The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power or LADWP will be hosting a virtual public hearing on the Draft 2020 Urban Water Management Plan or UWMP to provide stakeholders with an opportunity to review and provide public comment. Public comment received from these public hearings will be considered in the preparation of the UWMP update.
The public comment period ends on April 13.
The final 2020 UWMP is expected to be presented to the Board of Water and Power Commissioners for adoption in May 2021. LADWP will submit the 2020 UWMP to the California Department of Water Resources by July 1, 2021.
Public comments can also be submitted via email to uwmp@ladwp.com or by U.S. mail to:
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
Attn: Benjamin Wong
111 N. Hope Street, Room 308
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Time: 10:00 a.m. March 13, 2021
Details: Meeting registration and more information are available at www.ladwp.com/uwmp.
While a public desperate for protection against COVID-19 is quick to shame “vaccine hunters,” the real culprits are the companies refusing to share their publicly funded intellectual property and the governments allowing them to get away with it. By Sonali Kolhatkar (excerpted from “Common Dreams”)
At the heart of the desperate stampede to obtain vaccines is one simple dilemma: there aren’t enough vaccines against COVID-19 being produced. Variants of the virus are developing faster than nations are able to inoculate their populations, and plummeting infection rates in the U.S. have now leveled off.
Also showcasing that governments can indeed force private companies to do what is needed, Biden more recently brokered a deal with the pharmaceutical company Merck to produce extra doses of a new vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson. Merck is being paid handsomely with $268.8 million of taxpayer funds. Biden has also invoked the Defense Production Act to help the company obtain the supplies it needs. Had Trump last year used the might of the U.S. government against these private companies, we might not be fighting to sign up for vaccines today.
Pharmaceutical companies whose vaccines were funded by massive public investments still refuse to share their intellectual property with the world. The Open COVID Pledge, created by a group of academics and scientists to make virus-related technology freely available, has urged corporations to prioritize public health over profit. But notably absent from the pledge’s list of signatories are Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, or Merck.
The United States and other nations where these pharmaceutical companies are based could force them to share the life-saving information, especially because doing so keeps all of us safe. Unless nations stop all international travel across borders, hoarding vaccine technology from the rest of the world will not help anyone. The old adage of “no one is safe until everyone is safe” applies especially well to the pandemic.
Journalists with the Associated Press say they found three factories on three continents that could begin manufacturing “hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines on short notice if only they had the blueprints and technical know-how.” Except that such “knowledge belongs to the large pharmaceutical companies who have produced the first three vaccines.”
Instead of blaming and shaming one another over the frustrating lack of vaccine availability and the individual race to obtain it, Americans ought to turn their gaze to the companies that are manufacturing the products. Pfizer and Moderna have earned near-mythical status for the life-saving vaccines, but it behooves us to remember that these private entities were paid handsomely to do their job and cannot be allowed to hold humanity hostage over their profits.
Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute.
SANTA ANA, California – Federal authorities March 10, arrested two employees of the U.S. Postal Service who allegedly abused their positions to purchase and cash Postal money orders with tens of thousands of dollars of unemployment benefits fraudulently obtained with false claims of COVID-related job losses.
Christian Jeremyah James, 31, of South Los Angeles, who works in the Culver City Main Post Office, and Armand Caleb Legardy, 32, of Inglewood, who works in the La Tijera Post Office on Crenshaw Boulevard in South Los Angeles, are expected to make their initial court appearances March 10, in United States District Court in Los Angeles.
A criminal complaint filed on March 3 and unsealed after today’s arrests charges James and Legardy with conspiracy, aggravated identity theft, access device fraud, and fraud in connection with major disaster or emergency benefits.
The affidavit in support of the criminal complaint alleges that James and Legardy obtained debit cards issued by the California Employment Development Department or EDD. Those debit cards were issued based on applications for pandemic-related unemployment benefits submitted under 10 stolen identities.
Both James and Legardy used the fraudulently obtained EDD debit cards to purchase Postal money orders and cash Postal money orders that had been purchased with those debit cards, according to the complaint, which notes instances in which unidentified individuals used the EDD debit cards to purchase Postal money orders from the defendants while they were on duty at the Post Office.
