In what has become a years-long saga pitting the Woodfin Hotel in Emeryville against its workers, the hotel has again defied an Emeryville City Council order to pay back wages, workers’ advocates say.

In 2006, hotel employees first charged the Woodfin with defying a city-wide living wage ordinance. Measure C, approved by Emeryville voters in November 2005 and put into effect that December, set guidelines for low wage work in the city. Among these guidelines was a limit to the workloads assigned to hotel attendants, or housekeepers. According to the ordinance, these workers were to be paid time-and-a-half were they to clean more than 5,000 square feet of room space in an 8-hour work day. At the Woodfin, this square footage would have been equal to nine or ten hotel suites.

But workers have charged that for nearly a year, the hotel did not comply, and they continued to clean around 17 suites per day. They are now demanding back wages for the work they say exceeded the ordinance’s limits.

“We didn’t know about the law,” says Maria Martinez, who has worked at the Woodfin for eight years. All the workers involved, she says, are immigrant women. “Nobody told us. Only when people from EBASE came to tell us, that’s when we found out.”

The East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, an Oakland-based community organization advocating for low-wage workers in the area, has taken on the case.

“This isn’t charity; it’s not a gift,” says Brooke Anderson, the deputy director of EBASE, “It’s money earned by their own sweat and their own backache.”

With the support of EBASE and other community and legal aid groups, the workers approached the City Council and simultaneously filed a lawsuit for back wages against the hotel chain in September of 2006.

After investigating, the City Council ordered the hotel to pay $200,000 in back wages in 2007. The hotel  challenged the Council’s order in Alameda County Superior Court. In 2008, the court upheld the validity of Measure C, while ordering the City Council to redo the hearing process in order to guarantee the hotel its right to due process.

In the latest turn of events following the court decision, the City Council revisited the case, holding a series of hearings between November and January. At these hearings, the hotel challenged the order on several grounds, including the argument that room inspectors, or supervisors, conducted room cleaning as part of their jobs, and that therefore the hotel’s “team approach” rendered the Councils’ calculations of housekeepers’ workload, and corresponding back wages, inaccurate.

After an in-depth audit of the hotel’s records and workers’ time sheets, the Council rejected the hotel’s argument. At the last hearing on January 15, the Council issued its second order to the hotel to pay up.  Hotel officials were told to pay workers by March 31, and to provide the city with proof that the back wages had been paid by April 15.

April 15 came and went, and the hotel did neither.

Tim Rosales, spokesperson for Woodfin, says that the hotel has not complied because it continues to disagree with the Council’s decision and will be appealing the order again through the courts. The City Council, says Rosales, is in no place to judge the hotel’s cleaning practices, nor the measurement of square footage, since they are not specialists in the industry.

The hotel was also not satisfied with the fairness of the second round of hearings. “It was a huge waste of taxpayer money,” says Rosales, explaining that the hotel saw no difference between these hearings and the previous ones that the court had ruled inadequate.

But workers and their advocates are getting increasingly frustrated with the hotel’s defiance. “This is the second time the City Council has ordered Woodfin to pay,” Anderson says. “We know for a fact that they’ve thrown twice as much money into lawsuits than they would have had to pay workers.”

While the hotel is currently in compliance with Measure C, Rosales says that there is cause for broader concern arising from the living wage ordinance, saying that with increased operating costs such as bookkeeping called for by the law’s regulations, the measure is seen by many in the local hotel industry as a “hinderance to development.”

“With the economy now,” says Rosales, “Businesses are leaving the city. As long as the measure is on the books, hotels will be very reluctant to do business in Emeryville.” And when they see another business such as the Woodfin “dragged through the mud,” he says, hotels will think twice about doing business in the city.

But for Martinez, a mother of four who lives in Richmond, the $12,000 she says Woodfin owes her trumps considerations of a city’s economic development. At times, she says, the fight for back wages has turned ugly for these immigrant workers.

“They said that because there was a lot of people working illegally, that they didn’t have any rights,” says Martinez, speaking of some of the hotel managers’ references to the workers’ immigration status. According to Martinez, many workers have been fired since the conflict erupted, and their immigration status has been the primary excuse. “If someone defended themselves, or stood up for their rights,” she says, “they looked for an excuse to get rid of them. A lot of people have been fired for defending themselves.”

A month after the initial lawsuit was filed in 2006, workers received “no match” letters from the Social Security Administration informing them that the social security number and name they had provided did not match. Ordinarily sent out as courtesy to workers in the case of an administrative error or typo, the letter states that receiving the notice is not an indication of immigration status and that taking action against a worker would put the company in legal liability. Regardless, Anderson, of EBASE, says that 10 days before Christmas, 12 workers were fired and were only rehired after an injunction was put into place by a judge.

