Advocating for health and safety with a "progressive" administration

IDEPSCA - Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California

• Want to talk about health and public safety
• How do we organize in this time, challenges and opportunities
• We're at a moment of racial justice and economic justice work where we need to lean in and push back
• Where are you at, what are you doing?

Participant shares

• why we're here, what we're thinking about

One of the programs within IDEPSCA is the worker health and safety program

• focus on worker safety AND healthcare access
• there's a big gap that exists in thinking about this with worker safety, healthcare access and immigrant worker rights
• During CA/Westcoast firest we heard and talked about people loosing their homes, but also, there were HUGE worker violations: domestic workers that lost their income, day laborers where asked to stand in front of homes and act as first responders, rampid wage theft
  • There was relief for homeowners, but not any for day laborers and domestic workers
• COVID, politically accelerated health crisis hit - none to limited support for immigrant workers
• Survery 72% of daylaborers do not have access to healthcare & we don't have good data about this either
• In CA what we're seeing is that homes are NOT classified as work places or work sites in any of the public health systems, therefore we have lack of data, and no ways of filing a workplace violation for health and safety, they are officially excluded
• Fair Labor Standards specifically left out 2 groups of people: agricultural workers and domestic workers, as not being allowed to have same collective bargaining rights as other workers
  • why? because predominantly group of people doing this work in 1920s where Black women, and moving into Black and Brown women
• There's still a failure to see domestic work, ag work, day labor as work
• Hope to highlight the structural challenges here
• One thing we tried to do was repealed: Accessing the basic right to just REPORT when there's a work place violation, the bill moved through legislation but Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill. He vetoed the bill with a dangerous message: private homes should not be regulated the same way as other workplaces.
  • Hearing this message is dangerous in this context of Climate-generated Disasters, COVID,
  • Writer: Aftershocks of Disaster - Marisol Lebron

It's important to remember names, keep count, & remember history.

How do we deal with the data gap and how do we hold leaders accountable?

What are some reflections, thoughts, ideas? How do we get through this?

• Have had some experience with the missing data problem and will try to jump in when the goblin is a bit quieter.
• Challenges of having health care systems talk to each other, share data with each other
• Think solutions will come at the grassroots level.

How does that happen? How do we get there?

• Theres big learning with organizing community around creating, using, processing data of vulnerable populations
• Going to people where they're already at, and putting up butcher paper and asking what are needs...applying participatory methods help, but there's struggle, when im creating data, how can i safeguard it, it needs to be shared, but how do we use it in ways that doesn't get in the wrong hands...
• Have had some success with Powerbase - shout out
• IDEPSCA has the only org that has data about domestic workers, day laborers and the fires, etc.
• There's this data certification question..sometimes you need to have an academic institution behind you, for it to be considered legitimate someone has to support the data, but Academic institutions, because it's too hot, will pull support at most important hour
• Participatory research not seen as official or legitimate
• I’ve also run into challenges finding needed research funding from traditional donors
• Organizers are not data scientists as trade but we've had to learn how to handle this cuz no one else will
  • This is something we need to push back on, WE'RE the experts not academics, because we're the ones working on this
• Need support with building this capacity, it's a whole other language
• Need to connect radical techies doing pro-bono work to support organizing this, ways they can help build systems and support
• Q: Do you create MOU’s with academics before partnering with them?
• Whole idea also of "benefit-sharing" in MOUs with academic institutions, you can say, we want % of revenue that comes from this, and goes back to the community
• How do we develop consentful systems with people who think through the implications of sharing data across systems
• Concept of data trust, data stewards, users being able to say i trust board of trustees, have my best interest in mind
• So something akin to creating an “industry” standard for data sharing/creation that’s governed by the collective that’s creating and using it?