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Tell Long Beach’s City Council to Enforce the Will of Voters
(The following appeal comes from the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and Healthy Communities.) On November 6, Long Beach voters overwhelmingly approved a minimum wage for hotel workers in their...
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Raising the Minimum Wage Will Lift the Economy
Sustainable economies are built on good jobs. If people don’t earn enough money, they can’t keep the economy growing by buying goods and services. This basic fact is lost on opponents of minimum-wage...
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L.A. Times Misses the Story Behind Living Wage Campaigns
Supporters of Long Beach's Measure N. On Sunday the Los Angeles Times published a story about the important successes of campaigns to pass local minimum wage and living wage laws. However, while...
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Long Beach Activists Look Beyond Measure N
Pastor Nestor Gerente welcomed the overflow audience of nearly 350 Long Beach activists at last week’s People’s State of the City gathering and said, “This is a great crowd. Where are you on Sunday...
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Obama Picks a Bad Penny for Commerce
Barack Obama’s nomination of Penny Pritzker as Commerce Secretary was a poke in the eye of the American labor movement. The niece of the founder of the Hyatt Hotel chain and current member of the...
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Teaching the ABCs of Power in Long Beach
You get the basics in high school. The federal government is divided into three branches (executive, legislative, judicial). Locally you’ve got the mayor and the city council. Etc. Most of us don’t...
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Long Beach: Creating Community and Serving the People
Looking back on the eight weeks of the Long Beach living wage campaign, I could write about the conversations with voters, or the discovery of neighborhoods in a city I thought I knew like the back of...
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Enriching the Community with a Living Wage
A year or so ago, while picking up socks off of the living room floor, and considering the innumerable tasks of being a single parent, I exclaimed to my kids, “You know what? We think what we need is...
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Hotel Humbug in Long Beach
Every year I watch A Christmas Carol on TV to remind myself not to give in to the frustrations born of shopping, traffic and rushing from one holiday gathering to the next. Whether we are religious or...
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The Economy Improves — Will the Minimum Wage?
As the economy slowly rebounds, we need to ask what kind of recovery we want in Los Angeles. Experts point to tourism as a key industry poised to help drive recovery and growth in our region. The...
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