Free Republic

Penny Pritzker, the billionaire heiress whose family owns the Hyatt hotel chain, took a ride on Air Force One this afternoon from San Francisco to Portland, Ore., where President Obama was making a series of fundraising stops. The ride came hours after the announcement of a global boycott of Hyatt Hotels by Unite Here, the nation’s largest hospitality workers union. That boycott has been joined by the National Organization for Women, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the National Black Justice Center, and the National Football League Players Association. Pritzker was the national finance chair of Obama’s 2008 campaign....

LOS ANGELES (CBS) — The next time you plan a movie night without the kids, you may have to provide more than just pizza for your babysitter. Democratic lawmakers in Sacramento are fast-tracking a bill that would require workers’ compensation benefits, meal breaks and paid vacation time for all “domestic employees”, including nannies, housekeepers and even babysitters. Assembly Bill 889, authored by Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (D-San Francisco), has already cleared the Assembly and is expected to receive overwhelming support from Senate Democrats, who control both houses of the California legislature. Under AB 889, parents legally become household “employers” and are...

A New York assemblyman says he wants the state to require hotels to provide their housekeepers with an emergency "panic button" that would help protect them from sexual assaults on the job. Assemblyman Rory Lancman, a Democrat from Queens, said he will introduce the bill Monday. The move comes a week after former International Monetary Fund Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was charged with sexually assaulting a Manhattan hotel maid. "We send hotel workers, housekeepers into rooms by themselves without any other staff, without any other security," Lancman said at a news conference Sunday outside the Sofitel Hotel, the site of Strauss-Kahn's...

Democratic gubernatorial nominee Jerry Brown channelled his inner Obama on Wednesday night, preaching post-partisanship and unity at a small-dollar fundraiser in San Francisco. More than 100 young supporters gathered at Orson, a chic bar and restaurant, for an event dubbed “The Brown Bash.” Organizers said it was aimed at attracting younger voters to Brown’s campaign, which had run a bare-bones operation until going up with TV ads last month. For his part, Brown was brief, reminding the crowd of California’s potential and its position as the world’s eighth-largest economy. “It’s the state of imagination,” he said. “This is the place...