SUPERLOTTO PLUS winning numbers Jan 24 2018
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sisters and brothers thank you so much for coming out on this cold wintry night i'm really
glad to see you here i want to thank both Sacramento DSA and Sacramento
Central Labor Council for cosponsoring this event.
Labor and socialism separated at birth in America but now they're coming back together
again perhaps.
I'm really glad to see that kind of harmonic convergence taking place.
It's a long time coming.
I want to thank Peter Brogan of both DSA and the Labor Council for helping to put this
together.
I'm going to talk for about 30 minutes.
Interspersed in there is about 10 or 12 minutes of video.
Dean mentioned that I make videos and there was a California Labor History Series that
I produced for Californian PBS about 20 years ago and you'll be seeing clips from that and
then we'll have time for discussion.
So, that's the program.
Hope that meets with your approval.
I'm going to talk about a few events from California's history and compare and contrast
what the standard California history narrative has to say against the perspective offered
by labor history.
I hope to shed some light from these examples of what we're facing today in the current
political context as a labor movement, and I also hope to be provocative about that.
So let's start the provocation with a question that I've heard many people asking: "Is the
current administration in Washington DC simply a run of the mill right-wing Republican anti-labor
pro-corporate administration along the lines of Reagan's and Bush's, albeit with a dangerous
lunatic at the top?
Or are we actually facing the onset of fascism in America?"
I don't mean this as an insult or a swear word, I mean it in relation to how fascism
has appeared historically and its common structures over time.
Is this the real thing?
People have developed checklists to figure this out, I'll share one with you presently
and you can go down that list and make your own determination.
Trump's campaign and the rhetoric and actions coming out of him since his election point
in the direction that he may well be a fascist and the regime he is building brick-by-brick
is a fascist regime.
While we don't have time to go into this fully here, I want to draw your attention to an
interesting historical parallel before we move into talking about California labor history
proper.
It's pertinent because labor history is all about looking to the past for tactics and
strategies developed by working people to defend their common interests and those common
interests are deeply opposed to and threatened by fascism.
Everyone understands that Trump employed a crude racism, misogyny, and xenophobia along
the way while singing his nostalgic "Make America great again" song, but it's how those
elements fuse with others in an extreme reactionary nationalism and profound disrespect for democracy
that makes his actions and rhetoric potentially fascist.
Another important element is economics, a fake anti-capitalism, a funhouse mirror image
of Bernie Sanders' socialist ideas although without the fun part.
Sanders ran a socialist campaign and named it, he proposed to address growing economic
inequality by taxing the rich and creating public programs funded by those taxes to serve
the interest of the 99%: universal healthcare, free college, rebuilding public infrastructure,
reforming labor law so that organizing is once more possible in the private sector.
He won 13 million votes and significant working-class following with a mildly anti-capitalist or
social democratic program.
He named the real problems, especially economic inequality, name the real enemy—the 1%,
the big banks, out of control corporations—and an explicit set of solutions meaning to unify
middle class and working class voters.
And by the way, Sanders won the largest vote ever officially tabulated for the president
of the united states by a socialist.
Gene Debs, who I'll talk about again in a moment, in 1912 got 6% of the vote.
Bernie's primary vote was equal to about 10% of the final electorate.
Trump, on the other hand, ran a fascist campaign although he failed to mention the fact.
That's typical of fascism in its post WW2 incarnation when the term became officially
unpopular.
His economic appeal to workers was based on the improbable idea that he would bring back
manufacturing jobs.
Hence the nostalgic "Make America Great Again" and the slogan "America First" lifted from
the xenophobic right-wing of the 1930s.
We saw right away with the Carrier Company how he actually plans to do this.
Claiming the minority of jobs the company was already planning to keep as his victory.
When the president of the steel workers local of the plant pointed this out he earned Trump's
bullying tweets and a flood of violent social media threats.
The German communist leader Clara Zetkins said something of note in 1923.
In the wake of World War I, in addition to the Russian Revolution, several other European
countries witnessed powerful left-wing workers' movements, some of which came close to socialist
revolution.
All were eventually put down.
Surveilling the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany Zetkin observed, and this was 1923—very
early on here in the rise of fascism, "fascism" she said "Is the punishment inflicted on the
European working class for not having continued the revolution begun in Russia."
