $16 trillion or 24 percent between the third quarter of 2007 and
the first quarter of 2009, according to a study by the Dallas Federal
Reserve Bank.
That’s trillions of dollars, not the $7 billion fine that Citigroup
just got slapped with as a means of avoiding the harsher judgment in a
court of law that the bank and its politician enablers so richly
deserve.
Truck drivers
from companies that haul cargo from the ports of Los Angeles and Long
Beach start a two-day strike to protest alleged labor violations in
front of Long Beach Container terminal in Long Beach, California April
28, 2014. On Monday a similar strike began, the fourth of its kind in
the past year.
Reuters/Kevork Djansezian
Amid delicate negotiations that will determine the flow of a third of all U.S. cargo container
traffic for the coming months, dozens of Longshore workers at two of
the country’s busiest ports were ordered back to work Tuesday after they
walked off the job in solidarity with a group of fed-up truck drivers.
The Longshore workers returned to their jobs at about 11 a.m. at the Port of Los Angeles and the adjoining Port of Long Beach after a federal arbitrator said their walk-off was against their contract.
The workers began a strike on Monday to express solidarity with about 120 truck drivers backed by Teamsters Local 848 who claim they are improperly classified by their employers as contract workers. Unlike direct employees, contract workers are typically paid less, bear higher payroll deductions and receive fewer if any benefits than regular employees.
The drivers work for three nearby companies,
Green Fleet Systems, Total Transportation Services Inc. and Pacific 9
Transportation, which handle cargo to and from the ports. It’s the
fourth such protest in the past year, including a two-day strike in
April. Drivers were seen picketing the truck yards and following drivers
from these companies to and from the ports.
"Green Fleet is discouraged to learn that outside interest groups
have again decided to block the rights of these drivers to go to work
and earn a living,” the company said in an email sent to IBTimes on
Tuesday. “The fact is that an overwhelming majority of contractors and
drivers affiliated with Green Fleet don't want these groups involved in
their work.”
The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which
represents the workers keeping cargo flowing through 30 West Coast
ports, is currently in talks to renew a six-year contract with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), which represents the port operators.
On Monday, the two sides announced a cooling-off period in the heated negotiations that will establish new pay and benefits
for the roughly 20,000 workers that move cargo between the ships,
terminals and trucks. Historically, these talks often run past the June
30 contract-expiration date but are typically resolved by the middle of
July.
“During this break, starting at 8 a.m. on Tuesday, July 8, through 8
a.m. on Friday, July 11, the parties have agreed to extend the previous
six-year contract, which expired last week,” said a joint statement from
the ILWU and PMA.
The longer these negotiations take, the more
likely workers will institute slowdowns, which can force cargo movement
to a crawl.
In 2000, talks went on for months in part over issues
pertaining to port automation, which reduces the need for workers. Port
operators instituted a 10-day lockout that required then-President
George W. Bush to invoke his authority to order the reope ning of the
ports.
The smooth operation of U.S. ports is vital to the country’s
commercial activity. In May, retailers warned businesses to expect
operations to slow this summer.
In the 13 states that saw their minimum wage rise on Jan. 1, 2014, job growth has been higher
so far this year than in states where the minimum wage stayed the same.
Extreme pro-business interests often argue that raising the minimum
wage will lead to job losses, but once again, the evidence suggests
otherwise.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research
looked closely at the data and found states that raised their minimum
wage increase have seen an average increase in employment of 0.99%,
while the static states saw an increase of only 0.68%.
Of the 13 states, all but New Jersey saw employment gains and nine of the 13 states are above the median state in job growth. Four of the 13 states saw their minimum wage increase
because of new legislation, while the rest saw automatic increases
related to inflation.
The states in question are: Arizona, Colorado,
Connecticut, Florida, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio,
Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
Girls sit in the US immigration detention facility in Nogales, Arizona
A surge of unaccompanied child migrants has been crossing the US-Mexico border and seeking refuge in the United States
since 2011, and the problem seems to be getting worse. US Customs and
Border Protection says that apprehensions of unaccompanied children are up
a staggering 92 percent from the previous year, with growing numbers of
children coming from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Since
October, 52,000 children have come to the US without an adult.
They're coming in so quickly that normal immigration facilities
have been completely overwhelmed, and thousands of kids are now being
warehoused in makeshift detention centers, like the one shown above.
Border state politicians, particularly Republicans, want to tighten
immigration restrictions; immigrant rights activists say that's the
exact opposite of what these children need.
