Today, we look at China's role in California's economy, and why labor unions are still going strong in the U.S. Then, Trader Joe's raises the price of Two-Buck Chuck wine, the teen publication L.A. Youth is closing its doors after 25 years, and much more.
China's role in California's economy
In his State of the State address, California Governor Jerry Brown announced he's going on a trade and investment mission to China this spring. But just how are the two economies linked? And what does Brown has in mind for strengthening ties? We'll find out.
Why labor unions are still going strong in California
Union membership is at a 97-year low. In the past year, their ranks fell to just over 11 percent of the workforce nationally, with sharp drops in places like Wisconsin and Indiana. And, as you may remember, those states had some pretty dramatic political standoffs over unions.
But turn to California and you get a sunnier outlook. That's because, unlike the most of the nation, union membership grew last year in California by more than 100,000 people.
One reason for the increase is California's high population of Latinos. Harley Shaiken, professor at UC Berkeley specializing in labor history, joins the show to explain why California's unions are still going strong.
Friday Flashback: Gun control, John Kerry, and more
It's time for Friday Flashback! A round up of this week's biggest stories. On tap this week are Christina Bellantoni the political editor for the PBS Newshour and James Rainey, political columnist for the LA Times.
Price of first-class postal stamp rises to 46 cents
Come Sunday, the price of a first-class stamp is also going to increase, from 45 cents to 46. Yes, just one penny, but still. Joining us now is Ken Martin, executive director of American Philatelic Society, the world's largest stamp collectors organization.
Trader Joe's raises price of Two-Buck Chuck wine (Poll)
Southern California's favorite, affordable wine can no longer be called by its pet name, Two-Buck Chuck.
Grocery store chain Trader Joe's has increased the price of Charles Shaw-brand wine from $1.99 a bottle, a price its held for more than a decade, to $2.49. A "whopping" 50-cent increase.
What's behind the price hike, and more importantly, what are we going to call it if it's no longer two bucks?
Trader Joe's released a statement about the new price:
"In general, our retail prices change only when our costs change. In the case of Shaw in California, we've held a $1.99 retail price for 11 years. Quite a bit has happened during those years and the move to $2.49 allows us to offer the same quality that has made the wine famous the world over."
Indeed, quite a bit has changed in the last eleven years. We've had inflation, we've had a global economic downturn, but there is something specifc to the wine market that's changed.
Wine economist Mike Veseth, author of the book "Wine Wars: The Curse of the Blue Nun, the Miracle of Two Buck Chuck and the Revenge of the Terrorists," says one of the miracles of Two-Buck Chuck is that the conditions eleven years ago when Charles Shaw was released were ripe so to speak for making cheap wine. But now that's changing.
"[Two Buck Chuck] It was created in an era of vast oversupply of inexpensive wine grapes. So there was a long period when wine was a bargain," said Veseth. "That long period of low prices has discouraged new planting, so we're now entering an era where wine is gonna cost more."
In fact, in several states outside California, Charles Shaw wine has never been sold for less than $2.49, but people still called it Two-Buck Chuck. The monicker has become engrained in its identity, regardless of price.
Even though New York Times chief wine writer Eric Asimov once called the wine "wretched and vile," he agreed that making the wine "two bucks" was a terrific branding move and it really launched a product that wasn't of the highest quality.
It's now the top selling wine at Trader Joe's, and the company sells around $5 million cases a year.
The bad news is this price hike is not anomolous, it's a real sign of higher prices for all budget wine produced in California.
Could the X-Games be selling out?
Kobe Bryant, Peyton Manning - those guys are old news. Today, we're ignoring the NBA drama and the Pro Bowl hype, and taking a look at the other biggest stars in sports - people like Gretchen Bleiler, Tucker Hibbert and Shaun White.
And if you have no idea who they are, please turn in your cool card.
