Organized Labor

The officers of the Council recently met at breakfast with a developer with whom we were – and are – having problems. He had just begun working for the first time in San Francisco, after projects in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Houston, and elsewhere.

He claimed experience in New York and Philadelphia, both cities with union densities comparable to San Francisco's in construction, but here on his first two projects he was employing a union-signatory general contractor but several non-union subcontractors.

Our conversation with him was cordial but unproductive, from our point of view. He spoke of needing "flexibility" from us and of wanting "competitiveness" from our signatory contractors. Although these are valued terms in American society and business, and although Building Trades unions acknowledge this and strive to provide both, in this instance we understood them as code words for "concessions on wages and conditions" and "willingness to shave standard profit margins and to squeeze the unions for as much help as possible."

We did not agree to fulfill his stated needs. All of us, however, agreed that Building Trades unions produce the most skilled and productive workers anywhere, and that we owe our skill and productivity in large degree to our apprenticeships. We agreed also on the worth of these apprenticeships to communities and to the underprivileged working to rise from poverty into the middle class.

The developer claimed a philosophy: Make money. Have fun. Do good.

I pointed out that our apprenticeships were a good on which we all agreed, and that by using non-union subcontractors he was undermining this good.

He had no answer to this.

I could devote an entire column to the subject of businesses and "doing good." Businesses often indulge in self-congratulation and bask in public praise for what are really the cursory goods of volunteerism and charitable contribution, or for producing a product that at once enriches them while serving some public need. The kind of good that unions demand, the good of a business providing its employees with a decent living and retirement, with health care for themselves and their families, and with apprenticeship training to give a future to the trade and those working in it – this kind of good can bump up harder against a business's bottom line and rarely brings applause. It is nonetheless more profound and genuine, a "better good," as it were.

Many in the trades have the habit of denigrating our apprenticeships. "I learned more on the job than I ever did in a classroom," they say. While this may be true, we learn things in the classroom that we would never learn on the job. Often we learn not just the "How" of our work, but the "Why," and this knowledge serves us well when we must think through a job problem or decide on an approach to a new challenge. We develop also knowledge of some parts of our trade in which we might rarely work, but for which we have some preparation when the need arises.

Most tellingly, our apprenticeships are respected by our competition. I recall reading in a construction publication some years ago an article that interviewed large non-union contractors who occasionally used union subcontractors. While these non-union contractors thought that their better workers could match the productivity and quality achieved by some union workers, they acknowledged that the better union workers were the best in the industry. One said, "When you get the union's 'A' team, you get the best there is." As the contractors were comparing union and non-union workers performing the same work, clearly it was not the work itself that was teaching the union workers more. More knowledge and skill resided in the unionized trade, and the clear inference was that this was because of our apprenticeships.

They are prized also by the communities in which we work. Again and again we hear, "Our young people need to get into your apprenticeships."

And again and again we reply, "The doors are open. We have reasonable requirements for entry. If they're serious and qualified, when we have the work they'll have the work."

All of our apprenticeships conduct regular outreach to schools. I have spent much of the last several weeks distilling information from numerous sources – apprenticeship flyers, websites, and telephone calls – into a page apiece on each apprenticeship for a booklet that I will distribute this month to high school counselors of the San Francisco Unified School District. I hope that this is just an early step in a relationship that will culminate in the return of shop classes to the schools. In the meantime, it will mean that students can know just what they need to do to join us, for the sake of their future and ours.

We are planning to incorporate the same information over the next few weeks into our new website, www.sfbuildingstradescouncil.org. We are counting on this being a way for those who know little about us to find their way to us, for increasing the number of top candidates available to us, and for ensuring the future of our trades. We are excited about the options the web gives us in showing what we do and how well we do it. Check it out.