Recent studiessuggestthat most of these unaccompanied children
aren't economic migrants, as many Americans might assume — they're
fleeing from threats and violence in their home countries, where things
have gotten so bad that many families believe that they have no choice
but to send their children on the long, dangerous journey north. They're
not here to take advantage of American social services — they're
refugees from conflict. Understanding the nature of the violence
pushing them north is crucial for figuring out what to do about the
child refugee crisis on our southern border.
Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the three countries that make up
Central America's "Northern Triangle," are experiencing a terrifying
level of violence that's been rising rapidly since the late 2000s. State
weakness and corruption have allowed a number of different armed groups
— including transnational street gangs, drug cartels, and other
organized crime syndicates — to flourish, checked by little but their
competition with one another.
Today, those groups battle for control of drug trafficking routes, residential neighborhoods, bus systems, human-smuggling operations, and more or less anything else that allows them to leverage their skills in violence to extract a profit.
To put the problem in perspective, this chart shows murder rates in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras since 2007:
And this chart shows civilian casualties in Iraq from the same period:
Source: UNODC
These charts show that the murder rate in Honduras in 2012 was a
whopping 30 percent higher than UN estimates of the civilian casualty
rate at the height of the Iraq war. In other words, all three Central
American countries were, statistically speaking, twice as dangerous for
civilians as Iraq was.
Why are children coming in such large numbers?
Are gangs targeting kids specifically?
Children are uniquely vulnerable to gang violence. The street gangs known as "maras" — M-18 and Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13 — target kids for forced recruitment, usually in their early teenage years, but sometimes as young as kindergarten. They
also forcibly recruit girls as "girlfriends," a euphemistic term for a
non-consensual relationship that involves rape by one or more gang members.
"The gang told me that if I returned to school, I wouldn't make it home alive"
If children defy the gang's authority by refusing its demands,
the punishment is harsh: rape, kidnapping, and murder are common forms
of retaliation. Even attending school can be tremendously dangerous,
because gangs often target schools as recruitment sites and children may
have to pass through different gangs' territories, or ride on
gang-controlled buses, during their daily commutes.
A recent report
on the child migrant crisis from the United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR) includes testimony from several children who came
to the US to escape gang violence. Here's 17-year-old Alfonso,
explaining why he fled after receiving threats from Mara-18 members at
his school:
"The problem was that where I studied there were lots of M-18 gang
members, and where I lived was under control of the other gang, the
MS-13. The M-18 gang thought I belonged to the MS-13. They had killed
the two police officers
who protected our school. They waited for me outside the school. It was
a Friday, the week before Easter, and I was headed home. The gang told
me that if I returned to school, I wouldn't make it home alive. The gang
had killed two kids I went to school with, and I thought I might be the
next one. After that, I couldn't even leave my neighborhood. They
prohibited me. I know someone whom the gangs threatened this way. He
didn't take their threats seriously. They killed him in the park. He was
wearing his school uniform. If I hadn't had these problems, I wouldn't
have come here."
15-year-old Maritza:
"I am here because the gang threatened me. One of them "liked" me.
Another gang member told my uncle that he should get me out of there
because the guy who liked me was going to do me harm. In El Salvador
they take young girls, rape them and throw them in plastic bags.
My uncle told me it wasn't safe for me to stay there. They told him
that on April 3, and I left on April 7. They said if I was still there
on April 8, they would grab me, and I didn't know what would happen."
17-year-old Mario:
"I left because I had problems with the gangs. They hung out by a
field that I had to pass to get to school. They said if I didn't join
them, they would kill me. I have many friends who were killed or
disappeared because they refused to join the gang. I told the gang I
didn't want to. Their life is only death and jail, and I didn't want
that for myself. I want a future."
As these testimonies show, merely attempting to get an education can be life-threateningly dangerous for children in gang-controlled areas — which helps to explain why so many feel they have no choice but to leave.
What about the police? Can't they protect the kids?
Members of the Mara 18 gang on trial for extortion and murder in Guatemala City. JOHAN ORDONEZ/AFP/Getty Images
Nope. In all three countries, the police are too weak and corrupt to
offer any meaningful protection. In fact, the police often essentially
operate as dangerous criminal gangs themselves. Nearly three in four killings in Guatemala still go unpunished
In both El Salvador and Honduras, there arenumerous, crediblereportsthat
the police are responsible for hundreds of "social cleansing" killings,
including the murders of youths they suspect to be gang members. The
Salvadoran national police "specializ[es] in obstructing justice and
guaranteeing impunity for those with sufficient amounts of money,"
writes Hector Silva, a fellow at American University who researches police corruption.
