ReWork the Bay envisions a Bay Area economy that centers the voices, power and needs of working people. We believe it should be possible for everyone to live full lives with security, dignity and agency in our work, home and communities.

We are so grateful to our Equity at Work Council, leaders actively working to make that a reality. They drive ReWork the Bay’s programmatic strategy, generate policy and systems change recommendations, and model deep cross-sector collaboration. It is a deep honor to build with them.

As a new Equity at Work Council cohort begins, we thank our alumni for all of their contributions: Andrea Dehlendorf of United for Respect, Eric Flores of California Workforce Association, Kris Stadelman of NOVAworks and Lisa Countryman-Quiroz of JVS.

In this newsletter, we take a moment to recap a few of our successes for 2021. But first, I would be remiss to not take a moment to honor the late bell hooks, who once said:
“To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”

Shared prosperity is everyone’s job. We look forward to continuing to do this work with you in 2022.

-bell hooks

In Solidarity,
Rob and Kayla

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“Cash Crops” is a new series of work by Bay Area artist Cheryl Derricotte that considers the six major American agricultural crops that motivated the transatlantic slave trade from the 1600’s to the 1800’s – tobacco, sugar cane, cotton, rice, coffee and wheat – and the enduring role they play in today’s world. The history of American cash cropping is considered a parallel account of our nation’s economic might and racial inequity. Cash crops were instrumental in building the American economy despite being excruciatingly labor-intensive to produce. Visit re.riddle gallery

As we move into the season of gratitude, I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you who take an interest in how ReWork the Bay strives to envision an equitable Bay Area where everyone has access to quality, empowered jobs that allow them to benefit from and shape the region’s growing economy.

We believe envisioning an equitable future requires imagination and creativity, and it also demands a truthful understanding of our past. One way ReWork helps bring that understanding to our partners in philanthropy is through our Racial Capitalism Community of Practice (CoP).

What is Racial Capitalism?

The term “racial capitalism” is a concept originally proposed by Oakland-born Black political scientist Cedric J. Robinson to describe the extractive way America’s capitalist economy derives social and economic value from another person of a different racial identity. If you would like to take a deep dive on the way the American economy was designed, take a look at this interactive timeline, “To what extent was our economy designed to be fair?” by Take on Wall Street.

Our Community of Practice, a partnership of ReWork, Liberation in a Generation and Christina Garcia Consulting, offers grantmakers an opportunity to learn about the ways racial capitalism has created our current conditions, and take concrete actions to contest its’ influence in their work. Over the course of 6 months, participants:

• Reflect on racial capitalism, how it impacts and shows up in grantmaking, with grantees, and in the community.
• Explore why and how racial capitalism matters in advancing toward an inclusive economy, and how a deeper understanding of the principles can inform more community-centered grantmaking practices and transformative funding strategy.
• Translate knowledge and intention into action through projects tailored to each individual philanthropic institution.

Building on the success of our first Bay Area cohort, we are now partnering with Funders for A Just Economy at Neighborhood Funders Group to bring the program to their national funder audience–that cohort just kicked off this week!

If you are a funder (or know one) with an interest in and commitment to increasing their awareness and practice of anti-racism in solidarity with communities of color, please reach out to me to connect on joining ReWork the Bay. We will be offering our members another Bay Area Community of Practice cohort in Spring 2022. It’s going to take all of us to make much needed change!

I hope you are all able to enjoy your friends and family as we start the holiday season.

Rob Hope

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We are proud to uplift the work important work being done by Equity at Work Council member, the California Domestic Workers Coalition. On September 27, 2021, SB 321, the Heath and Safety for All Workers Act was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom. SB 321, which was co-sponsored by the CA Domestic Workers Coalition. It creates guidelines- for the first time- for the health and safety of domestic workers in California. Domestic workers, a group of over 300,000 workers mainly comprised of immigrants and women of color, were excluded from the California Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1973, and now the exclusion of these workers from Cal/OSHA protections can come to an end.

They aren’t stopping there.

On October 26, the CA Domestic Workers Coalition will be launching its “Access to Paid Time Off” campaign in San Francisco. You can learn more at this event and join the CA Domestic Workers Coalition in introducing the San Francisco Access to Paid Time Off ordinance. This ordinance would create a portable benefits system that would allow domestic workers to accrue sick time and paid time off from all their different employers. While domestic workers are legally entitled to paid sick leave, they have not been able to access this right. The ordinance will serve as a necessary first step for San Francisco to guarantee domestic workers the safety net benefits that they deserve and that other workforces in the city already enjoy.

