SAN FRANCISCO — This year Debbie Yates came from her home in San Rafael to San Francisco’s 50th annual auto show because she heard there were more green cars than ever before.
“The good part of me wants a Prius,” Yates said, standing by a silver pine mica Toyota Prius hybrid that cost $27,734. “But the bad part of me wants a Porsche Cayman.” Continue reading
BERKELEY–On a sunny and crisp fall afternoon, Sam Azam sprayed glass cleaner on the doors and windows of a shop on University Avenue in Berkeley. His wife, Perveen, organized glittering pink, red, and turquoise saris and bangle bracelets on metal racks and white wooden shelves. The couple that moved from Mumbai, India to Marin City in 2002, were preparing for the grand opening of their store Faiz International. Continue reading
BERKELEY — For Shahid Salimi, living the American dream has its trade-offs.
The halal market his father started when “there was no goat meat around” in 1979 has been a success. Indus Valley now has a restaurant, distribution company, a flat-screen TV playing Sufi music videos, and a market with 30 who work there. Customers come from as far as Reno to buy its meat. Continue reading
OAKLAND–JDS Uniphase Corporation’s former chief financial officer told an Oakland jury today that he never reviewed the cash flow of companies for which JDSU paid top dollar during the dot com boom. Under cross-examination in a multi-billion-dollar securities fraud case, Tony Muller said that despite the record amount JDSU paid to acquire the companies, no review was needed.
OAKLAND–Nurses were locked-out of work today at the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland. After a two-day strike, hospital security guards refused to let the unionized nurses return to work en mass and without hospital ID badges.
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SAN FRANCISCO – Not all merchants in the Castro are taking the city’s advice to shut down this Halloween.
Angel Castro, 19, who works at Lime Bar and Restaurant on Market Street between 15th and Noe streets, said his restaurant will stay open on the 31st. It’s just his second time in the Castro for Halloween and he’s excited about dressing in drag as Cinderella for the festivities. Continue reading
Every morning for eight years, 44-year old Maria Luisa Contreras would take her place at a sewing machine to stitch name tags and logos on the uniforms of Oakland city workers and others. Last month, she traded in her needle and thread for a picket sign.
She and some 30 workers at Prudential Overall Supply in Milpitas are on strike with the support of UNITE-HERE, a union that represents service industry workers, to protest what they call unfair treatment at the Prudential plant.
“They don’t respect our seniority. They keep breaking the law,” Contreras said. She said supervisors have harassed workers who support the union in an attempt to squelch the organizing drive. “That’s why we went on strike,” Contreras said.
Contacted at the company’s Irvine headquarters, Prudential president Dan Clark denied that the company has attempted to intimidate union supporters. “We told people what’s going on, what may happen, but we’re not pushing them,” he said. Still, Clark didn’t hide his feelings about the union. “UNITE HERE has been very aggressive. They come and stir up problems,” he said
Prudential is the target of a multi-state campaign by UNITE HERE to improve conditions at its unionized plants, and to organize unions at the company’s non-union shops. Prudential contracts with a number of cities, including Oakland to launder and repair the uniforms of municipal workers. It’s one of the largest uniform laundry companies in the Southwestern United States; about 40 percent of its 800 production workers are unionized.
On Tuesday, Contreras and two other striking seamstresses took their fight to Oakland City Hall for the second time in four months. They asked the city council’s Finance Committee to force Prudential to fully comply with the Oakland living wage law.
The union contends that Prudential pay its workers a little more than $10 an hour. The law requires city contractors like Prudential to pay $10.39 with health benefits, and $11.95 without. Last month, city officials ordered the company to pay nearly $40,000 in back wages to its workers, but union officials contend that the company owes more.
Amaha Kassa of the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, which led the effort to pass the living wage law in 1999, joined the workers. He said that the point of such laws is to “make sure our public monies don’t create poverty wage jobs.” But, Kassa said, “The laws are only as good as the political will to enforce them. The city should take aggressive action.”
Finance committee members said they’d investigate further. They also decided to bill Prudential for staff time, and take the issue to closed session to consider other legal remedies, according to Justin Horner, legislative analyst for City Councilwoman Jane Brunner.
