Labor & the Economy: February 2007 Archives

In Sunday's SF Chron, clever seeming anti-urbanist critic Joel Kotkin tells an increasingly familiar story about the tarnished reputation of the Golden State:

Our magnificent state may still be the home to Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the nation's largest port complex and the world's richest agricultural valleys, but by many critical measurements the state is slipping.

What are the problems, and how can we move forward through them? Is Mr Kotkin or anyone else in the state proposing serious solutions?

Here at Speak Out California, we've been closely following the dispute between the California State University Administration and its faculty, represented by the California Faculty Association (CFA). The Administration has been quick and generous to give itself hefty raises and increased benefits (all approved by its overseeing organization, of course), but has been worse than Scrooge when it comes to its all-important faculty.

At present, the CFA is trying to achieve its reasonable and arguably modest efforts to bring salaries for its members closer to parity with other similar institutions of higher education through normal channels. Speak Out California welcomes your comments or suggestions on the situation and will be looking at what can be done to help resolve this serious impasse.

In the meantime, here is Professor Oden's latest update on the stalement and the current efforts to resolve it and prepare for a possible labor strike.

[Cross-posted at dailykos.]

Barack Obama's announcement speech was terrific. It had some genuinely spine-tingling moments; moments we haven't had in far too long, like where he stands tall against right wing scapegoating of immigrants and gay people. But about two thirds of the way through, he gets into the "Let us" section. There are 20 uses of the construction "let us..." packed into the next six paragraphs. This was the weakest part of the speech. It felt like an ordinary laundry list, like he stepped out of telling an otherwise compelling story for those few paragraphs.

Education, health care, support for unions, ending of poverty, energy independence - these are all great goals, these are my goals as a progressive. So why did this part feel so flat?