In spite of these challenges, Martinez is hopeful.

“We will win,” she says, adding that she is grateful for the community support the workers have received.

“We have to know how to defend ourselves. And they have to know that just because someone’s an immigrant, they can’t do with them what they want.”

A congregation of look-alike Andy Warhols is not something that happens often. But on Friday March 6, in an Emeryville warehouse that reproduced the 1960s’ dark, industrial-driven art scene fathered by Warhol, the Third Annual Amoeba Art Show took place.

The Factory Party.

More than 60 artists showed their paintings, sculptures, installations, films, photographs and other mediums/works. And yes, there were also the Velvet Underground look-alikes, playing classic songs like Venus in Furs, Heroin, and Pale Blue Eyes in a huge, cold-concrete wing of the place, evoking the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Warhol’s multimedia road show.

It was still early; the labyrinthian depot was staring to get packed, seven or eight rooms transformed into galleries, food and beverage flowing and Christa Päffgen’s (Nico) voice in the background; like a sonorous fog covering everyone. The atmosphere conjured an artistic scene known for exploding in a promiscuous, heroin-nourished creative feast. And it was all very similar, except there were no needles passing around.

Later on, when the Nihilist Outlook & Grace (one of the two Velvet Underground cover bands that performed) was playing, the art show became a secondary thing; the Velvet Underground’s covers were flooding the main room, a bunch of eyes were closed and everyone singing.

“I guess that I’ll be the closest I’ll get to Andy Warhol’s idea of a party and his 1960s New York City Factory,” said one of the attendees, who had Fando & Lis’ (the first feature-length film by Alejandro Jodorowsky) spider woman tattooed in his chest. Very impressive.

One of the installations, the proliferation of fungal mycelia, created by Bruce Anderson, Dale Sophiea and Curtis Tamm, was a small tunnel made out of plastic garbage bags that finished in a warmed little room with natural grass and small tree stumps to sit on. The front wall had two screens just spitting nature images, 10 or more per second, very experimental. Grass disco balls hung from the ceiling — a fixture of intertwined ideas about nature and technology through art.

Amoeba Music, the East Bay Express, OFFSpace and contributing sponsor the de Young Museum teamed up to create a Peel Slowly and See session of art, music, and the artistic spirit of a character that defined a good part of today’s pop culture.

February 14 is the day for pink teddy bears, roses, and chocolate hearts. But for some homeowners and tenants in Emeryville and the East Bay, “there’s not a lot of heart out there right now.”

That’s the message expressed by Wanda Remmers, the executive director and fair housing specialist at Housing Rights Inc., at a recent foreclosure intervention workshop held in the Emeryville Senior Center. The workshop, sponsored by the Emeryville Redevelopment Agency, was one in a series meant to educate homeowners and tenants about their rights in the case of foreclosure.

With about a dozen attendees, various housing advocates provided information and counseling to those facing possible mortgage payment default or foreclosure.

On the top of the list was the issue of  “loan rescue” scams targeting afflicted homeowners throughout the area. These scams include agencies or individuals who claim they can “modify” a mortgage and bring down the payments, who say they can fix a defaulter’s credit, who convince homeowners to file for bankruptcy, and, in some cases, who convince homeowners to turn the title over, essentially giving the house away with the idea that someday they will be able to buy it back.

In most cases, the advocates said, these agencies do nothing for the people who fork over the cash. Often a “modified” mortgage is simply yet another bad loan. In some cases the payments under these modified loans are even higher than the original ones.

Many of these “loan rescue” agents, said Maria Benjamin of the Community Housing Development Corporation, are former mortgage brokers or real estate agents who no longer have work and simply “turn their hats around” to become mortgage modifiers and credit wizards.

Lisa Sitkin, a staff attorney for Housing and Economic Rights Advocates, an Oakland-based organization that takes on foreclosure cases, recalled the case of a woman with a mortgage she could not possibly pay back. The woman went into default and then paid $995 to an agency that claimed they could help her keep her house. Yet when HERA called the bank, they had no record of the “rescuer” even calling.

According to Sitkin, it is illegal to charge an advance fee for these “loan rescue” services. In rare cases, if the homeowner has not yet defaulted, these agencies or individuals may charge a fee up front, but must first register with the Department of Real Estate of California. So it is wise for those seeking help to ask if the agency is DRE certified.