Right now, these three athletes - along with many others - are participating in the Winter X-Games in Aspen. It's the first set of games in a newly expanded calendar of events that spans the globe - from France to Spain to Germany, Brazil and Los Angeles.
Advertisers like Red Bull and Jeep see the X-Games as a golden opportunity to reach that valuable Generation Y market.
But, corporate sponsors and expanded schedules doesn't sound very... well... cool. Could the X-Games be selling out?
A Martinez is joined by Brandon Graham, Action Sports host for ESPN and Street League Skateboarding commentator.
Former LAPD Chief Bill Bratton tapped to help Oakland reduce crime rate
The Oakland city council has hired Bill Bratton to develop a plan to bring down the city's violent crime rate. Bratton has led police departments in Los Angeles, New York and Boston.
Despite his credentials, some Oakland residents question whether he is the man for the job. Bratton joins the show to talk about his new gig and what he's planning to do for Oakland.
E-Verify lessons from Arizona
It's gotten a lot more complicated in recent years to hire undocumented workers -- and that's especially true in a state like Arizona, which mandates strict hiring practices. Workplace enforcement will be a part of the upcoming debate over immigration reform. In the next installment of the Fronteras series Broken Borders, reporter Jude Joffe-Block explores the lessons learned so far.
Several states now require every employer to run newly hired workers through E-Verify, an online, federal program that cross-checks identity information against federal databases. Arizona’s mandate was the first in the country to include all employers.
As Congress gears up to take on immigration, many observers believe one debate will be over whether to include mandatory E-Verify, or a system like it, in a comprehensive reform bill.
What lessons has Arizona learned from using the program for the past five years?
At the time the E-Verify requirement took effect in Arizona in 2008, Ross Tappan was the manager at a dairy in Mesa, Ariz. with more than 6,000 cows.Tappan was overseeing up to 90 employees, many of them Latino immigrants.
“Everything from milking cows, to driving tractors to feed them, cleaning out the stalls, breeding cows,” Tappan said of his workers. He recently left the dairy to sell feed.
Back then, Tappan didn’t want to risk losing his critical workforce in an immigration raid.
So before starting with E-Verify, he did an internal audit of his current employee’s files. He found many workers’ Social Security Numbers didn’t check out.
“They had to either get it straight or we couldn't employ them,” he said.
He lost 12 people that way. And from that point forward, he turned away new hires who couldn’t pass E-Verify.
Law-abiding managers like Tappan are at least part of the reason that some unauthorized immigrants did leave the state.
But not everyone took the new mandate as seriously. A third of new hires in Arizona weren’t checked through E-Verify according to an analysis by the libertarian think thank, Cato Institute.
E-Verify was queried 982,593 times in Arizona in 2011, while census data shows there were 1.48 million new hires in that period.
One reason for the lack of compliance is Arizona’s mandate doesn’t have teeth.It’s one of a number of lessons learned in the past five years here.
“Arizona was the test case and we ended up debugging the system for everyone else,” said Julie Pace, a Phoenix employment attorney.
For instance, the program has been criticized for providing both false positives, and false negatives.
While 98.3 percent of people currently pass E-Verify immediately, the 1.7 percent of people who are flagged include a small number of legal, eligible workers.
Furthermore, E-Verify isn’t immune to fraud, particularly identity theft, though U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is working on improvements.Currently, some undocumented immigrants do pass by using the identity of a legal worker.
“We had one name that was used 266 times in the country to pass E-Verify and let them work,” Pace said.
According to Pace, a key lesson from Arizona’s experience with E-Verify is that it cannot be effective on a national scale as long as their are millions of undocumented workers.
“Because then people have to keep lying to work in this country,” Pace said. “So you have to have a visa program for service workers. You have to. Or you will crash the entire economy of this country.”
One proposal to beef up the integrity of the system is to add biometric data, such as fingerprints.
But that would be costly, and is a red flag for privacy and civil liberties advocates.