Protecting workers has to be a priority for lawmakers. In this month’s newsletter, we highlight Governor Newsom’s signing of AB 701, a bill written by Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), in the article ‘We’re Going to Protect Workers” in Community Updates. Gonzalez says of this bill, “This is a first step. We’ve got to do more.” And, we do. Congrats on this amazing achievement, CA Domestic Workers Coalition!

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Workers at Popular Chinatown Restaurant Win $1.61 Million in Massive Wage Theft Settlement Twenty-two restaurant workers were served a slice of justice as they fought for and won a three-year battle for a settlement to recover stolen wages, tips, penalties, and interest owed to them by Z & Y Restaurant.

This is a major victory for many reasons, but most notably because it brings heightened awareness to a practice of undercutting and exploiting immigrants and black and brown workers with seemingly no expectation of consequence. This settlement is a step in the right direction toward ensuring accountability and fair and equitable treatment of people that supported us as essential workers through the pandemic, at the risk of their own health and wellness.

The hospitality industry has largely rejected the notion of labor unions for years, even though these are the very organizations that may have offered protections for the workers in this scenario. As a result worker centers were created and have been instrumental in winning rights and raising standards for workers employed in low-wage industries. I encourage you to visit the link below to learn more about the history of Worker Centers and the powerful impact they continue to make.

We are proud of the role the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA). played in this enormous victory. CPA, a member of ReWork the Bay’s Equity at Work Council, is a nonprofit organization that has remained committed to the empowerment and education of the low-income and working-class immigrant community in San Francisco since the 1970s. CPA’s Tenant Worker Center programs include wage theft case support, hospitality job training program, community education and outreach, grassroots leadership development, and policy advocacy.

Read more about Worker Centers here:
Worker Centers: Past, Present, and Future by Laine Romero-Alston, Sarita Gupta

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The past 18 months have called for people, organizations and systems to focus onresponding….to changing health guidance, urgent community needs, rapid unemployment, re-employment, wildfires, toxic air, rolling blackouts, water shortages, the list goes on.

Now, as the state and federal government are poised to invest generational sums of money to kickstart the economy, modernize education and infrastructure, many of us in philanthropy, public systems and community organizations are turning our attention to responding to these funding opportunities, desperate to not miss out on leveraging public dollars to benefit our communities.

At ReWork the Bay we are grappling with a fundamental question:

When is the time to shift our focus from responding to preparing?
Because while we have unquestionably endured what feels like a perfect storm of societal and economic challenges in 2020-21, the reality is that wildfires, droughts, and rolling blackouts now happen nearly every year; never in history has the U.S. gone more than eleven years without a recession; and if our inability as a country to effectively manage COVID is any indication, pandemics are likely to become a much more common occurrence.

In the video above, Equity at Work Council’s North Bay Jobs with Justice helps bring awareness to the significant challenges faced by the Indigenous, Latinx and undocumented farmworkers that rely on the wages earned during the Sonoma County grape harvest season to support themselves and their families. Perilously, the harvest season now coincides with California’s now annual fire season, exposing this community of workers to significant physical and economic vulnerabilities.

If we know all of these challenges are coming back around, whether it be in 12 months or 10 years, what prevents us from planning for the next one, rather than just continuing to respond to our current challenges? How much better organized and coordinated could we be to respond next time, if we used some of the energy and resources that are being mobilized today to prepare for tomorrow? Can we move from rapid response to proactive preparation?

To be clear, we are not talking about those communities on the frontlines who take the brunt of these challenges–we see their heroic efforts to keep critical systems online, keep their residents fed and housed, healthy and safe. But as a region, as a movement, can we take stock of the infrastructure we wish we would have had to better respond to the many challenges of 2021-22, and start building them now, for next time?

Below is an opportunity to take action by signing a petition in support of farmworkers on the frontlines, learn more about the impact of the wildfires on farmworkers, and check out a jobs plan that offers practical solutions to start preparing for tomorrow’s challenges, rather than just responding to today’s.

Sign the Petition: Farmworkers Deserve Safety and Respect in Sonoma County by North Bay Jobs with Justice, an Equity at Work Council member.

Graphic via North Bay Jobs with Justice

• California Climate Jobs Plan in partnership with Jobs with Justice SF, an Equity Work Council Member
• ‘We’re not animals, we’re human beings’: US farm workers labor in deadly heat with few protections by Michael Sainato
• Wildfire smoke linked to thousands of coronavirus cases on West Coast by Kurtis Alexander [Paywall]

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The past 18 months have called for people, organizations and systems to focus onresponding….to changing health guidance, urgent community needs, rapid unemployment, re-employment, wildfires, toxic air, rolling blackouts, water shortages, the list goes on.

