San Francisco Public Press (https://www.sfpublicpress.org/author/christopher-d-cook/)
Christopher D. Cook is an award-winning journalist whose reporting has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, The Economist, The Guardian, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review and elsewhere. He is the author of “Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis.”
In a pandemic that mandates physical distancing, survival in the poverty-suffused Tenderloin is endangered by relentlessly overcrowded conditions, a dearth of open public spaces and limited mobility. Neighborhood residents suffer the city’s second-highest rate of COVID-19 infections — eclipsed only by the Bayview — and five times that of neighboring Nob Hill.
Backers say it helps recruitment and retention, opponents say it kills jobs
This story is part of a special report in the Spring print edition of the San Francisco Public Press.
“Job killer” is a common refrain from businesses in opposing wage increases and other worker benefits. But some researchers are challenging the assumption that boosting the minimum wage depresses hiring. “We don’t see any decline in employment,” said Michael Reich, director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.
At S.F.’s largest soup kitchen, working adults say full-time work no longer pays the rent
This story is part of a special report in the Spring print edition of the San Francisco Public Press.
As President Obama’s minimum wage hike proposal renews a national debate over costs and benefits, many low-wage workers in San Francisco say they can hardly get by even on the nation’s highest minimum wage of $10.55, which is nearly $3 an hour higher than the federal rate. As rents have soared above $1,500 for a typical studio apartment, low-income workers say San Francisco’s minimum wage isn’t enough to keep up.
Those drawn to the movement are thinking big, and broad
Beyond the slogans and chants, what is this occupation movement about and why is it catching like wildfire? What do the growing ranks of Occupy Wall Street/San Francisco/fill-in-the-blank hope comes of this tempest of progressivism? In an emerging movement where everyone and no one is a spokesperson, and where centralized demands and hierarchy are eschewed, there is no single, or simple, answer. But there are plenty willing to express their varied hopes for the ultimate outcome to the protests.
READERS HELPED FUND THIS REPORTING THROUGH A MICRO-FUNDING CAMPAIGN ON SPOT.US
As “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations entered their 12th day in New York and economic justice rallies spread across the country, several hundred San Franciscans took to the streets Thursday to “make the banks pay,” as the protests signs put it. Snaking through the Financial District, the crowd rallied outside the offices of Goldman Sachs, CitiBank, Charles Schwab and then Chase Bank, where six demonstrators sat in and were arrested.
When Eric Quezada — for decades a community organizer and widely respected leader on housing and economic justice and immigrants’ rights — died Wednesday after a seven-year struggle with cancer, there was an immediate outpouring of grief, love and appreciation from progressive friends and allies across San Francisco and the nation. The lonlongtime executive director of Dolores Street Community Services was a leading candidate for District 9 supervisor in 2008 and an accomplished grassroots community organizer.
In 2006, things were looking good for Lennar, America’s second-biggest homebuilder. That year, before the U.S. housing market’s epic collapse, the Miami-based giant pulled down $15.6 billion in revenues and closed sales on 29,568 homes. The ink was just drying on a massive and potentially lucrative deal to transform Treasure Island with new housing complexes, and the well-connected Lennar already had secured a deal to develop the Hunters Point Shipyard that the Navy was turning over to San Francisco.
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In a mixed verdict Friday morning, a nine-member U.S. district court jury awarded $1.5 million to the Service Employees International Union in its ongoing campaign against a rival created by former SEIU staffers. The judgment is unlikely to resolve the unions’ protracted battle over members and worker voice in the labor movement.
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Capping a wave of national immigration-rights actions across the country, local organizers turned this week to urging Sen. Dianne Feinstein to support comprehensive reform. About 2,000 Bay Area immigrants and others rallied Wednesday in front of Feinstein’s San Francisco office. The nationwide effort — including a march of 200,000 in Washington, D.C. — is aimed at pressuring Congress to support reforms Immigration reform leaders are pressing Congress for “humane comprehensive immigration reform” to protect undocumented immigrants while moving them toward legal status, prevent immigrant families from being split apart by deportations, and other goals.
City workers are demanding alternatives to Mayor Gavin Newsom’s hard-nosed fiscal approach as he attempts to close a $522 million projected budget gap through mass layoffs and de-facto furloughs.
As San Francisco grapples with a ballooning deficit for the coming fiscal year, Newsom laid off 17,474 workers two weeks ago, but promised to hire back “most” of them at 37½ hours per week. For the rehired, that represents a 6.25 percent pay cut — which city workers’ unions intend to challenge in court.
Toting 8½-by-11-inch “termination of employment” pink slips, angry city workers lined up at last Wednesday’s Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee hearing to decry the layoffs and urge city leaders to explore other sources of money.
