February 18, 2015 – RI Future

February 18, 2015February 19, 2015

West Warwick Town Councilor made public anti-Muslim remarks in 2013

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West Warwick Town Councilor Angelo Padula made incendiary comments about Muslims at a public meeting in May of 2013.

The city emergency manager director was informing the Town Council about a seminar on how explosives work, said town councilors, to which Padula said, “We’re not going to invite any Muslims?”

Some in the crowd laughed and others applauded.

In an interview tonight with RI Future, Padula said he apologized later in the meeting. As the video indicates, he did not apologize when asked by Town Councilor David Kenahan.

“I said at the end of the meeting, ‘if anyone finds this offensive I apologize,” Padula told me, noting a fuller video of the meeting would show this. “It was nothing against the good Muslim people of this country. I meant the Muslims who bombed Boston. I meant this about the terrorists and nobody else. I in now way meant this to discriminate or against the whole Muslim faith.”

Padula represents the West Warwick district where the Islamic School of Rhode Island is located. The school was victimized by vandalism this week with anti-Islamic graffiti like “Fuck Muhammad” and “Now this is a hate crime.” The FBI is investigated the crime as a hate crime and a civil rights violation.

“That school is in my district,” Padula said. “We’ve never had any problems with them people.” He told a story about when the Islamic School let the community use its basketball court.

Padula posted this to his Facebook wall about the video.

Town Council David Kenahan is the voice in the video asking Pedula to apologize. A physics teacher at Cumberland High School, Kenahan said in an interview tonight, “I thought it was inappropriate and offensive. As a Council we speak as a group and I didn’t think it was fair that we would get lumped in with that.”

February 18, 2015August 9, 2016

‘Wage Theft Street Theater’ outside Gourmet Heaven

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A protest outside the upscale downtown Providence deli Gourmet Heaven was scheduled for the same day that three workers filed a case in district court for non-payment of wages. Six more workers are expected to join the case later this week, alleging a total of $140,000 in unpaid wages over two years. The workers have organized through Fuerza Laboral and Rhode Island Jobs with Justice.

As they did during their last protest back in December, workers and protesters entered the restaurant to confront management about the unpaid wages. This time store manager Mohamed Masoud was in the store, but he declined to comment to the press. The police arrived quickly and moved the 30-40 protesters outside and onto the sidewalk without incident.

Outside the protesters picketed and chanted for about 30 minutes. Passersby were handed flyers informing them of the working conditions at the restaurant. The police were vigilant in making sure there was ample room for pedestrians to get through the picket line, at one point picking up my video camera and moving it, even though there was a four foot wide path available.

The highlight of the protest was some “street theater” in which former employees acted out the experience of being hired by Chung Cho, the owner of Gourmet Heaven, which started off with promises and handshakes, but soon devolved into physical abuse, unsafe working conniptions and stolen wages. The scene ended with Cho and his manager, Masoud, being hounded down the street by an angry mob of workers.

In Connecticut, Cho reached an agreement with the [Connecticut] Department of Labor to pay $140,000 in back wages to 25 workers, but has so far not made his payments in a timely manner. Former employees of the two Gourmet Heaven stores in New Haven, CT have already filed suit against Cho in federal court in Connecticut for wage theft at the New Haven locations.

“The only way for Cho to pay workers what he stole from them is for us to bring this to the public and let his clients know what labor rights abuses were going on at this store,” said Jesse Strecker, Executive Director of RI Jobs with Justice in a statement. “Since Cho has not given any response to the [RI] Department of Labor and Training or to us, we are filing in the courts and continuing our public protest.”

A December 2014 report by the US Department of Labor determined that wage theft in New York and California amounted to between $1.6 and $2.5 billion dollar a year and that “…affected employees’ lost weekly wages averaged 37–49 percent of their income.”