James and Legardy also allegedly used the EDD debit cards issued in other people’s names to withdraw thousands of dollars in cash from ATMs. And, according to the complaint, James and Legardy deposited multiple fraudulently purchased Postal money orders directly into their own bank accounts, including one instance in which James purchased a $1,000 money order that was then deposited into Legardy’s bank account. According to the complaint, more than $25,000 in fraudulently purchased Postal money orders were deposited into James’ own bank account.
As of late December, the 10 fraudulently obtained EDD debit cards had been used to make $168,758 in purchases and $31,133 in ATM cash withdrawals.
The complaint does not accuse James or Legardy of submitting the fraudulent applications to the EDD. If they were to be convicted of the conspiracy and two fraud offenses alleged in the complaint, James and Legardy would each face a statutory maximum sentence of 45 years in federal prison. The charge of aggravated identity theft carries a mandatory two-year prison sentence that would run consecutively to any other prison term imposed in the case.
Members of the Yakama Nation of Native Americans join farmworkers and other immigrants to celebrate May Day in 2017 and protest continued deportations and detentions. (Photo (c) David Bacon)
The current guest worker system prioritizes agricultural growers’ profits over immigrants’ and workers’ rights. Joe Biden should seek a different way: building an immigration system based on family reunification, community stability, and immigrant workers’ rights to decent wages, health, and housing.
The intention of the US guest worker program for agriculture, called the H-2A program, couldn’t have been stated more clearly than it was by agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue in a January 2020 speech to growers. He wanted, he said,
to separate immigration, which is people wanting to become citizens, [from] a temporary, legal guest-worker program . . . That’s what agriculture needs, and that’s what we want. It doesn’t offend people who are anti-immigrant because they don’t want more immigrant citizens here. We need people who can help US agriculture meet the production.
By separating the immigration of families, in which migrants become community members and eventually citizens, from the recruitment of migrants solely for their labor power, in which they work and then leave, Perdue was restating a goal of US immigration policy that has existed from its inception. In opposition to that goal, the civil rights movement among Mexican and Asian Americans proposed an alternative vision to guide our immigration policy, one that favored unifying families and strengthening immigrant communities, and forced Congress to enact a law in 1965 that enshrines that vision.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was a high point, however. In the subsequent years, US agriculture’s use of migration as a labor supply program has grown enormously, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The Trump administration, however, made the H-2A program’s growth a priority. While ending family-based migration through an emergency executive measure, it issued order after order making the H-2A guest worker program more attractive to agribusiness.
The Biden administration must decide not only which of those administrative orders it intends to revoke, but if it will pursue a different direction for US immigration policy in general.
Regulating Migrant Flows for Capital
The movement of people from country to country, displaced by war, insecurity, and neoliberal economic policies, is enormous and growing. The US government, like all others, develops its policy within that context. The US Congress and presidential administrations do not debate the means for ending this flow of people, despite the often-poisonous anti-migrant rhetoric. Nothing can stop this global movement, short of a radical reordering of the world’s economy and politics. Instead, US political debate centers on how directly this flow should be used for its ability to create wealth for those who employ it, and over the legal status and rights of migrants themselves.
US industrial agriculture has its roots in slavery and the brutal kidnapping of Africans, whose labor developed the plantation economy, and the subsequent semi-slave sharecropping system in the South. For over a century, especially in the West and the Southwest, industrial agriculture has depended on a migrant workforce, formed from waves of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexican, and, more recently, Central American migrants. Today, a growing percentage of farmworkers are indigenous people speaking languages other than Spanish, an indication that economic dislocation has reached far into the Mexican countryside’s most remote parts.
Repeated waves of immigration raids and deportations are not intended to halt migration. Immigrant labor plays such a critical part in the economy that the price of stopping migration would be economic chaos. The intention of immigration policy since the Chinese Exclusion and Alien Land acts of the late 1800s is managing the flow of people and determining their status in the United States in the interest of employers.