Now, as the state and federal government are poised to invest generational sums of money to kickstart the economy, modernize education and infrastructure, many of us in philanthropy, public systems and community organizations are turning our attention to responding to these funding opportunities, desperate to not miss out on leveraging public dollars to benefit our communities.

At ReWork the Bay we are grappling with a fundamental question:

As organizations begin inviting office workers back to their desks, and we look to put the pandemic in the rearview mirror, many people and corporations will also seek to put the racial “reckoning” that coincided with the pandemic behind them–perhaps punctuated with a celebration of Juneteenth being recognized as a Federal holiday. But now is not the time to move on.

No, now is the time to practice resolve in holding on to the lessons learned as a nation in 2020, and to ensure that commitments made are not broken. As it relates to work, this includes not taking corporate commitments to racial justice at face value–we need to pay attention to whether those huge financial commitments to racial equity grants are happening (spoiler alert: early signs are that they are not).

We also need to press industry leaders to go beyond grantmaking. Business practice change is where the real impact is when it comes to racial justice. For example, in the Tech sector, are companies actually hiring black people, or just talking about it? And are venture capitalists actually funding black entrepreneurs? Again, the data isn’t promising.

Relatedly, are employers considering the benefits of remote work through a racial justice lens, and using the return to work to make changes toward a more inclusive office culture that facilitates greater participation and advancement of women and people of color?

And finally, can those of us for whom returning to an office is now a primary topic of conversation, not forget that so many workers-predominately people of color and women- won’t be returning to an office? For them, there is no “return to work” because they never stopped going to their job sites to do “essential” work that has kept our communities running.

Please join us in committing to not lose sight of the many important lessons we’ve learned during the past 16 months. Instead, let’s keep them front and center, and use them as fuel to advance toward real racial justice. Here are some resources to get started:

• A People’s Orientation to a Regenerative Economy by United Frontline Table
• Don’t be fooled by corporate commitments to racial equity by Caitlin Morelli
• Return to Office? Some Women of Color Aren’t Ready by Ruchika Tulshyan [NYT Paywall]
• In a year of tragedy, injustice, and upheaval, have we seen progress in the quest for racial justice in technology? by Kapor Center
• ‘The spirit of our ancestry’: how California’s Black Wall Streets are changing their cities by Abené Clayton

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“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”

In May, we were proud to release the culmination of extensive research collected over the last two years aimed at understanding how to create a more worker-centered future. This report, a collective product of ReWork the Bay, Jobs With Justice SFand Working Partnerships USA synthesizes insights and perspectives from worker organizations, workforce development and philanthropy leaders, and offers action-oriented recommendations. We invite you to explorePower is at the Root: How Funders and Workforce Leaders Can Center Workers in the “Future of Work”.

Last week we brought together leaders and workers to discuss the report and reflect on how it ties to their efforts. During the program, Tim Rainey, Executive Director of the California Workforce Development Board, reminded us of a saying he heard from his grandfather: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”

Now is the time to invite workers to the table to have a greater say in the decisions that impact them and their families.

• Center workers as decision-makers
• Forge a racially just future as essential to building worker power
• Build collective power
• Focus on the changes most affecting people’s lives (Hint: it’s not automation)
• Shape technology to serve people

“The future of work is not a question of technology,” said Kung Feng, Executive Director of Jobs with Justice San Francisco. “It needs to be a visionary question, a question of what we think is a good future: a future where work meets our societal needs for public health, caring for children or climate resilience, where all people can achieve their full potential and agency at work and where the value of work is shared by all.”

I encourage you to check out the report and thePower is at the Root webinar, and let us know what you think. Below, you’ll find links to articles that offer additional examples of the challenges we face and the innovative solutions workers are leading. I’d love to hear from you as we continue to reshape the Bay Area workforce to benefit us all.

• The Gig Economy’s Business Model Is a Racial Justice Issue by Edward Ongweso, Jr
• The future of elder care is here – and it’s artificial intelligence by Zoe Corbyn
• Special Delivery: Our New Report Shows How Local Delivery Services are Superior to the Big Apps by Susan Holmberg and Kennedy Smith

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By now, many of you have seen the stories claiming people aren’t working because they’re making more on unemployment. We’ve seen signs on stores that have said things like, “We can’t open because no one wants to work.”

However, that’s the wrong angle and not the whole story. I wanted to share a story about employees at Dollar General in Maine. Berndt Erikson has worked at Dollar General since last June, making $13.25 an hour. According to the Living Wage Calculatorcreated by MIT, Erikson, who is supporting her brother who has been out of work due to a health condition since before the pandemic, needs to make $23.88/hour to support her family – more than double what she was getting paid. Dollar General made $8B in revenue in 2021 and the CEO made $12M in salary and incentives in 2019. Think about that.

