The plan evokes another controversial bill making its way through the Legislature that would permit the state to negotiate wages, hours and work conditions for the entire fast-food industry .And it follows a February poll from SEIU Local 2015 — which represents California long-term care employees — that found half of nursing home workers are likely to leave their current position in the next year. A whopping 86% cited staffing levels and wages as their top concerns. SEIU 2015 Executive Vice President Arnulfo De La Cruz: “Long-term care workers have been on the front lines protecting our communities throughout the pandemic, but they are quitting in droves due to lack of fair pay and protections.”
Tens of thousands of Central and Southern California grocery workers voted to authorize their union to call a strike against supermarket chains Ralphs, Albertsons, Vons and Pavilions if a new contract deal can’t be reached, the United Food and Commercial Workers said Sunday. Sacramento City Unified School District campuses are expected to remain closed today with thousands of employees continuing the strike that started Wednesday. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond tried to bring the district and unions together for a Friday meeting, but the district refused his invitation .Also today, negotiations are expected to resume between Chevron and the 500 oil workers who went on strike last week at its Richmond refinery .
The Golden State added a whopping 138,100 nonfarm payroll jobs last month — accounting for 20.4% of the nation’s new jobs — as its unemployment rate fell to 5.4%, EDD announced Friday . That’s significantly lower than its revised January rate of 5.7%. Though it’s higher than the national jobless rate of 3.8%, California no longer has the country’s highest unemployment rate : It’s now tied with Alaska for the third-highest, behind New Mexico and the District of Columbia. Gov. Gavin Newsom :“These latest numbers show that California is continuing to drive our nation’s job growth.”
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Although that may sound like a multibillion-dollar contradiction, sending drivers gas money wouldn’t necessarily undercut California’s climate goals. CalMatters’ Grace Gedye reports why .But the higher gas prices rise, the more bipartisan pressure builds on Newsom to ramp up in-state oil production. GOP state Sen. Shannon Grove of Bakersfield unveiled a bill Friday that would ban California from importing crude oil from nations “with demonstrated human rights abuses” or lower environmental standards. State Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Hanford Democrat, also touted California’s strict standards for oil production in a Sunday KSEE segment . “There’s so many benefits in being able to produce more in the state of California, and in the Central Valley particularly,” she said. “Not having enough oil for drivers … I don’t try to politicize these issues, because they’re directly tied to, and can impact, working families and families that are struggling.” Indeed, for many critics, the central problem with Newsom’s proposal is its failure to recognize that “inflation is far less damaging for rich families than for poor families,” as Annie Lowrey put it in a Saturday column in the Atlantic .
Christine Kevane La Marca, president of the California Rental Housing Association :“Rental housing providers are being forced to carry the financial weight of the pandemic and some of them will lose their properties as a result.” However, the bill only covers tenants who apply for state rent relief by Thursday. And it also limits local governments’ ability to enact new tenant protections, concerning advocates who point out that in the most recent survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 977,000 California households at all income levels reported no confidence in their ability to pay April’s rent.
The big question facing California — especially as the state prepares to launch a new mental health hotline and lawmakers consider Newsom’s proposal to force more mentally ill people into treatment — is whether such an approach will help vulnerable people access needed services while reducing fatal encounters with police. As a case study, Alexei takes us to Nevada County , which launched its first mobile crisis team — a sheriff’s deputy plus a mental health clinician — in October 2020. Less than four months later, law enforcement officers shot and killed a distressed woman brandishing a knife. The mobile crisis team had been unavailable to respond to the incident. Ernesto Alvarado, the clinician on the mobile crisis team ,told Alexei there’s no guarantee the situation would have turned out differently if he’d been there: “I’m not a wizard. I can’t just wave my hand and calm everybody.” Meanwhile, demand is growing for the mobile crisis team’s services: “We are the catch-all for everything,” said sheriff’s deputy Galen Spittler . “If someone doesn’t know how to fix something, we are the fixers.”