The political fault lines that divide the US immigrant rights movement are determined by decisions to either support this general trend in policy and its political advocates in Washington, DC, or to oppose it and create a social movement for equality and rights based in migrants’ own communities. Those fault lines were set in place thirty-five years ago, when the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act criminalized work for undocumented migrants and resurrected the contract labor programs that were ended in 1964 with the abolition of the Bracero Program. Current debates over immigration policy must choose between these alternatives, and this choice will govern the approach to immigration under a new Biden administration.
The largest US guest worker program, the recruitment of migrants by agribusiness through the H-2A work visa, has its historical roots in the earlier Bracero Program of the Cold War period, from 1942 to 1964. The exploitative conditions and vulnerability of migrants who came under that program are very close to those of the H-2A program today.
During the Bracero period, immigration enforcement by a growing US Border Patrol and government bureaucracy was used to create labor shortages, which then provided the rationale for vastly expanding the recruitment of contract labor: the braceros. Today, the impact of immigration enforcement is very similar. Raids and the use of employer sanctions (prohibiting the employment of people without legal immigration status) are directly used to require the substitution of an H-2A workforce for undocumented workers.
The H-2A program does not just provide a replacement for undocumented labor. It also impacts farmworkers already in the United States, both documented and undocumented. The program has been used repeatedly to replace workers with residence visas or who are US citizens. Legal protections against such replacement are ineffective, and enforcement of those protections by the Department of Labor is virtually absent.
Intensifying a Race to the Bottom
Some of the largest H-2A worker recruiters have enormous influence over immigration policy and its enforcement. With no limits on the number of visas issued annually, their recruitment has mushroomed from 10,000 workers in 1992 to more than 250,000 in 2020 – one-tenth of the US agricultural workforce.
A system in which workers with H-2A visas are put in competition with a domestic labor force depresses all farmworkers’ wages. Even mild protections that should provide a wage floor are easily swept aside, as the Trump administration did by issuing executive orders effectively cutting H2-A wages in 2020. (Those orders were challenged in court, and later rescinded by Joe Biden upon taking office.) The growth of the H-2A program has exacerbated the existing housing crisis for rural workers and impacted their living conditions. While some states seek to limit grower access to government housing subsidies, other states encourage growers to use them to build more barracks for contract workers.
Guest workers are pressured to speed up their work, which then increases pressure on other farmworkers around them. When H-2A workers try to organize against exploitative conditions, the H-2A visa allows employers to terminate their employment and end their legal visa status – in effect deporting them. Workers can then be legally blacklisted, preventing their recruitment to work in future seasons.
Although farmworkers were officially declared “essential workers” during the COVID-19 pandemic, the declaration did not increase workers’ rights, provide protection from the virus, nor result in a living wage. Instead, H-2A workers were particularly vulnerable to contracting the virus because of the structure of the program, in which they live in congregate housing and travel to and from work in close proximity. The power of the growers and contractors using this program was clearly demonstrated by their successful effort to maintain dangerous housing conditions in Washington State and the lack of regulation of housing conditions in California. The coronavirus crisis only added extreme health risks to a bedrock of the inequality and exclusion suffered by H-2A workers generally.
The gross imbalance of power between H-2A workers and growers makes it impossible to implement meaningful worker protections. Yet efforts to expand the H-2A program have garnered political support among both Democrats and Republicans. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act, the most important of these bipartisan efforts, would likely lead to half the farm labor workforce in the United States laboring under the H-2A program within a few years – five times the already large number of H-2A workers currently.
Intensifying a race to the bottom for all farmworkers in the United States, the consequences would be disastrous, as it would likely limit any growth in wages, increase workers’ vulnerability to employer pressure, undermine their bargaining power, and increase the already heavy obstacles to independent worker organization and unions.
Real change for H-2A and resident farmworkers requires upsetting the balance of power between workers and growers, and the government that protects them. The choice confronting the Biden administration is whether to expand an immigration program prioritizing grower profits over workers’ and immigrants’ rights, or to reinforce an immigration system based on family reunification and community stability, while protecting the wages, rights, health, and housing of farmworkers – the alternative advanced by the civil rights movement over half a century ago.
LONG BEACH — On March 8, the City of Long Beach presented its $207 million Long Beach Recovery Act – a plan to bolster the economy, keep the community healthy and safe – and to secure the city’s future. If you missed it, please check it out on YouTube here.