Clark said, “If we owe, we’ll pay.”
The union might have found the company’s Achilles heel in living wage laws up and down the state; its researchers have uncovered several alleged violations in California cities. The San Diego District Attorney’s office has filed a lawsuit against Prudential because of its failure to comply with San Diego’s living wage law. The union’s Jason Oringer said that the suit, filed under California’s unfair business practices law, could result in millions of dollars in penalties. Officials in Los Angeles and Ventura counties are also investigating Prudential’s compliance with living wage laws in their jurisdictions.
Clark said that complaints like this had never surfaced until the union began its recent organizing drive at his company, “I’ve been told by the union that if I gave into the union, all this would disappear.”
However, these actions have encouraged the strikers. Maria Luisa Contreras said that she’s confident the union will win in Milpitas, even though less than half of her 82 co-workers are walking the picket line. Workers at two plants in Los Angeles County are striking in sympathy with their Northern California counterparts.
The dispute shows no sign of abating. Clark said he doesn’t intend to settle with the union. The strikers said they have no plans to go back to work. “We want to be respected as human beings,” said Prudential worker Daria Plantillas
OAKLAND–A quiet spring of funds are being diverted to Oakland and other California cities thanks to the energy crises of 2000 and 2001. Few will forget the lawsuits brought by the state of California against several energy companies. But it pays to remember that in the settlement, $2.3 million was allocated to Oakland to be spent on energy efficiency projects. This summer $250,000 was granted to the Green Jobs Corp, an off-shoot of the Ella Baker Center.
Green Jobs Corp would like to see this money go to green collar job-training as part of a “pathways out of poverty” program. For Van Jones, President of the Ella Baker Center, this program offers a relief from the frustrations of working towards social justice via the typical youth and police-centric programs. Green Jobs along with Apollo Alliance, a labor union of electricians and plumbers, engages private industry leaders in a process that could directly impact the economic disparities experienced by at-risk communities.
With echoes of New Deal rhetoric, the focus on developing a green-collar work force in economically depressed areas of the city strives to link energy efficiency with social equality.
The Green Guide rated Oakland one of the top 10 US green cities, beating out Berkeley and San Francisco this year. California has already long been considered “…a consumer trend-setter. For everything from organic foods, the Prius and AB32,” says banker, Peter Liv, at a recent conference of green-industry leaders hosted by Business Times. But Oakland is emerging as a model-city for the state and the rest of the nation, retrofitting old infrastructure with environmentally-conscious values.
Both solar and bio-fuels are industries that have bloomed by 20% in just the past year and according to Daniel Kammen, energy professor at UC Berkeley, these industries create 3-5 times more jobs per dollar invested than fossil fuels.
Some of these jobs take a relatively low skill-level and can be mastered quickly with on-the-job training. “Yep, I got my degree from google.com,” says Ralph MacIntyre, co-owner of biodiesel processor Blue Sky. After years of working in construction, MacIntyre and his brother Patrick MacIntyre, began a 7-year journey into biofuel processing and design, eventually opening the doors to their current venture at Blue Sky. Throughout the east bay the Blue Sky pump trucks are busily collecting restaurant grease and turning it into a renewable energy source. Their goal is to eventually produce 15 million gallons of biodiesel a year.
At that level they expect to employ 50 people with 6-8 of them working as facility operators mixing batches of biodiesel. Blue Sky is already in the midst of a pilot program that supplies biodiesel fuel to AB Trucking’s fleet at the Port of Oakland.
Federal dollars are also filtering into the green economy in the form of workers’ training in community and vocational colleges focusing on energy-efficient building and construction, renewable electric power, energy-efficient vehicles, biofuels development and other green industries. The Green Jobs Act of 2007, authorized the Department of Labor to use up to $125 million to support these programs.
In a letter to the community Chancellor Elihu M. Harris outlined a program to make the Peralta Community College system, “THE place to go for green job training.” He makes use of a three-pronged approach called the Three E’s of sustainable management – Ecology, Equity and Economy. A historian might hear some similarity to Roosevelt’s Three R’s – Relief, Recovery and Reform.
