Calendar

Sing for an hour on Solano Avenue at the old Oaks Theater, Berkeley.

Berkeley Copwatch meets weekly.

Also check out their “mass copwatching” events.

RSVP here!

Last winter, workers at the Holiday Inn Express Oakland Airport told the City of Oakland that their boss was violating their rights under Measure FF, the new minimum wage law. The City investigated and issued a report identifying a number of alleged violations at the hotel – failing to pay the minimum wage for all hours, “rounding off” time-clock records to shave off time worked, requiring employees to give notice before using sick leave, taking away workers’ accrued vacation time, and other alleged violations.

Then, the following month, the City’s Planning and Building Department gave the owners of the Holiday Inn Express permission to develop a new hotel in downtown Oakland – a Hampton Inn on 11th Street in Chinatown.

“The City assessed a penalty of $5,000 against the Holiday Inn Express – then turned around and gave the hotel’s owners a permit to build a brand new hotel where they can make lots of money. So what reason would any boss have to respect our rights?” said downtown Oakland hotel housekeeper Irma Perez.

The Planning and Building Department wants to ignore the issues of job quality and the impacts of poverty-wage jobs in considering hotel development, but we’re not going to let them! Councilmembers Guillen and Kalb have introduced a City Council resolution calling on the Planning and Building Department to take job quality seriously. The resolution would also begin the process of bringing more public accountability to hotel development decisions.

The City Council’s Community and Economic Development Committee will consider this resolution on Tuesday, April 26th, at 1:00pm. Please attend, and call on the members of the Committee to vote YES for the resolution, for GOOD JOBS IN HOTELS and NO POVERTY-WAGE HOTELS IN OAKLAND!

Please let us know if you can be there, and if you plan to speak.

In solidarity,

UNITE HERE Local 2850

Find out why police are killing more residents. Please pack the community meeting and ask questions of the captain,

Captain Daniel Perea

The Mission Station Commanding Officer holds a district related community meeting on the last Tuesday of each month at 6PM in the community room of the station. 

Join us to fight for a livable wage for all Bay Area workers! We collaborate in principled reflection and action on what the Bay Area livable wage would be and where we are at on the right to a livable wage.

The Oakland Livable Wage Assembly builds Community and Power among those who seek higher wages and better work life conditions for area workers.

Our work together encompasses:

(1) The concerns of precarious, care and contingent workers,
(2) Campaigns to improve wages for low wage workers, and
(3) Efforts by unionized workers and unions to improve wages and quality of work life.

We share stories and information in an egalitarian and participatory way to build relationships and build the movement.

Oakland Livable Wage Assembly meets every 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month, 6:30-8:00 PM at the SEIU Local 1000 Union Hall, 436 14th Street #200, Oakland, CA

Please love and support one another ~ We have a duty to fight ~ We have a duty to win!

olwa.org

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1568668586707336/

 

Hosted by Berkeley Copwatch.
Know Your Rights trainings are tools for learning how to deal with the police, how to safely assert your rights and how to safely and effectively observe the police in your community.

Join us in this workshop at the Grassroots House at 7:00 PM on April 26! This is a free event; bring your bodies and your buddies, as well as questions, concerns, stories, resources.

And in the meantime, check out the Berkeley Copwatch Know Your Rights Pocket Card.

Tell City Council to adopt a REAL Living Wage

Raise Berkeley’s minimum wage to $15 by Oct. 2017
Raise it each year by 3% + inflation until it’s in sync with Berkeley’s official “Living Wage” (now $16.37)
Bring sick leave up to the standards set by Oakland, Emeryville and San Francisco

There is a crisis in Berkeley and the Bay Area.  Rents are out of control and the wage standards are so low families can’t work enough hours to keep their heads above water.  Many are being pushed out of our communities.

Working families need relief now. The good news is some is on the way.   More than enough signatures were submitted last Monday to insure a progressive Berkeley Minimum Wage measure will be on the Ballot in November.

But relief could come sooner if the city council majority stopped stalling and adopted the initiative now. Their inaction and foot dragging has already extracted a heavy toll on Berkeley’s lowest paid workers costing them over $3,500 to date. Instead of joining with the voters of Oakland, SF and the Emeryville City Council, Bates, Capitelli, Droste, Maio, and Moore chose to prolong allowing poverty wages.

As unconscionable as that is they are now lining up to do it again.  Their current proposal will unnecessarily delay getting to $15 several years and will never catch up to Berkeley’s official Living Wage which the city defines as “a wage that can support a family at, or above, the poverty level” currently pegged at $16.37.

SPEAK OUT!

Homes Not Jails is a consensus-based collective of squatters and squat supporters who believe housing is a human right. Our goal is to open as much vacant housing as possible and to keep it open as long as possible. HNJ is a place to organize mutual aid among squatters and squat supporters and housing rights advocates in the bay. We actively fight to make our space inclusive and safe for everybody and combat oppression in all forms.

Vandana Shiva is a physicist, world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, and a tireless crusader for economic, food, and gender justice.

She has just compiled and edited a new book – Seed Sovereignty, Food Security; Women in the Vanguard of the Fight Against GMO’s and Corporate Agriculture – that is an extensive anthology of essays by women from around the globe. They write about the vital struggle to preserve small-scale farming, seed sharing, and local and indigenous knowledge. Seed keepers and community organizers, scientists and activists, mothers and scholars, the women in this collection are dedicated to speaking out against the GMO takeover and advocating for a food system that would truly support the health of our eco-systems, communities, and children.

With contributions by such notable women as Winona LaDuke, Frances Moore Lappe, and Marion Nestle, among others – this anthology dismantles the myths propagated by the GMO industry to reveal the widespread and devastating repercussions of genetic engineering. Highlighting the nightmarish effects of industrial agriculture on both the ecology and the human body, Seed Sovereignty, Food Security is a clear explication, an eloquent protest, and a cry for change.

“Women are not just sowing the seeds of resistance against an agriculture based on monocultures and corporate monopolies, they are sowing the seeds of alternative paradigms of science and alternative agricultural practice.”

“Her fierce intellect and her disarmingly friendly, accessible manner have made her a valuable advocate for people all over the developing world” -Ms. magazine

Hosted by Jeannine Etter

advance tickets: $15 : http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2513607 :: T: 800-838-3006 or Books Inc, Pegasus (3 sites), Moe’s, Walden Pond Bookstore, Diesel a Bookstore, Mrs. Dalloway’s S.F. – Modern Times. $18 door, Benefits KPFA & Navdanya Institute,

Discussion to start at 7pm, potluck precedes. All are welcome.

Representatives [from] … East Bay Housing Organizations, the Oakland Tenants’ Union, the Richmond Progressive Alliance, The Berkeley Progressive Alliance, The Alameda Renters’ Coalition and the Oakland Alliance[will] brief the club and all interested parties on their efforts-how to join, support each other, learn from each other, and to organize region-wide towards long term, state solutions.

Please plan to attend, bring your friends, your organization, if not represented here, such as-small business and artist advocates who currently have few protections against the corporate gentrification of the neighborhoods they have invested in-and get ready to organize with the power of the not-so-silent majority in your cities, towns, counties and at the state house with us.

“Today, Casey and I had court for our arrests at Liberty City. Trial begins April 29, 9 am, room 112.

We want to pack the courtroom. What is at stake is the freedom to protest without government being able to say “that’s not a protest.” We want to challenge the ability of the state to use 647e, illegal lodging, in the commons. The law plainly states “without the permission of the owner” in it. Yet, this law has been used on public property to prevent homeless people from sheltering themselves. This law is used by cities to steal people’s possessions as “evidence of lodging” and once confiscated, are destroyed.”

Birdhouse Art Collective, in conjunction with Open Engagement, will be hosting an interactive, all-day art fair celebrating a variety of arts collectives and other collectively organized, non hierarchical organizations within the Omni Commons and in the Bay Area.

Presentations from within the Omni will include ferrofluid demonstrations from Counter Culture Labs’ monthly event The Art of Science/The Science of Art, a film screening and lens dissection by Liberated Lens, a multimedia installation about the Zapantera Embroidery Project by the Chiapas Support Committee, medicine making demonstrations by Buried Seeds, a demonstration open wireless internet systems by Sudo Room, and a poetry table by small press Timeless Infinite Light. There will also be presentations from the student-run alternative art education program DIY MFA and the art center for artists with disabilities The New Space Studio.

The panel discussion will feature members from local arts collectives including 924 Gilman, Birdhouse Art Collective, Black Salt Collective, Design Action Collective and Qulture Collective. Panel participants will discuss the impact they make in their communities and the ins and outs of starting, running and maintaining an arts collective in our extremely expensive time and place.

The fair will run from 10am to 5pm, with fair booths active from 10am to 3pm and the panel discussion beginning at 3:30pm.

Birdhouse Art Collective is the art collective of the Omni Commons. For more information visit: http://birdhouseartcollective.com/

The Omni Commons is a volunteer-run, horizontally-organized community space comprised of a number of different horizontally organized collectives. For more information about the Omni Commons visit:https://omnicommons.org/

Open Engagement is an annual, three day, artist-led conference dedicated to expanding the dialogue around and creating a site of care for the field of socially engaged art. For more information about Open Engagement visit: http://openengagement.info/

Tomorrow evening, San Francisco Vision will be holding a public forum on police violence against the community. Afterwards, they will march to the Mission Police Station to hold a rally in support of the #Frisco5.

People of San Francisco…enough is enough. Come to a public forum on police violence and how we can bring the SFPD under community control.

Speakers include Sana Saleem, who recently covered the Alex Nieto trial and is following the #HungerforJusticeSF hunger strike for 48 Hills; Father Richard Smith, who will discuss the Amilcar Perez Lopez case, Yayne Abeba from the Mario Woods Coalition, Lisa Marie Alatorre, Human Rights Coordinator at the SF Coalition on Homelessness, and others.

Ray McGovern, Joanna Macy
“Active Hope: Going Forward”

6pm Potluck dinner; music
6:30 Program

Codepink Women for Peace Golden Gate Chapter, BFUU Social Justice Committee, Peaceworkers present:

Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and one of the most respected progressive activists in the United States, talking about the “Panama Papers”, drone warfare, the surveillance state, the CIA, and war criminal/ UC Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo. http://raymcgovern.com/

Keynote: Joanna Macy, beloved author of Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re In Without Going Crazy. http://joannamacy.net/

https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2016/04/19/18785372.php

Also (so far; more to come!): Cecile Pineda, Codepink Women for Peace; Pierre Laboissier, Haiti Action Committee; Tracy Rosenberg, Media Alliance; Berkeley Progressive Alliance; Mike Rufo, Bill of Rights Defense Committee; Linda Seeley, San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace/Shut Diablo Canyon; David Hartsough, Peaceworkers and World Beyond War; Berkeley Peace and Justice Commission; SF Occupy Forum; Standing Up for Racial Justice; Sunflower Alliance; Cynthia Papermaster, No More Guantanamos;  Christopher Macy, Stealth Geoengineering (“Chemtrails”); Jimminywinks and Friends, Barkers Agitating for Reactor Closures; musicians Gwen Winter, Mike Rufo, Francis Collins

This is our second 2016 “Active Hope” event bringing together groups/issues to discuss, strategize, collaborate and celebrate social and environmental justice activism.
Our January 10 event gathered over 100 activists to “get out of our silos and find common cause” to end drone warfare, shut Diablo Canyon and Guantanamo Prison, save our East Bay Forests, elect a progressive Berkeley City Council, demand Police Accountability, stop Crude Oil Trains and Fracking– and this event continues the momentum. Join us for a potluck dinner, great presentations, music, video clips and active hope! You’ll leave energized, inspired and re-committed to activism.

Contact (information, volunteer, make a presentation/perform): Cynthia Papermaster, Codepink Golden Gate, 510-365-1500; cynthia_papermaster@yahoo.com

Join us to gather signatures for our three endorsed ballot initiatives! We’ll do a short training on how to get signatures and then hit the streets. Bring a car if you are able!

We’re working to get these three measures on the ballot:

From the Coalition for Police Accountability: Measure X turns the current Citizens’ Police Review Board into a Police Commission that has power to approve police policies and discipline officers who are found guilty of misconduct.

From the Oakland Tenants Union: Oakland’s “Renters Upgrade” would expand Oakland’s current “Just Cause for Eviction” law and provide greater ability for the city to enforce existing laws amidst a wave of unfair evictions and widespread harassment as demand for housing in Oakland grows.

From Oakland Livable Wage Assembly: A Minimum Wage/Fair Scheduling ordinance that will raise Oakland’s minimum wage to $14/hr in 2016 and $20/hr by 2020, as well as implement fair scheduling similar to San Francisco’s recent ordinance and mandate enforcement of both.

These three measures represent a people’s legislative agenda, enacted through direct democracy at the ballot box. The Oakland Justice Coalition invites anyone who is concerned about Oakland’s housing crisis, police repression of communities of color and rampant income inequality to join us in building a grassroots movement for social, racial, economic and environmental justice.