The parallels are not precise, but i'd suggest something similar is going on here recently.
The moment of the presidential election in 2016 was ripe for a direct economic appeal
to a chunk of America's unhappy white working class and we want to be careful with our definitions
of working class here.
People such as, but not inclusive, former manufacturing workers who consider themselves
"middle class", but found themselves drifting downward toward or into the ranks of the poor.
With the failure of Bernie's socialist crusade we lost the solidarity message in which unity
of the working class, white workers and workers of color, women and men, immigrant and native
born, might have been the key to putting in place policies to roll back the power of the
billionaires and economic inequality.
This would have been a natural, effective, and inclusive message to sympathetic working
class ears and I think it would have won especially in places like Michigan and Wisconsin.
Instead, the fake working class message of Trump was able to rush into the vacuum created
by Bernie's fall and Clinton's refusal to pick up that banner.
We can adapt Zetkins' astute observation from nearly 100 years ago and propose that Trump's
fascism is the punishment inflicted on the American working class for not having extended
Sanders' social democratic message into the presidential election.
Now let's look at the checklist: racism, extreme nationalism, xenophobia and scapegoating,
a fake socialism, assault on civil liberties, continuously delegitimizing the media and
the courts while packing the courts with far-right wingers, and a build up of the war machine,
not to mention the everyday misogyny and assaults on unions moving through the courts and congress,
suppression of voting rights, oh and the sprouting up of violent street gangs of the right wing.
In addition, a true fascist regime doesn't just get elected, it needs a movement on one
side of it and willing coalition partners among the more traditional conservative elites
on the other side with their desire for the tax cuts on the rich and corporations, rolled
back social programs, and deregulation of the economy and environment.
This is precisely what Mike Pence and his joined at the hip connection, the Koch brothers,
represents.
Along with the billionaires in Trump's cabinet and at top government agencies and congressional
republican leaders.
Having made the case this might indeed be fascism we're watching be put together here
let me take a step back and say "maybe it's not."
Maybe it's really a bad anti-labor anti-immigrant administration with strong tendencies toward
corruption and authoritarianism.
In either case, it looks as if it is attempting to dismantle a couple hundred years of admittedly
imperfect American experiment in democracy.
And whether it's fascism per se or some other form of authoritarian rule, may ultimately
be a less important distinction than figuring out how to fight it.
Let's just bear in mind that contemporary American fascism won't look superficially
like the fascisms of the past.
Trump probably won't grow a little mustache, the military will not begin goose-stepping
during parades, red white and black swastika banners won't begin appearing in the background
of press conferences so we just have to be alert.
What is heartening is that since the election a lot of people have gotten active, figuring
out how to turn this around, finding out where we stand and fight and getting into the streets.
The growth of DSA is a perfect example of that, you know explosive growth from 7,000
or 8,000 in 2016 to the 30,000 today.
That's really significant.
My view is that we must offer information useful to working people who want to fight
and provide more ways for working people who don't know where to turn to get the information
to do that.
I will offer one doorway tonight: labor history.
And the fact that I've recently come out with a book on California labor history and I'll
be selling it after my presentation at that table is purely coincidental.
Just a bit of background, Dean mentioned some of it, I've had the great privilege for the
last 20 years teaching a course in California labor history at City College of San Francisco.
That class, one night a week, has given me the space to ponder how best to reach working
people with their own hidden and really suppressed history.
The class also created the imperative to find something my students could read.
When I realized there wasn't anything suitable, the last book of this sort was written in
the 1960s way behind the times here, I set out to write it myself.
And I wrote it because California's history is rich in how ordinary working people can
achieve a level of justice when faced with injustice.
As the labor movement has declined, and its density has dropped now to a third of its
peek in the 1950s, virtually no one knows the stories anymore behind the victories working
people have won.
My book recovers those stories so that my students, union leaders and activists, and
the interested general public can figure out where our rights as workers came from, what
it took to win them, and what we stand to lose if they are taken away.
There are two inescapable things about California history: immigration and the Gold Rush.
They're at the center of the mainstream narrative about California which can be boiled down
to four words: "come here, get rich."
It's pretty much the same thing as the American Dream only more concentrated.
The Gold Rush was a validation of these ideas though few people actually became rich from
the Gold Rush, or at least from gold mining.
But some did and some became rich in each of the successive gold rushes that the state
has experienced.
Wheat farms, oil, Hollywood, the World War 2 defense industry, and today Silicon Valley
and the digital economy.
All these gold rushes drew people from across the country and indeed the world.
And when some people prospered and their stories were publicized it further fed the mainstream
narrative of "come here, get rich."
But if one side of the coin is gold, the other is not.
Each gold rush also produced many more workers who did not share much of the wealth that
they created with their hands.
Labor history is about those people.
Out of the original Gold Rush emerged the railroads and the individuals often described
in standard history as the people who "built" the railroads.
Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins.
They were failed miners, they became wealthy by mining the miners selling foods, supplies,
and clothing to them and receiving huge subsidies from the US government to hire the workers
who actually built the central pacific railroad.
These men amassed gigantic fortunes, they were the poster children for the enormous
economic inequality that arose during the gilded age following the gold rush.
When a terrible economic depression devastated working class communities in the 1870s there
was a backlash and it wasn't pretty.
San Francisco's two largest population groups were Irish and Chinese immigrant workers.
Out of the fear and anger caused by the economic depression, which threw over 20 percent of
the labor force out of work, emerged the Workingmen's Party of California which briefly swept to
power in local offices across the state.
It was a progressive party in some respects.
It had a trade union wing that called for working class unity, for free public education,
taxing the rich, and curbing the power of the railroad corporations.
But the main impact of the Workingmen's Party of California echoed the words of Irish immigrant
Dennis Kearney, who preached an anti-Chinese ideology.
The party adopted his slogan "The Chinese must go."
The only lasting effect the party had was the Chinese exclusion act of 1882 which banned
Chinese immigration for decades.
No part of the progressive program, the economic program of the Workingmen's Party that might
have benefited all workers, was enacted.
Diverted instead by demagogs instead into division and xenophobia.
I want to underscore though that even in movements like this there's always choices for working
people and their leadership: to be inclusive instead of exclusive, to seek broad unity
on behalf of common interests, or allow the employers to divide us by race, ethnicity,
language, or national origin.
There are also always opportunities produced by worker movements for individuals to act
with creative and courageous approaches to solidarity that in turn can grow that movement.
Let me offer one example that took place here in Sacramento during the national Pullman's
Strike of 1894.
The workers who built the luxurious Pullman railroad cars near chicago went on strike
shortly after affiliating with the brand new organization the American Railway Union or
ARU.
Unlike the way things had typically been done previously by railroad workers who organized
themselves into many different skilled worker unions, craft unions, the ARU had industry-wide
orientation.
Its outstanding leader was Eugene Debs a locomotive fireman who believed that all railway workers
should be in one big union enabling them to act in solidarity with on another.
Consequently, when the Pullman workers asked for restoration and Pullman refused the ARU,
some 150,000 workers and eventually a quarter million, went on strike all across the country
on their behalf.
Here's what happened on independence day in Sacramento.
I will now read from my book for just a moment: "In Sacramento a tense confrontation between
a few thousand strikers and a thousand militiamen, on July 4th, ended bloodlessly with the retreat
of the militia.
The impressive solidarity of the workers and community was for the moment holding fast
and it was contagious.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported: "After the troops fell back from the depot this afternoon
two companies were ordered to take a gatling gun and move to the American River Bridge
for the purpose of guarding it from possible destruction.
As the men had already walked a considerable distance they were glad to avail themselves
of an electric car that ran as far as 28th street.
Orders were given to hitch the gun to the rear end of the car, the conductor objected,
but without avail.
For the first ten blocks the street are paved with asphalt and the gun ran without a jolt,
but the motormen who was interested in the strikers' cause bided his time and when the
car approached 11th street where the smooth pavement ends and cobblestones commence he
threw the level to the top notch and the car sprang forward at full speed.
The result was that the gun was so badly damaged that it will have to go to a machine shop
for repairs."
*clapping* The national strike was beaten when overwhelming government fire power and
court injunctions were deployed on behalf of the railroad corporations.
Debs was sent to jail for 6 months during which time, pondering the events of the strike,
he became a socialist.
A decade later in Oxnard in 1903, a better outcome emerged from elements similar to the
ones surrounding the Workingmen's party and its reaction to immigrant workers.
Sugar beats were an important crop in California around the turn of the last century.