A timeline of the California foreclosure process was also outlined, including day limits and legally required notices. In a worst case scenario, said Sitkin, it may take as little as five months from the time a notice of default is recorded with the county to the time a foreclosed property is sold.

Tenants
While much attention is given to homeowners affected by the mortgage crisis, tenants living in foreclosed properties are likewise feeling the brunt. In her presentation, Remmers outlined the rights of tenants in these situations.

In San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley (not, however, in Emeryville) there are “just cause” laws in which a tenant can only be evicted for reasons such as not paying rent or damaging property. Section 8 and other subsidized housing tenants are also protected by these laws. In other words, they cannot be forcefully evicted from their homes even if the property is foreclosed. In these cases, Remmers said, tenants may be in a position to negotiate “cash for keys,” or a compensation for leaving the property. If a tenant is not protected by “just cause” laws (as is the case in Emeryville), then the bank or new owner must give the tenant 60 days notice to leave the property.

Counseling
Five people received foreclosure intervention counseling during the workshop. One had received a notice of default, and others were borrowers whose interest rates had or were about to spike up, or were simply in danger of defaulting on their mortgage payments.

This was the case for Ruth, an Emeryville resident who requested that her last name be withheld.  Holding a stuffed manila envelope close to her chest, Ruth explained that she had taken out an “interest only” loan that was set to “balloon” in March. She estimated her new payments would increase by about $500 a month. Though her credit union had initially agreed to lower her interest rate, they later reneged on the offer, she said. The counseling was “very helpful,” she said, and she said she was hopeful that one of the advocacy agencies would be able to negotiate with the credit union on her behalf.

Unlike agencies that charge for mortgage help, HERA and CHDC, the organizations that did the free counseling, are foreclosure counseling agencies approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Both organizations are overwhelmed with cases. Benjamin, from the CHDC, said that it currently takes an average of 10 days to set a counseling appointment after receiving all the necessary documentation.

And there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. In fact, the flow of homeowners seeking help is growing. At the HERA offices, a new population has only recently begun to walk through the doors: furloughed state employees. Sitkin recently counseled a woman who worked at the Department of Education, and was afraid she would be unable to make her mortgage payments now that her work hours had been cut.

“It’s rippling,” said Sitkin of the housing crisis. Beyond victims of subprime mortgages, the recession seems to be catching up with others who only months ago were in the clear.

In the face of the deepening recession, the agencies are — like most of the country — holding their breath that the benefits of a federal stimulus package will trickle down to their neck of the woods. Somewhere in the “tax cuts versus public spending” debate that grips Capitol Hill is the proposal that a portion of stimulus money go to HUD-approved foreclosure counseling programs such as these.

Whether that money will make its way to Emeryville is yet to be seen.

Location: Emeryville Senior Center
4321 Salem Street
Emeryville, CA 94608 Related Site
Phone: (510) 596-4316 Current Weather
Map/Directions

PREDATORY LENDING PREVENTION AND FORECLOSURE INTERVENTION WORKSHOP

Saturday, February 14, 2009
9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Emeryville Senior Center
4321 Salem Street, Emeryville
Sponsored by the Emeryville Redevelopment Agency

Come get information about how to avoid predatory loans, what to do if you are having difficulty making your mortgage payments or are facing foreclosure, and what your rights are if you are a tenant being displaced due to foreclosure.

PANEL PARTICIPANTS:

–Nora Davis, City of Emeryville City Council
–Maria Benjamin, Community Housing Development Corporation
–Maeve Elise Brown, Housing & Economic Rights Advocates
–Wanda Remmers, Housing Rights
–Kevin Stein, California Reinvestment Coalition

HUD-certified housing counseling agency staff will also be available to provide assistance.

For more information, contact Janet Anderson at janderson@emeryville.org or 510-596-4316.

FREE AND OPEN TO ALL; NO REGISTRATION REQUIRED. ALL ARE WELCOME!

Sponsored by the Emeryville Redevelopment Agency

katy cryer
squareoneyogacollective.com
4336-A san pablo ave. emeryville ca. 94608
510 . 547. 9700
415 . 652 . 8229/cell

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/south_bay&id=6500810&status=ok

By Cecilia Vega

EMERYVILLE, CA (KGO) — One East Bay mayor is refusing to pay his business license tax. It’s an important source of revenue for any city, but the Emeryville mayor has a reason for not paying — one that many people around the Bay Area understand all too well.

Mayor Ken Bukowoski opposed Emeryville’s business tax license when it came before the city council four years ago.

“I do think it should be changed,” said Mayor Bukowski.

