Labor
Oakland has spent almost $2.9 million to date to defend a wrongful termination lawsuit brought by former police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick. A federal jury last Saturday, finding the city had no grounds to fire Kirkpatrick, awarded her $337,645 in damages — an amount equal to a year’s compensation. Ryan Richardson, Oakland special counsel, said the award was “equivalent of the one-year severance the City was ready and willing to pay when she was terminated in 2020.” According to an expense…
More than 40,000 Kaiser employees and members of three local unions walked out at 21 Kaiser hospitals across Northern California on Thursday in support of striking stationary engineers. On Friday, the California Nurses Association will follow suit. “Every single worker in our health care system, including the engineers who are on strike, deserve to have fair working conditions and a union contract,” said Oakland City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas, who came to show solidarity with the International Union of…
As the strike of stationary and biomedical engineers stretched into a 36th day, the union and employer Kaiser Permanente engaged in mediation Friday that ended without an agreement. The International Union of Operating Engineers Local 39 told members around 5:30 p.m. that the session had ended with little headway made. While the sides agreed to continue with the federal mediator, a new session has not yet been scheduled. A day earlier, outside Kaiser Permanente headquarters in Oakland, striking hospital employees…
Oakland’s labor unions say they should have been involved in a draft mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy that would apply to the city’s 4,500 or so employees as a condition of employment. “Unions aren’t against vaccines at all,” said Elizabeth Ortega, executive director of the Alameda Labor Council. “But we do want to stay at the table.” Ortega said that the 135 unions that ALC represents received notice of the mandate only a few hours before the draft was released. She…
Nurses and healthcare workers at Highland Hospital in Oakland, joined by nurses at two other hospitals in Alameda county, will go on strike for five days beginning Wednesday, Oct. 7 to protest what they’re calling unfair labor practices by the Alameda Health System (AHS) management.
2019 brought a new group of student reporters to Oakland North from across the country and the globe. We covered a city that is always changing, but where tensions about city finances, policing, housing and the fate of the public schools run deep. We also produced three new episodes of our Tales of Two Cities podcast, which covers audio stories from Oakland and Richmond in collaboration with our sister site, Richmond Confidential. Click here to check out all episodes of the Tales of…
Journalists hold a rally to denounce what they say are a decline in working conditions at The East Bay Times, San Jose Mercury News and Monterey Herald as a consequence of nearly a decade of ownership under MediaNews Group and its hedge fund owner, Alden Global Capital.
Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Irvine released a study last month regarding an Oakland Unified School District program focused on boosting achievement for Black male students. The study showed that the program has led to an increase in graduation and retention rates among participating students over the last dozen years.
Nearly 100 people—mostly formerly incarcerated people—graduated from BOSS’s Career Training and Employment Center this year.