After the Chinese Exclusion Act beet farmers had difficulty getting enough workers especially
temporary seasonal laborers.
There were two types of farm labor, year round and seasonal, the secure and gig economy workers
of their time.
In Oxnard white workers were the majority of year-round employees.
They generally stayed away from seasonal work if they could so the growers imported workers
from other countries to do the temp work.
By the early 1900s, that meant mostly Japanese workers about 75% of the seasonal workers
with around 20% Mexican as well as a remnant of about 5% Chinese.
Despite the obstacles of race, culture, and language differences that they faced these
workers put together the Japanese Mexican Labor Alliance or JMLA, the first union in
California's fields, and it prevailed through a well-organized strike.
Although not before one striker Luis Vasquez was killed by gunmen hired by the growers.
Here's a videoclip to show what happened.
Due to its socialist leadership the Los Angeles Council of Labor is way ahead of the rest
of the labor movement in extending its hand to workers of color.
When farm workers reach their hands across barriers to form the Japanese Mexican Labor
Alliance, Fred Wheeler convinces the all-white labor council to support them in creating
the first union in California's fields.
Wheeler travels to Oxnard just North of Los Angeles.
He finds a small town.
Its stores and services support the famous Southern California citrus industry.
But Oxnard is also surrounded by extensive sugar beets farms beneath the shadow of a
massive factory.
Built in 1897, the second largest sugar works in the United States, its owned by the Oxnard
family just one of whom lives within a thousand miles of Oxnard.
The Oxnard treat the factory managers well providing them with large houses and nice
parties.
Oxnard workers are treated less well, especially the farm workers brought by labor contractors
from Mexico and Japan to work in the beet fields and they live in places like these.
They pay inflated prices for their food and supplies in company stores and work long hours
planting, thinning, harvesting, and transporting the sugar beets.
Early in 1903 the growers, in an attempt to eliminate the middleman, form their own labor
contracting company.
The Japanese and Mexican contractors lose business and workers wages are cut.
Anger helps them to form a union and go on strike.
Despite grower initiated violence reported as a "labor riot" in the local newspapers,
the farmworkers stand firm for two months.
Few sugar beets make it into the mill, finally the bosses back down.
With some help from Wheeler, JMLA president, Kosaburu Baba, shown here in a photo taken
years later, negotiates a settlement restoring workers pay and giving Japanese and Mexican
contractors back their business.
Against all odds the union wins, but its troubles aren't over.
The Mexican secretary of the alliance JM Lazarus petitions the national AF of L for a union
charter.
Samuel Gompers responds, "It is understood that in issuing this charter to your union
we will under no circumstance accept membership of any Chinese or Japanese."
Lazarus and the Mexican members of the alliance refuse Gompers' condition.
They write back "In the past we have counselled, fought, lived on very short rations with our
Japanese brothers, and have toiled with them in the fields and they have uniformly been
kind and considerate.
We would be false to them, to ourselves, to the cause of unionism if we now accepted privileges
for ourselves which are not accorded to them."
Without connection to the broader labor movement, the JMLA soon disappears from sight.
It's worth noting in the post Bernie Sanders moment that Fred Wheeler, who got the LA Labor
council to support the JMLA, was a socialist.
Besides being president of the Labor Council, and one of the first organizers hired by the
California Labor Federation, he was also a few years later the first socialist candidate
elected to the Los Angeles City Council.
Wheeler and socialists like him were much more likely to be fair-minded and antiracist
than non-socialists in the labor movement, although this was not universally true.
For instance, writer, Jack London, who lived in Oakland was a fire-eating member of the
left-wing of the Socialist Party, but also a white supremacist.
This moment in 1903 when defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory was not unusual.
The history of labor in the United States is mostly a history of defeats.
If it weren't, the country would look a lot more like Sweden with paid maternity leave,
free healthcare for all, and free education from preschool through university.
But on the other hand, there have been some victories here and some movements to get those
victories so important that they have kept the US from looking more like Nazi Germany
than it might otherwise.
The 1934 San Francisco General Strike and its aftermath was one of those moments.
It remains the most important event in California history that no one remembers anymore.
And given what is heading at working people, with a right-wing republican congress and
president including the loss of agency fee in the public sector and a national right
to work law, we should start remembering tactics like this.