“I just don’t think the government is very good at making or maintaining large databases like it needs to do, if it wants to make this system work,” said Alex Nowrasteh, a policy analyst at Cato Institute. “I also don’t really trust the government to make such a large database of all of our information for any reason, let alone, immigration enforcement.”
And in the end, Nowrasteh says, determined undocumented immigrants will find a way around any employment verification system.
“All it does is to make it more difficult for the rest of us, who are law abiding workers, to get lawfully employed,” Nowrasteh said.
One thing E-Verify can do is offer employers some peace of mind when immigration agents come knocking.
Federal I-9 audits of employment paperwork aim to crack down on employers for hiring undocumented immigrants. They can be accompanied by hefty fines –- and in extreme cases -- even criminal charges.
These audits have skyrocketed in recent years from 757 in the last two years of the Bush administration, to 5,516 in the past two years under President Barack Obama.
Among the 146 Arizona businesses audited in 2011 was the dairy Tappan managed in Mesa.
Two Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents showed up two years ago.
“They gave us a list of everything we had to do, pull all our records, make copies of it,” Tappan said.
Using E-Verify made the audit less painful.
ICE identified ten more employees who were working illegally, but if the dairy hadn’t used E-Verify for the past few years, Tappan assumes there would have been more.
The agents didn’t fine the dairy, and Tappan believes that could have been in part due to using E-Verify, since it showed the dairy had tried to hire lawfully.
Broken Border: Immigration Reform in the Southwest
Our series, Broken Border, peels apart the complex tangle of the immigration debate to explore what matters.
Tappan did have to say goodbye to those workers, which he said was hard on everyone.
But afterward he said he felt relief, knowing for certain his workforce was legitimate.
“You don’t worry about, oh my gosh, getting raided and getting called, ‘Hey we have cows to milk and no one is here.’”
Nationwide, only an estimated 7 percent of companies are currently using E-Verify.
How the program could be implemented nationally, and what changes would be part of that mandate, is likely to be a key part of the upcoming immigration reform debate.
From the Fronteras Desk
Photographer Stefan Falke captures artists living and working in Mexico border towns
Art has a way of redefining public spaces, particularly those marked by hardship or violence. That's what drew photographer Stefan Falke to the US-Mexico border. He's capturing the work of artists in this region for a project he calls "La Frontera."
Fronteras Desk reporter Mónica Ortiz Uribe shadowed him for a day.
Antioxidants may not keep you young and healthy
The Fountain of Youth may seem like it's at your grocery store.
Every year more and more products hit the shelves that promote antioxidants among the ingredients, from soda to lotion to pet food. Americans bought $65 billion of those products in 2011.
But the science behind antioxidants is getting fuzzy. While it's believed they help counter the effects of aging and disease on the cellular level, a growing amount of research shows that taking too many antioxidants might backfire.
That's the story behind a new article by Melinda Wenner Moyer in Scientific American magazine, "The Myth of Antioxidants."
Stop The Presses: LA Youth newspaper ends publication after 25 years
After 25 years, LA Youth is closing down, and current and former writers are devastated.
This independent newspaper for teens and by teens was read by about 400,000 people throughout Los Angeles.
In it, you might have learned about the college aspirations of an undocumented immigrant, got a student's reaction to the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, or read an argument against illegal music downloads.
But no more: years of financial struggles took their toll on LA Youth, and the last issue heads to schools across Los Angeles this week.
Jazmine Mendoza, a 17-year-old at Social Justice Humanitas Academy in San Fernando. She's written for LA Youth this past year. And Andrea Domanick is an alum of LA Youth and also a former KPCC intern. She's now a reporter for the Las Vegas Sun News.
The Dinner Party: Haunted house, lack of sleep and more
Every week we get your weekend conversation starters with Rico Gagliano and Brendan Newnam, the hosts of the Dinner Party podcast and radio show. On tap this week, a house in France for a Euro! One catch: it may have ghosts. And why millions of Americans aren't getting enough sleep.