More of the best columns from 2019

This one was published on the Record-Bee in the anniversary of the deadly Camp Fire in Butte County California. Mandy Feder-Sawyer is a career journalist and an instructor of journalism at California State University, Chico. She can be reached at mandyfeder@yahoo.com. She is a former editor of the Lake County Record-Bee.

Fire People

One year ago, I became a member of a club I didn’t want to belong to – the fire people.

If this piece of writing seems fragmented, it’s because it is, much like our new lives.

We are perpetually straddling the line of gratitude and terror.

My daughter Nicole’s biggest fear – the house burning down – was amplified by tens of thousands when the Camp Fire struck our town and left us all running for our lives together as a family.

We escaped together as a family and we will stay together as a family.

A year later we live in a big Victorian house in Red Bluff – all of us – my husband, daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren.

Faced with losing her entire family, my daughter Miranda, 26 then and her boyfriend Brad of Sacramento, took care of all six of us. Miranda’s an EMT and signed up for a strike team to come into the fire as we were trying to get out.

Our severed community floated all over the country like the ashes that whipped through the wind on Nov. 8, 2018.

In one fell swoop, we, the people who loved to spread sunshine, were incapable of giving. For months we had to be takers and we had nothing to offer anyone else who was suffering either. This was humbling and painful.

The people who helped us from near and far cried for us and showed us a kind of empathy I had never experienced. Conversely, some folks fell away with the discomfort of our new reality.

We approached everything matter-of-factly. As people shared their sorrow for our circumstances, we smiled and said we were OK. We wouldn’t know until much later that we were not in fact, OK.
The civilized life we led until Nov. 7 was turned on its head.

People were jumping into stranger’s vehicles. Nobody was wearing seatbelts because we didn’t know when we might have to leave the car and run. Those who were forced to shelter in place huddled and sobbed hour after devastating hour.

In the wake of the fire we lived in phases. Phase one was simply to have a roof over our heads. Phase two, we needed to get our fire damaged vehicles repaired.

We had an epiphany at the Toyota dealership.

“What’s your address?” The service manager asked. Larry and I looked at each other with blank stares. We explained that we were from Paradise. Tears filled his eyes and poured over his cheeks unabashedly into his goatee. He lost his own home to fire the year before in Santa Rosa.

Our granddaughter Eloise was 4 years old then.

After we checked into the hotel, we headed through the lobby to the elevator. Eloise jumped back away from it pointing wildly at a sign, the one that pictures someone running on stairs away from flames. “Use stairs in case of Fire.”

She thought the elevator was on fire.

We stayed in so many different places we never knew where we were when we woke up. That happens to us still.

Dining out and staying in hotels had lost its luster.

Yes, we are grateful for our lives on the daily. There are other feelings too. Feeling fortunate to be alive when many others did not make it out. Knowing that we suffered one day of running for our lives and people all over the world spend lifetimes doing so. Having family and friends who cared for us and insulated us through the biggest challenges, when many others have no one.

I clung to the routine of going to work. I missed only one day as a result of the fire. My Chico State students who were predominantly freshmen, matured at an alarming pace as a result of the fire. They became serious about journalism. I think in part to make me proud and also to show respect.

One student who was lackadaisical about attending class told me after the fire, “If you can make it to class, so can I.”

Larry did what he does, he wrote a song, “Sifting Ashes,” that chronicled the day. It took seven months to complete.

Nicole grabbed her sewing machine when we left. She made Christmas stockings for everyone in the hotel room while simultaneously caring for a 4-year-old, and a two-month-old.

Our dogs and cats were fostered out to friends and relatives until we could find a more permanent place to call home. One of our cats didn’t survive the fire.

Each second of that day plays back in slow motion like a movie montage. I can still see that wicked looking cloud, hear the roaring of the mighty engine that was the fire, the explosions and feel the ashes falling like hard rain.