General strikes are quite rare in United States history, we've only had about a dozen city-wide
general strikes and none since 1946.
There were 3 in 1934 in the depths of the Great Depression with 25% unemployment, wages
lowered to starvation levels, West Coast maritime workers including many immigrants were trying
to reorganize the unions that had been busted over previous 15 years.
When the workers across the west coast were confronted with the complete refusal of their
employers to recognize their unions or even to negotiate with them they went out on a
coast-wide strike.
In San Francisco, two maritime workers Howard Sperry and Nick Bordois were killed by police
during the strike.
In response, more than 100,000 workers stopped working in solidarity with the maritime strikers
to commemorate the deaths of the two workers and gain some dignity and respect on the job.
Here's some images from the events leading up to the general strike.
The employers opened the ports with a massive show of force.
They are determined to crush the maritime workers' strike.
The bosses hire a thousand strike-breakers in San Francisco alone including hundreds
of black workers who are barred from the union.
This tactic is neutralized when the union, breaking with its racist past, approached
African American longshoreman and asks them to join the union and the strike.
Many do.
But on July 5th other weapons are turned on the strikers.
One witness reports "Struggling knots of longshoremen closely pressed by officers mounted and on
foot swarmed everywhere.
The air was filled with blinding gas.
The howl of the sirens, the low boom of the gas guns, the crack of pistol fire, the whine
of the bullets, the shouts and curses of sweaty men.
Everywhere was a rhythmical waving of arms like trees in the wind swinging clubs, swinging
fists, hurling rocks, hurling bombs."
As the police moved from one group to the next men lay bloodied unconscious or in convulsions
in the gutters, on the sidewalks, in the streets.
"Around on Madison Street a plane clothesman dismounted from a radio car.
Waved his shotgun nervously at the shouting pickets and scattered.
I saw nothing thrown at him.
Suddenly he fired up and down the street and two men fell in a pool of gore.
One evidently dead, the other half-attempting to rise, but weakening fast."
Longshoreman Howard Sperry is dead.
A block away so is cook Nick Bordois who is volunteering in the strike kitchen.
For those of you who are wondering what a gatling gun was in the last segment about
the 1894 pullman strike you just saw one go by with the national guard there.
Did you also notice a startlingly contemporary image among the ones you just saw?
It was the chalked sidewalk memorial to Sperry and Bordois.
Could be a Black Lives Matter memorial or one from Charlottesville.
There were two main outcomes from the General Strike.
First, the maritime workers controlled hiring halls, wage increases, and a leap into the,
what we might call, middle class: the ability to own a home, send your kids to college.
For a part of the work force who had been low paid casual labor, completely controlled
by the bosses, this was an enormous change.
Second, the San Francisco General Strike and other similar events and especially the violence
surrounding them also played a major role in discussions in congress before passage
of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.
The NLRA established the ground rules for peaceful conflict resolution in the work place.
The same rules that are now on the verge of disappearing in the Republican congress through
the so-called Right to Work laws.
What rules will apply when the ones we've had are gone?
The labor history we know says it won't be pretty.
I want to bring us up to the present, but before we talk about recent labor history
I also just want to mention two other important developments contradicting "come here, get
rich" that took place in the 60s and 70s.
That's public sector unionism and United Farm Workers.
These two movements involved many thousands of workers and millions of supporters in families
and community.
They were very much social movements as well as labor movements.
Neither would have occurred without the civil rights movement cracking open the Cold War
society of the 1950s and both reflected the spread of antiracist politics and activism
into organized labor.
They helped push New Deal policies further, extending the right to collective bargaining
to public workers and farm workers, both of whom had been left out of the National Labor
Relations Act in 1935.
These movements also supplied some of the political muscle that created Great Society
programs like medicare and medicaid or, here in California, medical.
I'd like to show you a couple of minutes of images from that moment.
"You didn't end up accidentally standing there with a sign.
You had to purposely decide to do it.
Once you decide that one time, after that I mean when you're called on you can do it
again."
Although administrators and politicians claimed public employee strikes were officially illegal
dozens occur anyway.
"The teachers were engaging in strikes and they had no laws to deal with it and nobody
knew what to do except put them in jail or try to fire them or something and all of these
solutions just were frankly not very satisfying to anybody."
By the late 60s and early 70s teachers and other public sector unionists build an unstoppable
momentum in California and across the country.
"We acted as though we had the power and we did in a sense bargain collectively.
We went before the board of supervisors, we had sick-outs at the hospitals."
"One thousand three hundred sanitation workers go on strike and Memphis is not being fair
to them."
Martin Luther King Jr. involvement in a sanitation workers' strike in Memphis Tennessee highlights
the deep connection between the civil rights movement and public sector unionism.
His tragic death during that strike forces authorities to grant the workers union recognition.
It also provides a renewed spark for organizing elsewhere.
"The public workers really put on a fight at the level of the state legistlature and
that means that the teachers and the service employees, AFSCME, that was a group that really
put it on."
Keeping up steady pressure one public worker group after another was granted collective
bargaining rights.
By 1975 Governor Jerry Brown signs the Educational Employee Relations Act legalizing collective
bargaining for teachers and other school employees.
"We didn't pin our existence on a law, we were in existence before the law, we acted
as if we could bargain before there was a bargaining law.
So it's a collective action that's behind it fundamentally.
Now this doesn't deny the fact that Jerry Brown's approval of collective bargaining
for Farmworkers Teachers and so forth was a very very helpful and necessary thing for
us.
And thank goodness it happened."
The disruption to business as usual by the public sector union movement, while not as
violent as the 1930s, were substantial enough through strikes, sit-ins, demonstrations,
civil disobedience, and other forms of collective action that the results were similar.
The passage of legislation allowing for collective bargaining and the same dynamic unfolded in
California's fields.
Now to the present, 9 years ago my union the California Federation of Teachers understood
that it was time to implement one part of the Workingmen's Party program–the taxing
the rich part–which the party never got around to making happen because it was too
distracted by racism and xenophobia.
We were in the middle of the great recession following the Wall Street engineered housing
bubble and crash, employment in California was officially 12 percent, the worst since
the great depression.
10,000 teachers a year were laid off between 2009 and 2011 totaling more than 10% of the
k-12 teacher workforce.
Class sizes rose sharply, student fees skyrocketed in our formally free colleges and universities,
and thousands of courses were no longer being offered.
Services to seniors and low income Californians were slashed, millions of homes were under
water.
You all remember this, this was recent history.
We knew what the solution was, it was to create a millionaires tax to ask the people who could
best afford to do so to pay their fair share of taxes and prevent what remained of the
public sector from sliding into the ocean.
What we were up against was the preferred interpretation of California as a reliably
anti-tax state ever since Prop 13.
We didn't believe that that was true anymore, we thought the crash and recession had shifted
the understanding of the majority of the electorate about growing economic inequality and what
needed to be done.
The coalition that CFT worked with passed prop 30 in 2012 included a community group
called Move the Immigrant Vote which that year turned out more than 50,000 people, new
or recent immigrants, to the polls to vote for Prop 30.
So with that campaign we came full circle–labor and the immigrant community finally did the
work together in the 21st century that the Workingmen's Party of California failed to
do in the 19th century.
We did it again with Prop 55 in November of 2016.
Here are a few minutes of images from that campaign.
"This budget deals with the $42 billion defecit which is the biggest deficit that we've ever
had."
"New polling out by the California Federation of Teachers found overwhelming support, 67%,
for a higher tax when it hits anyone making a million dollars or more."
In response to the crisis, CFT and its community partners built a movement for a millionaires
tax to save schools and services.
We showed through mass action and opinion research that we had enough popular support
to win against competing ballot measures.
That's when the governor called CFT President Peshtal to talk.
"Governor Jerry Brown has stopped collecting signatures for his original ballot measure
to raise taxes, he's now focusing on a new tax initiative which is a compromise between
his original plan and the tax proposal from the California Federation of Teacher."
"Californians overcame decades of anti-tax sentiment and approved the first general tax
in twenty years" "So proposition 30 is a unifying force and we had to overcome a lot of obstacles,
we overcame them."
"So we were in free fall, so prop 30 stabilized the situation and in fact there have been
some gains.
The 8 furlough days that we had to take back, we have those back now.
So teachers are working more, students are in school more."
"Some of our classified employees have been restored to partially, to where they were
in 2012.
Some of them went back to 100 percent and some of them are sitting around 80 and some
are at 90 percent including myself."
