By Phoenix Calida (February 3, 2016)
I’m just going to go ahead and say it.
If you are pro capitalism, you’re not pro black. Continue reading “You Can’t Be Pro-Capitalism and Pro-Black”
By Phoenix Calida (February 3, 2016)
I’m just going to go ahead and say it.
If you are pro capitalism, you’re not pro black. Continue reading “You Can’t Be Pro-Capitalism and Pro-Black”
By Alex Riccio
On March 3rd student organizers from Allied Students for Another Politics (ASAP!) hosted an ambitious event: a Strike Debt Assembly. The core purpose of this assembly was to gather together students with like-minded opponents of rising tuition costs and debt oppression (specifically student debt oppression) in order to envision a world with open and accessible colleges, then develop strategies for attaining our vision. Continue reading “Chains of Debt”
By Vernon Huffman
“Everybody’s gotta eat,” explained the Stone Soup volunteer with a smile. Every day people from the Corvallis area come together in one of two churches to share a free meal prepared by volunteers. There are no forms to fill out, no sermons to sit through, and no questions asked; just good food for hungry people, often more than one hundred at a meal. Continue reading ““Everybody’s Gotta Eat”: Homelessness in Corvallis”
By Thao Lam. Originally published on Capital & Main on March 3, 2014.
A man wearing the uniform and cap of a fast-food worker, his apron tucked into a pant pocket, approached a clerk at the Alameda County Social Service Agency. As he handed over documents for his public assistance benefits claim, the man explained how it had felt to be waiting in the lobby for the past several hours:
“I was the first here and the last to leave.”
“You should get a pay check!” the clerk responded.
The reality is that this man does “get a paycheck” from his minimum wage job, but finds himself unable to meet his basic needs. This is a common scene at my office in Oakland and public assistance offices across the country.
This month’s National Association of Social Workers’ theme is “All People Matter,” chosen to remind us of our profession’s commitment to improving social conditions for all. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, large settlement houses worked towards improving labor conditions. Chicago’s Hull House, for example, provided a space for unions to meet and the Hull House workers (our social work predecessors) worked with low-wage workers.
Today the typical American employed at a minimum wage job is not the traditional teenager enjoying a first job. Instead, he’s an adult displaced in the economy – and more than likely, a parent. The head of household who works full time at minimum wage to support his or her family can still live in poverty. This is because the wages are so low that a family of four with one primary wage earner at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour (or even the higher current California minimum wage of $8) still lives below the poverty line. How can that be possible? Or rather, how can this be permissible?
In California the family with the full-time minimum wage worker qualifies for some form of public assistance for purchasing food (from the CalFresh program), health care (Medi-Cal), home energy costs (LIHEAP) or cash block grants (CalWORKs). The minimum wage worker may be someone you know and, with just one unfortunate event, it could even be you.
What better way is there for social workers to be true to their history than to support the minimum wage and living wage campaigns that are blooming in our own communities today? Two cities I’ve called home have such campaigns. In Los Angeles, Raise LA, a $15.37 hourly living wage campaign for hotel workers employed at larger hotels, is now underway. (On February 25 the L.A. City Council called for a study to gauge the economic impact of such a raise.) In Oakland, a coalition of community and labor organizations is working to place the Lift Up Oakland campaign for a $12.25 hourly minimum wage and paid sick days on the November ballot.
We as social workers and, more importantly, as members of our communities, need to be involved in these campaigns. If we belong to unions, we need to ask our locals to support the campaign and as members, we need to join the campaign. For Los Angeles County social workers in particular, the recent contract campaign was successful because community organizations and other unions supported their cause.
As voters, we need to contact politicians to express our support and insistence that full-time workers cannot continue to live in poverty and that we expect their support of the living or minimum wage initiatives, or we won’t vote to reelect them. As consumers, we need to tell low-wage businesses that we will no longer permit them to utilize public assistance as a subsidy. As community members we need talk to, and enlist, people to volunteer to collect petition signatures and to vote.
Social work is not limited to one month, but is our daily work with others in our communities. It is our collective history and responsibility to improve social conditions because all people matter.
(Thao N. Lam is an Oakland social worker.)
Join us for an afternoon discussion with Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein, the editors of the new book Until the Rulers Obey, on Tuesday, March 4, 2014 from 12:00 – 2:00 PM.
Until the Rulers Obey brings together voices from the movements behind the wave of change that swept Latin America at the turn of the twenty-first century. These movements have galvanized long-silent—or silenced—sectors of society: indigenous people, campesinos, students, the LGBT community, the unemployed, and all those left out of the promised utopia of a globalized economy. They have deployed a wide range of strategies and actions, sometimes building schools or clinics, sometimes occupying factories or fields, sometimes building and occupying political parties to take the reins of the state, and sometimes resisting government policies in order to protect their newfound power in community.
This unique collection of interviews features five dozen leaders and grassroots activists from fifteen countries presenting their work and debating pressing questions of power, organizational forms, and relations with the state. They have mobilized on a wide range of issues: fighting against mines and agribusiness and for living space, rural and urban; for social space won through recognition of language, culture, and equal participation; for community and environmental survival. The book is organized in chapters by country with each chapter introduced by a solidarity activist, writer, or academic with deep knowledge of the place. This indispensable compilation of primary source material gives participants, students, and observers of social movements a chance to learn from their experience.
Contributors include ACOGUATE, Luis Ballesteros, Marc Becker, Margi Clarke, Benjamin Dangl, Mar Daza, Mickey Ellinger, Michael Fox, J. Heyward, Raphael Hoetmer, Hilary Klein, Diego Benegas Loyo, Courtney Martinez, Chuck Morse, Mario A. Murillo, Phil Neff, Fabíola Ortiz dos Santos, Hernán Ouviña, Margot Pepper, Adrienne Pine, Marcy Rein, Christy Rodgers, Clifton Ross, Susan Spronk, Marie Trigona, Jeffery R. Webber, and Raúl Zibechi.
See and hear editor interviews, book reviews, and other news on Clifton Ross’s Page HERE and Marcy Rein’s Page HERE
Join us for a noontime event and discussion with Mtro. Enrique Fuentes Flores from the Universidad Latina de América on Wednesday, Oct 30th at Noon in the Memorial Union Journey Room.
In a nation with many social and political challenges, universities are attempting to provide Mexican society with professionals who can respond to current conditions in responsive, creative new ways.
But what does it mean to have access to higher education in Mexico? How do corruption and unemployment affect the outcome of the efforts made by universities and teachers?
This lecture will focus on the trends of higher education in Mexico, as well as its challenges.
A Peace Studies event, co-sponsored by the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, the School of Language, Culture, and Society, and the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures