California

A group of Uber drivers calling themselves Uber Drivers United staged a protest in San Francisco recently, driving slowly from the former Candlestick Park, to the airport, through the city, and eventually to Uber headquarters while honking their horns and disrupting traffic. The issue for the drivers, most of whom will not release their names, is they are earning less than half of what they earned when they joined the company, meaning that many now earn below the minimum wage.

Over the weekend, bus drivers at Compass Transportation entered the Teamsters union hall in San Leandro, California and voted 75 to 0 to approve a three-year contract. It includes solid raises as well as improved schedules and benefits. The drivers joined Teamsters Local 853 in February and began negotiating the influential deal. Their victory is part of a larger movement — recently coined “Silicon Valley Rising” — in which labor unions, community groups, and churches have improved wages and conditions for the region’s service workers. The nearly 200 bus drivers employed by Compass provide shuttle services to companies such as Apple, eBay, Yahoo, Evernote, Genentech, Zynga, and Amtrak.

FedEx has agreed to settle with over 2,000 past and present California workers who claimed they were misclassified as independent contractors. The $227 million settlement comes amidst a multitiude of long-running legal battles affecting FedEx drivers.

There's trouble brewing in Washington D.C. for American workers. In the coming weeks, our congress will decide whether or not to pass Fast Track legislation that will allow trade deals to be made behind closed doors and without any oversight from the people most impacted: American workers.

The Los Angeles City Council recently approved the Century City Center, a 37-story development project that will become only the sixth LEED Platinum-certified high-rise in the nation. It will be built under a Project Labor Agreement (PLA). The project was delayed by intense scrutiny from critics despite estimates that it will create 6,000 high-quality jobs.

Restore the Delta (RTD), opponents of Governor Jerry Brown's rush to build massive Peripheral Tunnels that would drain the Delta and doom sustainable farms, salmon and other Pacific fisheries, today responded to the prospect of a secret settlement of the debt Westlands Water District owes to US taxpayers and the near extinction presently of Delta Smelt.

The debate over the pros and cons of Proposition 1, Jerry Brown's $7.5 billion water bond, is very important, but an even bigger issue in any environmental battle or process is the money behind the campaign. The big corporate money behind the water bond largely determines who the bond will benefit — billionaires, corporate agribusiness, oil companies and The 1%, not the people, fish or wildlife of California.

Opponents of Proposition 1, the controversial State Water Bond, today blasted Governor Jerry Brown and the measure's backers for taking $850,000 in contributions from big agribusiness donors to pass public funding for water transfers to enrich them – and to enable the biggest dam-building program in California history.

Child refugees from South America have become a hot-button issue. And while many border-abutting states like Texas are taking a hard line, putting up fences and calling in the big guns, California is actually trying to help.

Systemic problems led to the failure of a gas pipeline in San Bruno, California, and a subsequent explosion that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes. The city's mayor has called for the ouster of key officials who negligently avoided fixing the problem at the behest of the energy industry they were supposed to regulate.