Danielle Tipton is campaign/communications intern at the California Labor Federation.
Danielle Tipton
In the wake of the monumental 15-day strike and six-day, 50-mile “WalMarch” for safe jobs from the Inland Empire to the steps of city hall in Downtown L.A., workers at Walmart-contracted warehouses have seen a few improvements in their working conditions. They now have water coolers to drink from instead of a hose, they can cool off with fans, and some dangerous broken equipment has been fixed. But they still have a major uphill battle ahead of them as they continue thier fight for justice.
Latinos are among the fastest growing groups of the electorate. About 5 million more Latino voters are eligible to vote this year than in 2008 — but historically, voter turnout among Latinos hasn’t been particularly strong. In 2008, only 50% of eligible Latino voters showed up to the polls (according to the LA Times). But that’s all going to change this year in California, as more and more Latinos are discovering what’s really at stake in the upcoming election if Prop 32 becomes law.
Yesterday, the Los Angeles Latino community united in Mariachi Plaza to kick off a host of Latino community events across the state to oppose the fraudulent Prop 32. Labor and elected leaders and activists spoke out against the engañosa (deceiving) measure, vowing to stop those behind Prop 32, including Big Oil, Wall St. and secretive out-of-state Super PACs run by the oil billionaire Koch Brothers and George Bush’s Karl Rove, from taking away their voices.
The notorious right-wing ideologues David and Charles Koch are some of the biggest spenders in American politics, dropping millions upon millions to buy elections and influence politicians all across the country. So why would they suddenly throw $4 million into a proposition that claims to “stop special interest money” from flooding politics?
Simple — because they know it’s a sham and that will silence the voice of workers while giving more power to corporate special interests. And this is exactly what the Koch brothers want. If they succeed in silencing our voice, the floodgates will open up even wider for billionaires like them to spend without limits and push their “greed agenda”– with the sole purpose of putting even more money into their loaded bank accounts, at the expense of our education, our jobs, our communities and our economy.
There is no issue more important in California and America right now than jobs. All of us know someone struggling to find one- you might even be struggling to find one yourself. So why is our tax money helping to ship jobs to other countries?
Yesterday, I joined hundreds of California labor activists, along with U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Larry Cohen, in San Francisco’s Union Square, where we rallied, chanted and danced to get our simple message across: Bring Our Jobs Home! It’s time to get rid of tax breaks that reward corporations that outsource jobs and ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent on creating American jobs, not shipping them overseas.
, struck a chord with me this weekend as I participated in California Labor Federation’s 2012 Campaign School in Burlingame, just one of more than a dozen Campaign School trainings going on around the state this month. Nearly 500 union and progressive activists attended a Campaign School this week alone, and by the end of the month, as many as 2,000 or more volunteer activists will have participated in the same intensive and exciting training, as part of California Labor’s coordinated grassroots effort to
Stop the Special Exemptions Act on the November ballot.
a day to appreciate everything teachers do for our state, our children, our communities and our future.
Teachers are often the first role models we remember in life. They teach us facts, but they also teach us about the kinds of people we want to be, and they are frequently reason we end up pursuing a particular passion or career path.
Just about everyone has had at least one teacher that really made an impact on their lives. For California Teachers Association President Dean Vogel, that person was his 4th grade teacher, Mr. Chavez. In today’s Long Beach Press Telegram, Vogel recalls how Chavez’ accepting and encouraging personality influenced him to become a teacher years later:
