Opinion
California regulators can’t relate to living paycheck to paycheck
EWA is a relatively new financial tool that allows workers to access their money as they work.
EWA is a relatively new financial tool that allows workers to access their money as they work.
OPINION: Numbers tell one story of COVID-19’s toll on California nursing homes: Some 9,716 nursing home residents and staff died from the virus, amounting to one in eight COVID deaths statewide. But there’s another story that can’t be told in numbers. It’s the story of what it was like to work in the pandemic’s most dangerous conditions: the stress, the fear, the heartbreak.
OPINION: Much attention has been focused on the barriers and challenges to accessing health care, highlighted by a pandemic that disproportionately harms Black, Latinx, Asian American Pacific Islander, and Indigenous communities. Barriers to technology or lack of broadband impeded access to MyTurn and other scheduling tools. Barriers to transportation made it impossible or difficult for folks to access mega-sites and wait in hours long lines for the vaccine.
A perfect storm of events is giving Gov. Gavin Newsom political headaches, and he is yet again the subject of a recall movement that claims to have already collected more than 800,000 signatures. It marks the sixth attempt by various Republicans to oust Newsom – the other five fizzled. Few veteran political observers give this one any chance of success, either, although California politics is full of surprises.
When Steve Swanson decided to stop accepting cash at his longtime chain of Sacramento area dry cleaning stores, it seemed to make all the sense in the world. “Cash was such a small portion of our operation,” he says. “Some days we might have only a few dollars for a whole day.” But soon he might not have a choice.
OPINION:“OK Boomer” has gained popularity as a sarcastic refrain, but if millennials and all other generations fail to take baby boomers seriously, we will all share in the consequences. The 2020s will be the decade of the baby boomer.
OPINION: Californians know that climate change is here, climate change is real, and climate change is the biggest threat to our planet’s future. Less known but recently more proven is that racist and discriminatory policies of the past, like redlining, have locked in pollution exposure among low-income communities of color and dramatically increased their climate-related risks.
OPINION: It’s been a long time since the United States waged a “war on poverty.” But here in California, a new war is underway. Under the leadership of Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Legislature, our recently enacted state budget confronts our poverty crisis with unprecedented investments in healthcare, preschool, CalWORKS, earned-income tax credits, and expanded juvenile justice and foster care funding and reforms.
OPINION: I believe in the American Dream because I am lucky enough to be the American Dream. And I’m not alone; there are millions of business owners in California and I imagine some of them share my success story.
OPINION: Dear Gov.-elect Newsom: California has long stood out as a state that innovates and leads. As you begin your term, we at the Western Center on Law and Poverty are ready to work with you to ensure that California lives up to its ideals — including addressing poverty and its subsequent harms.