A year ago this week, Long Beach experienced our first three cases of COVID-19 and just days later, business, education, events and peoples entire way of life came to a halt. Mayor Garcia noted the last 12 months have been difficult, but with the city’s vaccination program going well, its challenge now is to build back better than ever before.
Thanks to the support of the White House and state and county partners, Long Beach has developed a bold and aggressive recovery plan. You can view a digital version of Mayor Garcia’s presentation here, but below highlights some key areas.
Economic Recovery: $51 million will go immediately into the hardest-hit areas of our community.
$13 million for testing and contact tracing for businesses and workers
$5 million to restaurants, breweries and bars
$5 million for personal services and fitness centers
$4 million to nonprofits and arts organizations
$3.5 million for fee waivers for business and nonprofits
$2 million to business improvement districts
$1.25 million for tourism
$8 million to digital and economic inclusion
$2.5 million for economic empowerment zones
$2.5 million in small business development
$2 million towards closing the digital divide
$1 million for youth workforce development
$5 million for our Clean Long Beach Initiative, which will include significant investments in corridor cleanups, business and neighborhood association cleanups, and finally trash and graffiti collection and abatement programs
Healthy and Safe Community: $72.8 million in investments that will improve and develop Long Beach neighborhoods during this recovery.
$13 million for testing and contact tracing
$5 million for health equity and health outreach programs
$1 million for mental health programs
$7.4 million for food security and basic needs support
$2.1 million for early childhood education and childcare support
$29 million for tenant assistance
$12 million to assist people experiencing homelessness by investing in new modular temporary shelters, additional housing options, mobile outreach programs, accessible restrooms and showers, and further investments in workforce and social enterprise programs
$4 million for violence prevention and safe cities, which will include bringing back the safe park and midnight basketball programs, and the development of a reentry pilot program and other community development programs
Securing our City’s Future: $83.2 million not just for the Long Beach of today, but for generations to come.
$48 million to replenish city reserves, which have been nearly depleted due to pandemic related expenses
$30 million to eliminate the FY 2022 budget deficit so that we do not impact any critical services as we recover
$5.2 million to end city employee furloughs so we can get back to full operations
Details: If you missed it, please check it out on YouTube here.
On March 8, Long Beach unveiled the Proposed Long Beach Recovery Act . The $207 million proposal focuses on various economic, fiscal and public health priorities that promote inclusive, effective and prosperous economic and social recovery for Long Beach residents, business owners and workers critically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The proposed plan outlines various initiatives identified under three key areas of focus:
Economic Recovery ($51 million)
Healthy & Safe Community ($72.8 million)
Securing Our City’s Future ($83.2 million)
The proposed plan outlines three federal, state and county funding sources to carry out the plan’s key initiatives:
$151 million from the federal American Rescue Plan Act to be used for various initiatives outlined under each of the three focus areas.
Nearly $29 million in Emergency Rental Assistance funding, including $13.75 million in federal funds and $14.74 million from the State, to be used exclusively for the City’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program.
Nearly $27 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity for Prevention and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases Grant, received by Los Angeles County, to be used for various public health initiatives.
The City Manager has provided recommendations on how funds will be used and upon Council approval of a final plan will further develop program specifics and make adjustments to programs to ensure funds are meeting the appropriate need.
On March 16, the proposed plan will be presented to the Long Beach City Council, where it will be further reviewed and ultimately approved along with any modifications, recommendations or additional input from the Council.
The Port of Los Angeles will host a Clean Truck Program 2021 Concession Agreement Update March 17, via Zoom. POLA currently has concession agreements with approximately 1,100 Licensed Motor Carriers or LMCs, which must be replaced before they expire on September 30, 2021.
POLA Environmental Management staff plans to provide program background and information about the process for developing the next POLA Concession Agreement prior to the current concessions’ expiration date of September 30. The meeting will include an open discussion and an opportunity to ask questions.