And it’s not just about pay. Other workers speaking out through storefront signs cite safety concerns related to COVID, fatigue over being yelled at by belligerent customers, overly burdensome hiring processes and lack of benefits.

We’ve said that we can’t return to ‘normal’, because the old ‘normal’ didn’t work for everyone. We’ve called frontline workers “heroes” and “essential”. Now that the recovery is beginning, it’s time to walk our talk.

That means no longer accepting the argument that businesses large and small will always have to rely on workers enduring unsustainable, unsafe, and unhealthy jobs. Whether they be in rideshare, fast food, child care or retail, business models that depend on exploiting people are broken, and will always be an obstacle to thriving communities.

People want to work, they want to feel good about the work that they do, and they deserve to be treated respectfully and fairly compensated for their work.

Read on for examples of businesses doing the right thing, and resources for business, philanthropy and workforce development to help shape a people-centered future.

I would love to hear what you think! Please hit reply to send me a message. I’d also appreciate if you would forward this newsletter on to your network and encourage them to sign up to receive the next one.

In Solidarity,
Rob Hope

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The Fight for $44?

On the national stage, many advocates are calling for an increase in the federal minimum wage from $7.25/hour to $15/hour. Yet we know, in the Bay Area, even $15/hour is far from a living wage. In fact, according to the Family Needs Calculator, the living wage in the Bay Area for a single adult with a pre-school age child ranges from $24/hour in Solano County to $51/hour in San Francisco and San Mateo Counties.

Rarely do we hear calls for a local minimum wage that comes close to what it costs to live in the Bay Area, perhaps because it seems unrealistic, or out of reach. Yet if as a society we had chosen to tie the federal minimum wage to the growth of Wall Street bonuses since 1985, the current minimum wage would be $44/hour!That of course has not been the case. As compensation for the highest paid has skyrocketed in the last 40 years, it has stagnated for the vast majority of workers. Those in our society with economic and political power have opted to enact policies that widen, rather than close, economic disparities.

Tax policy is a prime example of policy choices that privilege the wealthy few over the increasingly struggling many, and corporate profits over popular prosperity. Corporate tax cuts resulted in55 large companies paying no federal corporate taxes last yeardespite earning substantial profits. This adds up to $12 billion of lost revenue that could have paid for public services and infrastructure that is not only critical to communities, but enables these same companies to earn their profits. We are told that corporate tax breaks trickle down and result in more jobs and higher incomes, but we’ve seen the opposite. The only incomes that continue to grow rapidly are those of the wealthy.

Yet, as some businesses seek to maximize profits at every turn, other businesses see how their workers and the communities they operate in are struggling to survive, and are taking bold steps to be a part of the solution. For example, during the pandemic Graton Resort and Casino voluntarily increased their workers hourly pay by a minimum of between $2.50 and $3.25. And restauranteurs like Reem Assil and the Oakland Bloom Collective are experimenting with worker-owned models as a more equitable alternativeto the traditional restaurant business model.

While reforming corporate tax policy is an important step, we also need to lift up and celebrate those entrepreneurs, small businesses and corporations who are going above and beyond to reimagine the role of business in an equitable and inclusive society.

Those who are as concerned with shared prosperity as they are with maximizing profits and building personal wealth; those who are willing to do more than issue public statements and commitments with no accountability for follow through; and those who go beyond giving away grant dollars to community organizations fighting the symptoms of an inequitable society, to address the ways their business may be contributing to the root causes of those problems in the first place.

Do you know of businesses in your community who fit this profile? We’d love to hear about them and share their stories. Email me by clicking below.

EMAIL ROB

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Photo courtesy of Oakland Rising, a foundation grantee.

Mixed teams and mixed leadership

This month ReWork the Bay’s partner Stephen Bediako OBE of Turning Basin Labsand the Path Groupshares learnings on how inclusive teams develop inclusive solutions.

As 2021 comes in to play, we need to be honest with ourselves. 2020 was a year that challenged, traumatized, and took loved ones. For those left behind, 2020 provided resilience and scars. It was also the culmination of approximately 40 years of a neo-liberal economic model that has dominated our socio-economic development strategies.

Today, COVID-19 has shined a light on a myriad of unintended consequences of these policies: inequality, social division, low trust in authority, a focus on identity, and much more.

In my work with colleagues, we’ve pursued a strategy we describe as “Mixed Teams and Mixed Leadership.” What this means is valuing the insight and expertise of life experiences and different stories that drive our society, equally with learned, academic and professional expertise…

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