Tuesday, September 27, 2011

They Said It

Nora Davis Said It-
"You People Are Dupes For EBASE!"

Politics in Emeryville have produced quite a lot of hyperbole over the years. At the Tattler, we occasionally post quotable quotes from Emeryville personalities since where we've been can sometimes inform where we're going.

Oakland based East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), an economic and social justice nonprofit organization concerned with working people and families, helped push for Measure C, a hotel workers living wage ordinance in Emeryville. In the run up to the 2005 Measure C election, many Emeryville residents publicly testified before the City Council that they didn't like to see hotel workers taken advantage of in their town and that they supported the incipient Measure C.

Thinks most Emeryville
residents are dupes.
Council member Nora Davis, who worked against the passage of the living wage ordinance, publicly impugned the intelligence of all Emeryville residents that supported the hotel workers by calling them "dupes for EBASE" from the council chamber dais at an October 2005 council meeting.

Measure C was subsequently approved by Emeryville voters 54% to 46% on November 8, 2005. One hotel in town, Woodfin Suites, fought having to pay their workers the higher wage mandated by Measure C and finally in 2010 they were forced by court order to pay the workers their back wages.  The hotel subsequently pulled up stakes and left town, disgraced.  Nora Davis is still on the council.

3 comments:

  1. I'm new to Emeryville- Somebody please explain to me how a City that is 1.5 square miles and has a resident population of 9000 people pays for a 400 million or almost 1/2 billion dollar bond? Is this a Joke? Please, do tell!

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  2. Sorry- This question was in reference to the above article- Could the post master please move it to the aticle above? Thanks!

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  3. How can you be a dupe of an organization that published a carefully researched, academically solid 144 page study of Emeryville under the auspices of the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley?

    http://books.google.com/books/about/Behind_the_boomtown.html?id=sv8vHQAACAAJ

    or download it for free and read it on your computer here:

    http://emeryvilleneighbors.org/documents/Behind_the_Boomtown.pdf

    If Emeryville residents are dupes for giving credibility to EBASE, I guess the University of California is a bunch of dupes too.

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