A central element of the Clean Truck Program, the POLA Concession Program establishes a contractual relationship between the Port of Los Angeles and LMCs operating at its terminals. All LMCs making regular calls at POLA container terminals are required to have a pending or approved POLA concession agreement. POLB has a separately administered motor carrier registration program.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health or Public Health has confirmed 13 new deaths and 880 new cases of COVID-19. To date, Public Health identified 1,204,018 positive cases of COVID-19 across all areas of L.A. County and a total of 22,041 deaths. The March 8 death and case numbers represent an undercount associated with lag in weekend reporting.
The County has returned to daily case numbers that are at pre-surge levels. The seven-day average number of daily cases by episode date has continued to decrease, and as of Feb. 28 is 700.
There are 1,132 people with COVID-19 currently hospitalized and 31% of these people are in the ICU. Testing results are available for more than 5,900,000 individuals with 19% of people testing positive. The March 8 daily test positivity rate is 2.0%.
Of the 13 new deaths reported March 8, one person that passed away was over the age of 80, four people who died were between the ages of 65 and 79, five people who died were between the ages of 50 and 64, and three people who died were between the ages of 30 and 49.
On March 5, the state announced updates to their Blueprint for a Safer Economy. In addition to assessing county case rates, positivity rates and positivity rates in neighborhoods with the lowest scores in the Healthy Places Index, the state is now taking into consideration the number of vaccinations that have been administered in the lowest resourced neighborhoods statewide. Unlike the other three metrics, vaccination numbers will be calculated statewide and used to change the case rate thresholds for counties to move from one tier to another.
Once 2 million vaccine doses have been administered in the state to the communities with the lowest score in the Healthy Places Index, the threshold to move from the purple tier to the red tier will go from 7 new cases per 100,000 people to 10 new cases per 100,000 people. To move to the orange tier, the threshold will remain at 4 cases per 100,000 people, and to move to the yellow tier, the threshold will remain at 1.
Once 4 million vaccine doses have been administered in the state to the communities with the lowest score in the Healthy Places Index, the threshold to move from the purple tier to the red tier will remain at 10 per 100,000 people, but the threshold will change for moving to the orange tier, from 4 new cases per 100,0000 residents to 6 cases per 100,000 people, and to move to the yellow tier, the threshold will change from 1 new case per 100,000 residents to 2 cases per 100,000 people.
The state anticipates administering 2 million doses to residents in hard hit communities by the end of the week. Last week, the case rate in L.A. County was below 10 new cases per 100,000 residents. If this week’s adjusted case rate remains below 10 new cases per 100,000 people, Public Health’s understanding is that within 48 hours of the state announcing the vaccine trigger has been met, Los Angeles County, along with other counties with qualifying case rates, would move into the red tier. Public Health will be working with the Board of Supervisors and our sector partners to prepare appropriate modifications to the Health Officer Order reflecting the County’s move to the red tier.
The State also announced plans to permit the reopening of outdoor sporting events, live outdoor concerts and theme parks, starting on April 1. Starting April 1, outdoor sporting events and outdoor live concerts will be permitted with significant capacity and infection control modifications. For counties in the purple tier, capacity at these outdoor events will be limited to 100 people or less, reservations will be required, and concessions will not be allowed. Only people who live in the region where the event is taking place will be permitted to attend. Once in the red tier, these outdoor events can open at 20% capacity, limited to in-state visitors only; concessions will be allowed only while seated. As counties move into less restrictive tiers, the allowed capacity will increase.
Public Health is also preparing for schools to be permitted, in the red tier, to open for on-site learning for grades 7 through 12. As schools prepare for these students, they must have an updated State COVID-19 Safety Plan (CSP), including the Cal/OSHA COVID-19 Prevention Program and the CDPH COVID-19 School Guidance Checklist posted to the school or district website no less than 5 days before their planned opening date. Schools will also have to file an updated L.A. County Reopening Survey and an updated L.A. County Reopening Protocol for K through 12 Schools at least 5 days before the proposed reopening date for grades 7 through 12. More information will be available online.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidance for fully vaccinated people. The guidance states that fully vaccinated people can gather indoors with other fully vaccinated people in small groups without wearing masks or practicing physical distancing. Individuals are considered fully vaccinated two weeks or more after they received the second dose of either Pfizer or Moderna vaccine or two weeks or more after they received the single dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Fully vaccinated people can also visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for severe COVID-19 disease, indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing. For example, fully vaccinated grandparents can visit with their unvaccinated grandchildren, as long as their grandchildren do not have serious health conditions.
