Organized Labor

At an event on election day a prominent local architect and a developer were talking to me about a measure proposed by Supervisor Tom Ammiano that would require all new developments in the “Eastern Neighborhoods” of San Francisco to obtain “conditional use authorization” for the next eighteen months. The Eastern Neighborhoods include Potrero Hill, Showplace Square, the Mission, the Central Waterfront, and the eastern part of the South of Market.

[Mike Theriault] A requirement of “conditional use authorization” would mean that the Planning Department could not automatically approve a project that otherwise met its standards for those neighborhoods, but that the project would have to undergo a public hearing and vote. In addition to “conditional use authorization,” Ammiano’s proposal would make developers provide seven reports on such issues as the project’s effects on housing stocks, recreation, transit, neighborhood-serving retail, blue-collar businesses, arts, and historic resources. The burdens imposed by the requirements would likely frustrate much development in the Eastern Neighborhoods. The architect and the developer were bemoaning this, and were talking with admiration of how the Residential Builders Association was speaking out against the proposal.

“You should get together with them on this,” the architect said to me. “We have a common enemy in this, and ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ What would it take to get you together?”

“First they would have to become us,” I replied; but this hardly began to address the incorrect assumptions about the Building Trades that underlay what he said.

Start with the statement that we have a “common enemy” in the opponents of development in the Eastern Neighborhoods. While some of those opponents may well be against virtually any development – and therefore against our work generally – others have very legitimate fears about what the nature of that development means for working-class San Franciscans. As I have remarked in earlier columns, these latter are far from being our “enemies.” We have instead some community of interest with them. Much of the “market rate housing” built in San Francisco is beyond the financial reach not just of hotel workers and retail clerks, teachers and healthcare workers, but of our own members as well. We need homes in San Francisco for our members, both because commuting from outside the City will grow more and more expensive and difficult and because the future of our political voice here demands that as many as possible of us reside here. Until the scarcity of affordable housing in the City is addressed effectively, we will in many cases be torn between our need for the work a project can provide us and our community of interest with some of its opponents.

In the Eastern Neighborhoods, however, we may not be torn all that often. Market rate housing developments there have often mixed union and non-union contractors; sometimes union jobs have been much in the minority on them, if not absent altogether. How much work would we actually lose, then, if future such developments were stopped? The old saw that the architect used in our conversation, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” may in fact work against his point. If we accept it, then we might well consider the opponents of projects that are not fully ours to be our friends.

The Residential Builders Association is not an anti-union organization like the Associated Builders and Contractors. Some of its contractor members and some of the contractors it employs are union signatory. Most are not. This brings us to another incorrect assumption underlying what the architect said: That there is “union work” and “non-union work,” and that we accept this division as immutable fact. How else would we make common cause with a predominantly non-union organization? If we work with them to assure that work is plentiful for them, if we have no assurances that this will bring their workers into our ranks and give them our wages, benefits, and standard of living, aren’t we then saying that the work is theirs, not ours?

Even many unionists, even some from our own ranks, believe that there is some work that is almost by nature not ours. I often hear, for example, that we neither do nor have any interest in doing small residential work. On the contrary, many of us remember when our contractors and workers were heavily involved in that work in the City. That we are scarcely involved in it now does not say that we have accepted that it is not “union” work; it says that the non-union sector does not believe in immutable divisions between “union” and “non-union” work, but has been happy to grow at our expense.

So it is with the Residential Builders Association. Its members have moved into larger and larger projects, multi-story poured-in-place or steel-framed buildings. Its need for certain skills in these have obliged it to employ more union contractors. It continues nonetheless to use many non-union contractors. We would be served only marginally, then, by making common cause with it, if we are served at all.

As the heading of this monthly column has said since I began writing it more than two years ago, we should be “Building the Trades.” We grow, or the construction industry passes us by. We would welcome all the contractors of the Residential Builders Association into our signatory ranks, and all their workers as our members. We could make common cause with them to bring large quantities of affordable housing to the Eastern Neighborhoods, and this could help quiet some of the opposition to market rate housing there by assuaging the fears of those who believe that its construction will displace the City’s working class.

Until then, a measure like Supervisor Ammiano’s that frustrates development in the Eastern Neighborhoods may be just fine by us.