Dec 21, 2016
This year organized labor dodged a bullet when Justice Antonin Scalia’s death left the Supreme Court tied in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. If Scalia had lived, the Court would have decided in Friedrichs that public sector workers cannot be required to pay for the services they receive from the union that represents the employees at their…
Dec 13, 2016
Jimmy Nguyen, candidate for San Jose City Council’s District 8 seat, has requested a manual recount of all the votes cast in the race. In a letter sent to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, Nguyen also asks for the opportunity to see “all rejected vote-by-mail and provisional ballot envelopes, all defective or ‘spoiled’ ballots which were remade by…
Dec 9, 2016
If you heeded the warnings that San Jose City Councilmember Johnny Khamis and the California Restaurant Association (CRA) offered at the Council meeting last Tuesday, you probably rushed out in the last couple of days to buy as much steak as you can before the city’s new minimum wage sends restaurant prices through the roof. That is, unless you’re…
Nov 30, 2016
Yesterday, San Jose City Councilmember-elect Sergio Jimenez was appointed to fill the District 2 vacancy that will be left after Councilmember Ash Kalra heads to the State capitol for his new role as Assembly Member. Kalra, who won California’s 27th Assembly District race will take office in early December, approximately one month before his term as Council Member is up.…
Nov 22, 2016
As The Left Hook predicted based on voting trends, Sylvia Arenas has secured a victory in the race for the San Jose City Council District 8 seat. After nearly two weeks, the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters tallied the last vote, solidifying Arenas’s lead and earning her a place on the City Council. The margin by which Arenas won…
Nov 21, 2016
The neck and neck race for San Jose City Council’s District 8 seat appears to have a winner: Sylvia Arenas. Arenas is currently up 88 votes and with less than 300 votes left to be counted, it is nearly impossible for the results to sway in her opponent’s favor. Since Election Day, the margin between Arenas and Jimmy Nguyen has…
Nov 11, 2016
Bucking the national trend local Labor-backed candidates and measures did extraordinarily well in Tuesday’s election. Here’s a recap: In what was one of the most contested and expensive races in San Jose, Ash Kalra won his bid for Assembly District 27, surpassing his opponent Madison Nguyen by nearly 5,000 votes and counting. Charter schools, a primary funder of Nguyen’s, and…
Nov 2, 2016
As the election campaign enters its final week, many are fatigued, but none so much as Labor Council Political Director David Urhausen, who has been running the South Bay’s largest, most sophisticated field campaign 24×7 for over two months. To his credit, the campaign has contacted well over 100,000 voters, and convinced many of them to support good causes and…
Oct 31, 2016
Most of us know that the Mercury News has a long and shameful history of misusing its role as a critic of sleazy campaign advertisements or mailings. Basically, it expresses outrage at anything that tarnishes its preferred candidates and whitewashes the attacks on those it opposes. Scott Herhold’s recent column on the “nasty shots” of 2016 is one more incident…
Oct 20, 2016
It should come as little surprise that Hillary Clinton is well-positioned to gain California’s fifty-five electoral votes on November 8, given the state’s strong Democrat registration advantage and diverse demographics. In fact, the pollsters at FiveThirtyEight estimate she has a 24.9% lead over Donald Trump, pegging her chances of state victory at 99.9%. If the race for California is already…