Fully vaccinated people should continue to wear a mask and maintain physical distance in public. They should mask, physically distance, and practice other prevention measures when visiting unvaccinated people at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease, or who have an unvaccinated household member at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease, and when around unvaccinated people from multiple households. Fully vaccinated people should also avoid medium- and large-sized in-person gatherings. There is a growing body of evidence that fully vaccinated people are less likely to have asymptomatic infection and potentially less likely to transmit COVID-19 to others. However, given the need for additional research, preventive measures continue to be important during vaccine implementation.
L.A. County and the state are reviewing this guidance and will be updating our guidance shortly.
To date, more than 2,415,000 doses of vaccine have been administered across the county. Of those vaccinated, 814,593 people have received second doses. Currently, people eligible for the vaccine include healthcare workers, residents and staff at long-term care facilities, people 65 or older, education and childcare workers, food and agriculture workers, and emergency service workers and law enforcement.
As of last week, 58% of L.A. County residents 65 and older have received at least one dose of the vaccine and 30% received both doses. For our 65 and older residents, one of the biggest concerns is reaching homebound people and making sure they have access to the vaccine. Public Health working with City Fire Departments and Health Plans to identify these people so that they can be vaccinated.
There are over 375 vaccination sites receiving a portion of the 312,690 total doses allocated to the County of L.A. for this week. This allocation includes 54,000 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The County’s network of vaccination sites has the capacity for 626,000 appointment slots this week, even with the increased doses, we only have enough doses for about 312,000 appointments. Our large capacity vaccination sites alone could be providing 195,000 additional doses this week if there was sufficient supply.
At the hundreds of vaccination sites across the county, including pharmacies and many community clinics, appointments are open to any L.A. County resident or workers meeting the eligibility requirements. For information about vaccine appointments in L.A. County and when your turn is coming up, to sign up for a vaccination newsletter, and much more, visit: www.VaccinateLACounty.com (English) and www.VacunateLosAngeles.com (Spanish). Vaccinations are always free and open to eligible residents and workers regardless of immigration status.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Representatives Nanette Diaz Barragán (D-Calif.), Michael Turner (R-Ohio) and Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) introduced a bipartisan bill to provide an historic one-time stimulus of $500 million for urban parks.
Local parks are at risk because of tightening state and local budgets during the pandemic and economic downturn. The Parks, Jobs, and Equity Act would provide a funding boost for urban parks through a formula grant to states to fund local park projects, which will ensure investments are quickly executed to help communities recover from dual public health and economic crises.
“From places to sit in the shade, to spaces to exercise in the fresh air, to local job creators, urban parks bring so much value to our communities, especially during this public health emergency,” Congresswoman Nanette Diaz Barragán said. “In Los Angeles County, low-income communities and communities of color often lack equal access to local parks. The threat of future park agency budget cuts place these critical community spaces on the chopping block. We need this one-time stimulus funding to help protect urban parks survive this crisis.”
A coalition of more than 200 national regional, and local parks organizations support the legislation, which will create jobs, improve local economies and address park inequity. Of the $500 million, 50 percent is designated for in low-income communities. In addition, two percent of funds will be allocated by the Interior Department to Indian Tribes.
If enacted, it’s estimated the Parks, Jobs, and Equity Act would:
On March 8, 1857, women from the garment and textile industry in New York demonstrated to protest low wages, the 12-hour workday and increasing workloads. They asked for improved working conditions and equal pay for all working women. Their march was dispersed by the police. Some of the women were arrested and some were injured. Three years later, in March 1860, these women formed their own union and again called for their demands to be met.
On March 8, 1908, thousands of women from the needles trade industry demonstrated for the same demands. They also asked for laws against child labor and laws for the right of women to vote. They declared March 8 to be Women’s Day.
In 1910, Clara Zetkin, a German labor leader, proposed that March 8 be proclaimed International Women’s Day in memory of those women who had fought for better lives. For almost 80 years, March 8 has been celebrated in many countries, but has only been commemorated widely in the United States since 1970 with the development of the Women’s Liberation Movement.
