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Seeking ‘The Community’ PDF Print E-mail
By Michael Theriault, Secretary-Treasurer   

ImageSome labor leaders use the term almost reverentially: The Community. Spokespersons for neighborhood groups, particularly those that call themselves “progressive,” proudly proclaim that they speak for the community. One building trades local representative often asserts in speeches before City commissions and boards – with more than a little hyperbole – that he and his local’s members are the community.

Some labor leaders use the term almost reverentially: The Community. Spokespersons for neighborhood groups, particularly those that call themselves “progressive,” proudly proclaim that they speak for the community. One building trades local representative often asserts in speeches before City commissions and boards – with more than a little hyperbole – that he and his local’s members are the community.

The number of our members resident in the City is not as high as it was many years ago, even though it has increased recently through organizing and recruiting efforts by some locals among both immigrant and native groups here. Although we can hope that these efforts and others will increase our number in the City further in the near future, our membership, like our work, is regional. Just as many San Franciscans in our trades work outside the City, so a great part of our work here is performed by non-residents. This will not change even with a rise in the number of us resident here. We will always be faced with the perception that when we speak on behalf of our work we are not speaking on behalf of San Franciscans. We will always be obliged to seek allies in the community.

But what does “the community” mean? What should it mean for us?

Recently the Board of Supervisors held a hearing on control of asbestos-bearing serpentinite dust in excavation for Lennar/BVHP at Hunters Point Parcel A, a project important to us. On the afternoon of the hearing a bow-tied member of the Nation of Islam was stationed at the rail of every opening at every floor overlooking the domed central court of City Hall. With some others in Bayview/Hunters Point, they were opposing Lennar/BVHP’s work. Meanwhile a mass of project supporters following Christian ministers and singing hymns mounted the great stairway toward the Board of Supervisors chambers. Amid division so religiously fervent, whom do we call “the community?”

The snap answer for us would be to say, those that back our work. But the standard of defining “the community” as those most likely to back our work are glib and transparent, and would lead (as it so often has) to the alliances we develop being devalued by the politicians and the City residents whose support and votes we need.

The utilitarian standard of the greatest good for the greatest number of residents might seem at first a straightforward approach to defining “the community.” In fact, this approach soon wanders off course.

Start with the question, “Residents of where exactly?” Is “the community” defined by neighborhood or by the broader City? The Telegraph Hill Dwellers, a neighborhood organization, will claim that they should have first say in the development of the northern waterfront along the Embarcadero, which skirts the hill and intersects their views of the Bay. Yet that waterfront for most of the City’s history was of economic importance to the entire City, from the nobs of Nob Hill to our callus-palmed forebears on the South of Market and Mission flatlands. Chunks of Telegraph Hill itself were sacrificed to that economic life, quarried to ballast sailing ships. Is Telegraph Hill or the broader City “the community” for the northern waterfront? For which “greatest number” should we consider the “greatest good?” Should it extend even beyond neighborhood and City to region, state, globe?

Even if “the community” is defined by neighborhood, how is the neighborhood defined? An activist from Bayview/Hunters Point recently claimed to me that a project on Potrero Point was a neighborhood concern for his organization because it was in Board of Supervisors District 10. By the same logic, a project in Visitacion Valley should concern Potrero Hill, and vice versa. This might surprise residents of either neighborhood.

And however the neighborhood is defined, how much consideration can trades workers who live paycheck to paycheck by sweat and strain give to the concerns of a neighborhood if most of its residents are well-paid professionals or well-to-do? If a neighborhood opposes the construction of a hospital, say, because it will have to endure occasional sirens, how can we, in whose neighborhoods those sirens are common, sympathize? If it complains of a minor alteration of views that none of us will ever have from our windows, how can we honor the complaint? Can we swallow the horse-pill notion of such a neighborhood as “the community?”

So the idea of “the community” is shifting, protean, slippery. If it is empty to seek alliances in the community based only on the standard of support for our work, if residency and neighborhood are themselves problematic in defining what we should consider “the community,” with what “community” do we ally ourselves?

We can look to the old standard of working class allegiance. Despite the contempt that discussions of class excite in some quarters in this country, and despite an American tendency to believe in social mobility and entrepreneurship above class, it remains true that most Americans and San Franciscans share our dependence on an hourly wage and a weekly or biweekly paycheck, our concerns for the present, and our worries for the future. We can extend that allegiance also to the poor, some of whom have fallen from being wage earners after their worries for the future proved all too justified, others of whom we hope to bring into our ranks. It is no doubt this “community” toward which some labor leaders feel near-reverence, and to which the building trades local representative wishes to lay claim in his speeches. Clearly it is a “community” that includes also labor organizations not a part of the Building Trades.

To acknowledge this allegiance doesn’t really simplify matters for us. Many individuals and organizations say that they represent working people and then go on to contradict each other on their behalf. The allegiance can be no more nor less than a first principle in our considerations.

What is more, if it is to be real it may sometimes lead us to hesitate to advocate for our own work. It has led us to support the hotel workers’ union, UNITE-HERE Local 2, even when this has meant a possible stop to hotel construction we would otherwise support. It has led us to ally ourselves with the health care workers of the Service Employees International Union, even though this means a possible stop to a major hospital project. It has led us to explore relationships with the day labor center and with the Mission Antidisplacement Coalition.

We risk short-term sacrifice because in a long view the Building Trades cannot succeed in the City without the success of the broader labor movement. We cannot succeed while ignoring the needs of the rest of the working class. We cannot ask the support of others while not genuinely offering our own for them. This is part of being our community; this is part of being the community.
 
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