As of now faculty are comparing independent initiatives and fleshing out a more fully integrated program. The Chamber of Commerce has sponsored the Green Business Council to assess the labor needs of 157 types of businesses. And the California Clean Energy Fund has put together investment packages aimed to attract more venture capital into this restorative industry.
Lyra Frederick
frederick@berkeley.edu
OAKLAND—The city’s first Whole Foods opened its doors this morning, eliciting praise from residents for providing high-end food while restoring a long-neglected downtown landmark.
An African choir sang, former Mayor Jerry Brown spoke and large crowds of eager shoppers rushed in to scout out the immaculate interior. Continue reading
BERKELEY—Emeryville, California, a Bay Area town with more chain retail stores than its 7,000 residents can support—and no farmer’s market—has big plans for the 2007 U.S. Farm Bill. The city passed a resolution this week announcing its hope that the bill would offer support for “small responsible farmers and food providers” rather than subsidizing agribusiness farmers who produce commodities such as soybeans, wheat and corn. Continue reading
BERKELEY — When the Federal Reserve talks, traders on Wall Street listen. Wall Street rallied vigorously Wednesday in response to Tuesday’s half-point interest rate cut. But the down and dirty is that most people’s lives will probably change very little. Continue reading
SAN FRANCISCO — A crowd of about 75 people waited for Barneys to open in the O’Farrell Street F.A.O. Schwartz building Wednesday. The store sits just a stone’s throw from Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and other high-end retailers that have drawn shoppers to San Francisco’s Union Square for years. Continue reading
OAKLAND–The Wikipedia entry for the 9/11 attacks have become a battleground of editing wars. The dispute and its focuses on the use of the words “terror” and “terrorism” have challenged the very nature of Wikipedia –an open-sourced watering hole of neutral encyclopedic information.
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Nine vowels and 11 evenly distributed consonants have bestowed the name’s owner with a curious fame. A generation of creative types the world over recite it regularly, many of them several times a day. Anonymous followers congregate in cyberspace to sing its praises, their adulations reminiscent of the gurus, cults and flower children of a bygone era. Continue reading
WALNUT CREEK – Paul Moon was drawn in by the hype, and mesmerized by the “hella good” graphics of Sony’s new Play Station 3 video game system.
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WALNUT CREEK – Store front windows filled were with Christmas trees, gift boxes, barely dressed mannequins in Santa hats – and red bows wrapped around everything.
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OAKLAND — Three years ago, when Karen Moses King wanted to escape family problems in Stockton, she headed for Oakland to continue as the only thing she’s wanted to be: a florist.
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EL CERRITO – The Cerrito Theater is so close to completion you can almost smell the popcorn from San Pablo Avenue. The $5 million restoration project has been underway for more than five years, but soon, very soon, the popcorn will pop, the lights will dim and the Cerrito will open for business again.
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Berkeley– Bugs, whales and bacteria are just some of the natural organisms that scientists are using to adapt designs from the natural world to solve industrial world problems.
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SAN FRANCISCO – Merrill Lynch, one of America’s biggest financial management and advisory organizations, announced Wednesday that it is allocating a total of $4.2 million in grants to 20 non-profit organizations that are “leading the way to brighter futures for youth in California.”
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OAKLAND – Passengers interviewed Wednesday at Oakland and San Francisco Airports say their planes were acceptably clean, despite a blistering report by J.D. Powers and Associates.
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OAKLAND – If you flew from New York City to Oakland in May 2005, you might have been part of a pilot-fatigue experiment conducted by JetBlue Airlines.
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OAKLAND – Frank Tucker is president of one of the most successful black-owned businesses in Oakland. His company, Tucker Technology, has 200 employees spread across 30 states.
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BERKELEY – October has been a big month for the iPod. The little gadget marked its fifth birthday, a new red iPod nano made its debut and Apple posted fourth quarter financial results showing the company’s highest ever revenues and earnings.
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BERKELEY – Hungry students swarmed around the pizza and sandwich shops on Telegraph Avenue yesterday afternoon, but inside Hi-Times things were quiet. “Business-wise, Telegraph is going bad,” said Hardeep Kalair, 22, from behind a smudged glass counter full of pipes and bongs.
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