Donna Nesselbush has introduced legislation in the Rhode Island State Senate that would increase the penalties for wage theft, and give more options to workers seeking lost wages. In the press release for today’s action Nesselbush says, “Theft of any kind is wrong, but wage theft is particularly disturbing because it is often perpetrated against the most vulnerable in our society, those who need their wages the most, even to survive.”

February 18, 2015February 19, 2015

Hard times at the DMV getting a non-driving state ID

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I live-tweeted the experience of getting a state ID sometimes under the hashtag #Paisleygate, a joke on the fact that I wore the same weird paisley shirt to get my last ID in Pennsylvania as I did when I went to get my Rhode Island ID earlier this week. But the broken process of getting a state ID card if you aren’t a driver or already a Rhode Islander is no joke.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567699862305533952

It took me two separate bus trips to-and-from the Pastore Center in Cranston from where I live in Providence. This was after a year of wrangling to get other pieces of paperwork like an original of my birth certificate – I only had copies – which are difficult to obtain without a valid ID.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567734538894589952

A couple things I’ve learned:

1. You cannot get a non-drivers’ state ID from any of the in-city locations. You have to go to the John Pastore Center on the Cranston/Warwick line, which for non-drivers is quite a hike on an infrequent bus. The clerk at the DMV made it clear to me that if I had been a driver and had a drivers license that was expired, it would have been no problem for me to use it as a supporting document, but that because I only had a non-drivers’ ID, I couldn’t. Location and process are really tilted against non-drivers.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567736001498726401

2. The cost of the ID itself is pretty significant: $26.50, with a $1.50 charge if you use a debit card. The cost of a drivers’ license is somewhat higher, but the gap is pretty small. There was a great analysis of how many states have an apparent gas tax, which is then exempt from sales tax, and how this exemption inflates the value of the gas tax. The cost to get a drivers license should be looked at in the same way, since the base cost for an ID is so high. An ID fee is like a sales tax–maybe worse, really–because it charges people for the basic cost of being part of the workforce or voting, whereas a license fee presumably covers the cost of testing and administering road safety.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567747700742172672

3. You must have originals! Don’t even bother trying to talk your way into a voter ID with photocopies, even if they’re accompanied by other documents, like college IDs, FBI background checks, BCIs, Medicaid cards, library cards, etc.

4. As a Warden of Elections, I’ve been instructed many times at trainings to turn away people with IDs that are unexpired and valid but not from Rhode Island, even if those people have corresponding documents to prove their Rhode Island addresses.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567735350651781120

5. Unless you have everything together perfectly, this whole process is going to cost you a lot of time. I’ve had copies of things like my birth certificate lying around the house for years for whenever I’ve had to start a job, but since I had to get an original, and didn’t have a non-expired ID, it took me about a year and a lot of interventions from family to get the new stuff in order. And because of the remote location of the Pastore Center, getting an ID as a non-driver means essentially taking a day off. The Center also closes at 3:15 PM, which is kind of ridiculous too. I brought the wrong paperwork the first time, so I actually made two trips back-and-forth by bus, racing against time with the ridiculous closing time and infrequent bus schedule.

https://twitter.com/TransportPVD/status/567746753483776002

How can we reform this? My thoughts:

1. A state ID should be available in urban locations. There are centers where one can go to renew existing IDs, but not to get new ones.

2. A state ID from someplace else should be as useful to getting a new ID as a drivers’ license from somewhere else is. This distinction is inequitable, and silly.

3. State IDs should be free.

4. Duplicates should be allowed, or at least a broader array of paperwork types.

5. One should be able to get an ID at night or on weekends. The Pastore Center closes at 3:15 PM! Possibly changing the ID process so that it isn’t taken on by the DMV would make sense, since identification for voting and working purposes is an entirely separate thing than driving.

The voter ID process and documentation needed for working has been something I’ve been aware of intellectually for some time, but going through the process really changed my perspective on it in ways that I didn’t expect. We have to change this if we’re going to stop disenfranchising people year after year.

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