It’s true that life does go on and there are many events aside from the fire in which we need to participate, such as weddings, births, and sadly funerals.

Mainly, I want to take the opportunity right now to thank every person who helped us through this. We couldn’t have done it without your grace and kindness. Our appreciation is endless. Each act deserves its own story.

We will not allow this blaze we narrowly escaped from take over our lives.

We will live, laugh and love.

“A town is a thing like a colonial animal. A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate from all other towns alike. And a town has a whole emotion.” — John Steinbeck

Best columns of 2019

As 2019 is coming to a close I endeavor once again to update my journalism blog. Who knows if I will be successful in posting more in 2020? Well that is one of my goals. I thought I would start by presenting some of my favorite columns printed this past year. Dan Walters is a political columnist we regularly feature in our Lake County Newspaper. This is a column he wrote about Assembly Bill 5 known as the controversial "gig economy" bill. It's a great piece of writing. Enjoy.

Dan Walters. Courtesy of CALMatters

A titanic battle over work looms

It would be difficult to name an issue of more fundamental, far-reaching importance than how we earn our livings — and a titanic political battle is about to erupt.

 This week, a coalition of companies that use on-call drivers with their own vehicles to transport passengers and goods — Uber and Lyft most famously — filed an initiative ballot measure to overturn a new, union-supported law that would compel their workers to become payroll employees.

That law, Assembly Bill 5, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom just a few weeks ago, was easily one of the most controversial of the 2019 legislative session, implementing the state Supreme Court’s Dynamex decision handed down in 2018.

That decision created a three-factor “ABC test” to determine who could be an independent contractor and who must be considered an employee, thus striking at the heart of the business models Uber, Lyft and other companies use.

AB 5 lodged the ABC test into law, while granting exceptions to “licensed insurance agents, certain licensed health care professionals, registered securities broker-dealers or investment advisers, direct sales salespersons, real estate licensees, commercial fishermen, workers providing licensed barber or cosmetology services…”

The gig companies contend that the Dynamex ruling and AB 5 undercut the desires of their drivers for flexibility. They offered to create a hybrid model under which drivers would still set their own hours but with income guarantees, fringe benefits and other aspects of payroll employment.

Unions countered with “wedriveprogress.org,” a coalition of drivers who want to become employees, and argued that the “misclassification” of workers as contractors is rampant, depriving them of rights and benefits protected by state labor laws.

Rebuffed by the Legislature and Newsom, Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, a delivery service for restaurant orders and other consumer items, pledged $30 million each to overturn the new law. Their initiative would embrace the hybrid employment concept they proposed in the Legislature, including minimum income guarantees, health care insurance subsidies and vehicle maintenance stipends.

The sponsors rolled out their measure Tuesday during a Sacramento press conference featuring drivers who like the status quo. One, Jermaine Brown, told reporters he quit a full-time job to drive for Uber and Lyft because he wanted “flexibility to be home with my kids” and called the new proposal “the best of both worlds.”

The California Labor Federation immediately denounced the proposal as “another brazen attempt by some of the richest corporations in California to avoid playing by the same rules as all other law-abiding companies in our state,” and added, “California’s unions will join drivers who want fair wages, better treatment and flexibility to defeat this corporate ploy.”

However, it’s not certain that voters will have the last word because Brandon Castillo, a spokesman for the “Protect Drivers and Services” coalition, made it clear during the news conference that the firms “prefer a legislative path.”

In other words, they would drop the measure, even after spending heavily to qualify it for the November 2020 ballot, if the Legislature and Newsom would agree to a compromise. Otherwise, he said, “we’re going to spend what it takes to win.”

Although the proposal would apply only to drivers using “app-based rideshare and delivery platforms,” its adoption would create a new model that could spread to other industries.

Thus, the stakes, in both human and economic terms, are obviously immense. The “gig worker” model has been growing fast, particularly in California, and the state’s unions, whose membership is declining, are eager to have more payroll workers that they could potentially organize.