Guatemala's police (and military) were so thoroughly infiltrated by
organized crime that in 2006 the United Nations had to set up a special
agency, the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala
(which goes by its Spanish acronym, CICIG), to help fight the pervasive abuses committed by "clandestine groups." CICIG has enjoyed some recent successes, but nearly three in four killings committed in Guatemala still go unpunished.
But isn't the journey to the US also dangerous for children?
Yes, it is — but for desperate families trying to save their kids' lives, it's often the best of a bad set of options.
There is no denying that the long overland journey from the northern
triangle to the US is tremendously dangerous. Routes north are
increasingly under the control of Mexico's Los Zetas cartel, according to
a recent report from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which means
that child migrants are at risk of "violence, extortion, kidnapping,
sexual assault, trafficking and murder" during the journey. Sending a
child to the United States is also extremely expensive. "Coyotes"
(people smugglers) charge $5,000 to $7,000 to bring a child to the US, according to the same report — an amount that can represent more than 18 months of earnings for an entire family.
Still, even with all the dangers of the journey north, when children
become the targets of gang threats, there is often no better option
available to their families than to send them to the United States (or another safe country).
Refusing the gang's demands is more dangerous, because it is likely to
lead to violent retaliation. Agreeing to join a gang is more dangerous,
because it means signing up for a (probably short) life of crime and
violence. Acceding to a gang member's sexual demands is more dangerous,
because it means accepting certain rape, as well as the other dangers
that come from being associated with a criminal group. Because the
police do not offer meaningful protection, migration is the only course
of action that remains.
Coming to the US is risky. But for these vulnerable kids, it's the best hope there is.
What can the US do about this crisis?
Children detained at the US immigration holding center in Nogales, Arizona. Ross D. Franklin-Pool/Getty Images
Part of the challenge for the US is reducing the number of children
who arrive at the border in the first place. The most effective way to
do that would probably be to allow kids to apply for asylum (or another
form of humanitarian immigration relief) from their home countries.
That policy would allow children to escape violence at home without
forcing them to risk the dangerous overland journey. It would also ease
the burden on US immigration facilities, because there would be no need
for the children to be detained after entry, or to go through removal
proceedings in immigration court. Unfortunately, that option does not appear to be under serious consideration.
The other part of the challenge is what to do about the kids who are already at the border. For this, President Obama is asking
Congress for additional authority to deport unaccompanied children
quickly. It's likely that that would mean sending them back after just a
brief interview with border guards, without a full hearing on their
asylum claims or an opportunity to request other humanitarian relief.
If that happens, it is all but certain that some children with
legitimate fears of persecution will be sent back to their home
countries, either because they are too young and unsophisticated to
advocate for themselves, or because they are too afraid to tell
interviewers the whole story right away.
As those policies are debated in the coming days, it's important to
remember what Obama is really proposing: to send young children back,
alone, to a conflict zone that is twice as dangerous as Iraq was from
2008 to 2012.
In a victory for new economy advocates, the New York City Council passed a budget last
month that will create a $1.2 million fund for the growth of
worker-owned cooperative businesses. The investment is the largest a
municipal government in the U.S. has ever made in the sector, breaking new ground for the cooperative development movement.
Melissa Hoover, executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker
Cooperatives and the Democracy at Work Institute, hails the New York City Council’s
move as “historic.” “We have seen bits and pieces here and there, but
New York City is the first place to make an investment at that level,”
she says.
New York’s cooperative development fund was the brainchild of a
coalition of community groups—including the Federation of Protestant
Welfare Agencies, the New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, the
Democracy at Work Institute, Make the Road New York and others—that came together to stage a series of public
forums and advocacy days to secure widespread support for the
initiative on the City Council. Over the next year, the fund will
provide financial and technical assistance in the planned launch of 28
new cooperatives and the continued growth of 20 existing cooperatives,
supporting the creation of 234 jobs in total.
While this may just be a drop in the bucket when it comes to the
city’s $75 billion total budget, cooperative advocates are hoping New
York’s example can help turn the tide in favor of alternative strategies
for urban development.
“We’d like to get to a tipping point where [cooperatives] really have
a measurable impact on the local economy,” says Hilary Abell, a San Francisco-based
co-op development consultant who co-founded the group Project Equity.
She notes that while interest in cooperatives has surged, there are
still fewer than 5,000 “worker-owners” nationwide. Nevertheless, the
model of worker-owned cooperatives has captured the imaginations of many
low-income communities of color hit hardest by the Great Recession, she
says, creating “a window of opportunity to take this to the next
level.”