"Prop 30 has made a difference, it's made a big difference it restored several of the
classes that I had previously taught and it's meant that it's no longer the case that students
have to wait around for the classes that they need."
"There's a lot more say at the site level of how we're going to be using our dollars
to best serve our children."
"Whether they be english learners of from very low income families, the money essentially
follows the student."
"So opponents of proposition often made the argument that jobs would be lost, millionaires
would leave the state, companies would move away" "If proposition 30 passes, California
will have the most crushing tax burden in the United States of America by a long shot."
"Berry Broom is actively recruiting chief executives from California companies and luring
them to Arizona, a land of lower taxes."
"What we've seen since proposition 30 was passed in 2012 is the state has added 1.4
million new jobs and we have 10,000 more millionaires than we had when the measure was passed.
What this means is at a minimum there's really no relationship between raising taxes like
we did with Proposition 30 and economic growth and if anything the evidence points to the
alternative, that it might actually be good for the state's economy."
As a result of prop 30 and prop 55, which was the renewal for 12 years of prop 30, we're
bringing in $8 to $9 billion a year for public education and services and we've gone in a
different direction than the rest of the country has at the state level coming out of the great
recession.
Thank you, I know a lot of people in this room did a lot of hard work on those campaigns
so thank you all.
This is in marked contrast to everything coming out of Washington today, the thrust of which
is to privatize education, hand a huge taxcut windfall to the rich, and send the children
of working people back to the 19th century.
Let's sum up, there words you long to hear.
The history that I have been talking about is clearly different from "Come here, get
rich."
The history of most Californians is about the people who came and didn't get rich.
The occupy movement brought us the understanding of the 1% and the 99%.
That's a pretty good estimate of how all these gold rushes have worked out.
For a long time California's economy did fairly well in helping its immigrant to make a decent
living.
That was the real story behind that happened to most people to make enough money so one's
family was comfortable and one's kids got a better start than one's parents had.
A critical piece of that success story is the labor movement; all but invisible in the
standard "Come here, get rich" story.
Today California unions represent about 16 percent of the workforce which remains considerably
better than the national average.
If you've only got a one in one hundred chance to strike it rich, to come here get rich,
a one in six chance to get at least more comfortable works out a lot better for a lot more people.
Clearly, many immigrants to California figured this out then we revised the narrative.
It's not "come here, get rich" it's "come here, organize, do better."
The Trump environment, whether fascist or just really bad, poses special challenges
for immigrant workers and organized labor.
Both groups significantly overlapping here in California, face targeting and scapegoating
at the hands of this administration and the right-wing billionaires that support it.
We've seen this most clearly around Trump's xenophobia, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and executive
orders.
But we will also see a spike in the anti-union invective when the Janus vs AFSCME court case
hits the supreme court this year and when Right To Work legislation starts seriously
moving through congress.
We have to find ways to build the broadest possible unity to stand together and fight
or we will be destroyed by these things.
I'd like to think that if I were in Germany in 1932 I would have figured out what was
being put together around me, I wouldn't be like Pastor Martin Niemoller who said "First
they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade
unionist.
Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a jew.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me."
What I would prefer... well if this scenario comes to pass I'm going to be in big trouble
because I'm all three.
So let's not have that happen.
I like this alternative to Niemoller's poem that I saw at a demonstration in San Francisco
earlier this year.
Can you read that in the back?
It's absolutely true that any fascist regime is going to go after trade unionists at least
the ones willing to stand together and fight.
And if you are a trade unionist and unwilling to stand and fight there's not much point
to being in a union because that is what it is there for.
By knowing the lessons of labor history and talking them up we give the public a shot
at understanding what's at stake at this moment.
Lessons like we lose when allow ourselves to be divided by racism and xenophobia, sexism
or split along the lines of private and public sector unionism.
Lessons like the 1934 San Francisco General Strike when we learned with that level of
unity and militancy we can win and set it up for winning for a good long time.
With labor history we help to fill the vacuum that should never have opened up in the presidential
campaign election... presidential election campaign after Bernie conceded.
The vacuum where working people's problems and solutions should have been.
Knowing labor history helps to create a progressive labor movement.
It's what we've always needed, it's what we need now to defend what's left of the legacy
previous generations of trade unionists have left us through their blood sweat and tears
so I say to you if you don't like the labor history that you've got let's go out and make
some of our own.
Thank you.
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