Channel 7 got this story from the Secret News:

http://e-villenews.blogspot.com/

Channel 7 Picks Up Secret News Story About Emeryville Mayor
Channel 7 Reports Mayor Failed to Pay Business Tax

One of the top stories on Channel 7 ABC Eyewitness News at 6 p.m. last night was Mayor Ken Bukowski’s failure to pay business tax on his Emeryville rental units. The story was first broken by The Secret News on October 20.

This post was submitted by Juanita Carroll Young.

Periscope Cellars • 1410 62nd Street Suite B (@ Hollis) • Emeryville, CA 94608
510-655-7827 • brendan@periscopecellars.com

This post was submitted by Jessica Palmer.

Perhaps this is outside the scope of what you are interested in, but I am wondering if there is a way to include more from our schools/ young people on the website. For instance, when I was growing up there was a page dedicated to children in our hometown newspaper. (Updated weekly, I believe). It took submissions from children in the form of drawing, poems, stories, etc. It made kids more interested in reading the paper–they looked for their names and their submissions. Perhaps this sounds hokey, or hopelessly outdated, but those pages remain something that many of the folks I grew up with remember about our hometown paper.

As a separate issue, there was a recent story about seismic safety in the Oakland Tribune a couple of months ago. I found myself wondering about EUSD’s rating, but did not find much information in the Tribune article and was, in general, wondering about more detailed information for our schools, (including ECDC where my child is enrolled).

Again, thanks for all of your work. I really appreciate the stories you have done so far!

This post was submitted by Jacqueline Asher.

EMERYVILLE, CA — No plane ticket to DC? No Inaugural Ball invite? No worries! Periscope Cellars, an urban winery in the heart of Emeryville, is hosting “Yes We Cab!” for residents of the Bay Area to share in this historic moment at their location on January 20, 2009 from 5:30pm to 8pm.

Periscope owner, Brendan Eliason, plans to highlight the inaugural celebration with the release of a premium, custom blend Napa Cabernet called Yes We Cab! There is no better way to celebrate this new era than with friends, neighbors and fellow campaign supporters while sharing a toast of the exclusive Cabernet, a one-of-a-kind tribute to the President Elect himself.

“Even though Barack won’t be here, due to other pressing engagements, you can still meet the person who once shook hands with him,” Eliason jokes. Brendan started his support of the Obama campaign by hosting a fundraiser at Periscope Cellars in May 2007. He later got the chance to meet Barack Obama only a few weeks later as a thank you for his support.

“The movement started a long time ago with our fundraiser, and now we have an even bigger celebration to enjoy,” he says. “I’m happy to have created something to drink to his honor and to the future of our country.” Eliason himself blended the earthy, spicy wine and only 56 cases were produced. “This is a classic Cabernet, elegant and stately—just like Obama himself,” Brendan explains.

The bottle has been graced with a custom designed label by local Oakland artist, J.B. Lowe and will be available for purchase for $18. Emeryville chocolatier, Cosmic Chocolates, will also be offering their “Obama Cosmic Icon” chocolate, flavored with espresso and cognac for sale at the event. You can purchase a four-pack of the sweets along with two bottles of “Yes We Cab!” wine for $44 at the event, in honor of the new 44th President of the United States.

If you can’t make it out to the event, local vendor, Vintage Berkeley, will carry the Yes We Cab! blend in all three of their locations, including Solano Cellars and their Elmwood district store. You may also purchase the wine via the Periscope Cellars online store.

There will be a rebroadcast of the inauguration ceremony from Washington, D.C. on projection screens inside the winery. At 7pm, Periscope will also re-play Obama taking the Presidential Oath. Tastings will be offered, hors d’oeuvres will be provided and Old Oakland favorite, Tina Tamale will be selling her famous tamales at the event.

For more information, please contact Periscope at 510-655-7827 or email at brendan@periscopecellars.com.

Operating out of a WWII submarine repair facility, Periscope Cellars works with small, family growers with a focus on hands-on growing and winemaking to yield wines of unique character and quality. Distinctly non-traditional, we focus on unique blends created and consumed in the relaxed, “industrial chic” atmosphere of our tasting room, wine lounge and independent art gallery. Current Best-of-Class winner from the 2008 SF Chronicle Wine Competition. Visit us on the web at http://www.periscopecellars.com.

Periscope Cellars • 1410 62nd Street Suite B (@ Hollis) • Emeryville, CA 94608

cab_label.jpg (56 KB)

This post was submitted by Jessica Palmer.

http://www.usaservice.org/page/event/detail/4vcgr

This post was submitted by Scott Nelson Windels.