Last month, Abell released a report called “Worker Cooperatives:
Pathways to Scale,” which outlines a set of strategies to grow the
cooperative movement nationwide. While there are several promising
federal policy
initiatives underway—Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), for example, has
introduced a bill that would create an Office of Employee Ownership and
Participation within the U.S. Department of Labor,
as well as another that would establish a U.S. Employee Ownership
Bank—Abell believes that “advocacy for cooperatives may have the
greatest momentum at the state and municipal levels.”
Across the country, similar local economic justice coalitions have
been seeking to persuade municipal governments and local institutions to
throw their resources behind the development of worker-owned co-ops.
It’s those resources, many advocates believe, that could take co-ops
from a niche movement to a broad-based strategy for creating living-wage
jobs and putting economic power in the hands of workers.
To that end, Abell hopes to see more cities follow in New York’s footsteps. In the Bay Area, she tells Working In These Times,
local organizers are currently reaching out to local officials for
support in scaling up worker-owned cooperatives to the point that they
constitute five to 10 percent of the local economy. The coalition is
particularly focused on creating jobs for workers of color in the
low-income areas of the East Bay , as past experiences have shown that
worker-owned co-ops can be particularly effective in redressing racial
inequities in the job market. For example, Women’s Action to Gain
Economic Security (WAGES), a network of nearly 100 worker-owned cleaning
cooperatives in Oakland, has increased members’ incomes by more than 50
percent.
Other hotbeds of co-op development include
Richmond, California, where the city has hired its own cooperative
developer and is launching a loan fund under the leadership of Green
Party Mayor Gayle McLaughlin. In Cleveland, Ohio, the city’s economic
development department has worked closely with the Evergreen Cooperatives, a network of worker-owned green cleaning, farming and construction businesses; local hospitals and universities have also thrown their purchasing power behind worker-owned businesses. And as In These Times has reported previously,
several unions have made a foray into the co-op business, combining
place-based growth with a focus on leveraging changes across industries
such as homecare.
Instead of simply appealing to local leaders for support, some activists have sought to build both political
and economic power by building electoral campaigns around the issue of
cooperative development. No city had secured greater local support for
co-ops than Jackson, Miss., a majority African-American municipality
where human rights attorney and longtime black radical activist Chokwe
Lumumba was elected mayor last year on a platform that included the use
of public spending to promote
cooperative enterprises. But following Lumumba’s sudden death in
February, the movement that brought him to office has been left
struggling to implement the vision it had forged.
Local activists say new Mayor Tony Yarber has
been tepid in his support for the cooperative development plan
developed by Lumumba’s administration, leaving them uncertain as to
whether they can count, for example, on city contracts being awarded to
local worker-owned businesses. According to Brandon King, a member of
the group Cooperation Jackson who also worked on the Lumumba campaign,
access to such contracts would have been a huge boon for nascent
construction and waste-management cooperatives, as Lumumba’s campaign
had estimated that
the city would need to spend $1.2 billion over the next 10 to 15 years
on infrastructural upgrades and repairs. What often happens, says King,
is that contracts go to companies located in wealthier and
majority-white suburbs outside of Jackson, with the result that “people
in Jackson aren’t really engaged in building their own city.”
Despite the change of course in city government, King says
Cooperation Jackson “is still working on building co-ops that are
large-scale, and getting as many people engaged in economic democracy as
possible.” The movement has a history of black community participation
in cooperative enterprises to draw from, King notes. Meanwhile, adds
Cooperation Jackson memberIya'Falola Omobola, while the group works to
get childcare and urban farming cooperatives off the ground, with or
without city support, “We’re going to be ready to mobilize around an
appropriate candidate in the next [mayoral] election.”
Noting the particular conditions that have helped secure local
support for cooperatives in New York City and Jackson, the Democracy at
Work Institute’s Hoover acknowledges that activists are still exploring
how these can be replicated elsewhere. But if these cities are
successful in retaining long-term support for cooperative growth, they
can serve as a jumping-off point for other areas. “Our hope is that
these won’t be one-off examples,” Hoover says. “What we need ultimately
is a shift among those doing local development: from, ‘Quick, let’s get a
Home Depot to come in and create jobs, but they’re low-wage and
low-skilled,’ to a deeper and more patient strategy. These places could
really start that shift.”
Rebecca Burns, In These Times Assistant Editor, holds an M.A. from the University
of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where
her research focused on global land and housing rights. A former
editorial intern at the magazine, Burns also works as a research
assistant for a project examining violence against humanitarian aid
workers.
of future employees do not need to be negotiated. The 2012 law rolling back benefits applied only to employees hired after July 1, 2013. Budget officials had hoped that the reductions would trim the city's retirement costs by more than $4 billion over a 30-year period.
