Adam Clare

Rent Strikes Gaining Popularity

the suburbs

Last year a community in Toronto launched a rent strike and won! This initiative to ensure affordable housing (and not being verbally abused by landowners) worked for the involved residents; and similar actions are working in the USA too. Last week in California a ballot initiative for rent control failed, but champions of housing argue that the ballot was merely one idea of many to help people stay in homes (after all, it’s hard for a grassroots movement to fend off a multibillion dollar industry). Over at The Slot they’re running a piece on the history of rent strikes and how they can be effective even if they don’t win in the ballot box.

Altogether, the strike lasted six months, ending in August with an agreement from the landlord to drop all pending eviction cases. In the months since, tenants have continued to organize, including around Prop 10. â€œWe were not comfortable because the conditions of the building are really bad,â€ Camero says. â€œWe donâ€™t get that much money every year in our jobs, and all the money we make is for the rent. So I wondered what we could do to push back against a bad owner. To keep things in control of the tenants.â€

The Burlington strike was one of several launched in Los Angeles since 2016. Sometimes, as in Burlington, they allow tenants to stave off immediate rent hikes or maintain a version of the status quo. But in 2017, after tenants in Boyle Heights (a rapidly gentrifying, historically Latinx neighborhood) went on strike in response to a proposed 80 percent rent increase, they not only avoided eviction but also successfully negotiated collective bargaining rights with their landlord. The building was not rent controlled and the tenants had no clear legal protections; the victory was built on organizing alone.

Things You can do Right Now to Fight Climate Change

a couple, bicycles

With so many reports coming out recently stating that the future of the planet will be decided in the next decade it can feel overwhelming to even try saving the planet. Thankfully there are things you can do right now to save the world from ecological collapse. You can be ambitious or make just tiny changes to your diet: the point is that it all helps and you can start today!

3. Other than that, whatâ€™s the best daily action I can take?

One 2017 study co-authored by Lund Universityâ€™s Nicholas ranked 148 individual actions on climate change according to their impact. Going car-free was the number-one most effective action an individual could take (except not having kids â€“ but more on that on that later). Cars are more polluting compared to other means of transportation like walking, biking or using public transport.

In industrialised countries such as European nations, getting rid of your car can reduce 2.5 tonnes of CO2 â€“ about one-fourth of the average yearly emissions (9.2 tonnes) contributed by each person in developed countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

â€œWe should choose more efficient vehicles and, whenever possible, switch directly to electric vehicles,â€ says Maria Virginia Vilarino, co-author of the mitigation chapter in the IPCCâ€™s latest report.

Even More Evidence Minimum Wage Increases are Good

Interview

The Ontario government recently decided to ensure inequality continues to grow by not raising minimum wage, which is obviously a bad thing. The rationale by the anti-worker Conservative party was that paying people more will ruin the economy. They couldn’t be more wrong. Seattle went through the same debate years ago and the results from there show that their economy benefited from increased wages. The evidence is so good that people who argued against the wage increase have admitted they were wrong. Even the research that opponents used to argue against Seattle’s wage increase was based on bad data and mired in ideological goals.

Let’s hope that other jurisdictions base their decision on evidence instead of ideology.

Seattle, like some other thriving West Coast cities, a few years ago passed an ordinance raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour in a series of steps. The law was a partial response to rising income inequality and poverty in the city, which began its post-crisis economic boom well before the rest of the country.
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The options are to either rethink your ideology or alternatively ignore the data. Most participants seem to have done the latter. Kudos to the University of Washington team for at least trying to incorporate the facts into their latest research.

It’s Time to Argue for Better Modes of Transit

The video above The Guardian explores the costs of subsidizing cars in cities and looks at alternatives to car-focussed design. In the UK Nottingham raised the price of parking to reflect the actual land costs. They then took that increased revenue to spend it on public transportation, which is a more effect way to move people in urban spaces. Which brings us to an important aspect of the video: argue for more efficient transit instead of arguing against the car. Car drivers get really defensive when you tell them they are traffic. It also turns out that in Nottingham the cost of parking didn’t negatively impact business at all.

Swag Bags are a Drag

things

Professional conferences which suffer from being described as boring try to appeal to people using consumerism in the form of a “swag bag”. A swag bag handed out to conference attendees usually contains useless gizmos like stress balls to appeal to a basic human tendency: acquiring stuff. Going to one conference and getting a single swag bag might not seem like much, but when you realize the scope of the swag industry the numbers grow exponentially. This is why people are pushing back and rejecting bags of useless marketing trash.

Ensuring an ethical supply chain and materials with the smallest carbon footprint, of course, tends to increase costs. We see a parallel here with the fast fashion industry, which also focuses on making things as inexpensively as possible, so you can buy a T-shirt for a few bucks at H&M or Forever21. But over the last few years, reporting on these practices has drawn attention to their enormously damaging environmental footprint, which includes producing water pollution, toxic chemicals, and terrible waste. The human impact is just as terrifying: Workers at low-cost factories that make fast fashion products often labor under inhumane conditions, and many have died because of a lack of workplace safety standards.
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We could get rid of cheap swag altogether. What if you left your next conference or trade show without heaps of notepads, pens, and USB drives stuffed in a cheap tote bag, all of which will eventually end up in the trash?