Organized Labor

At the same time, there have been areas of common ground between the Council and MAC, even if these have gone unacknowledged.

The continuing political influence of the Council in the City, the influence that is so important to making our work possible and keeping it ours, must depend in some degree on preserving and even increasing the number of our members resident and voting here. The density of union voters in the city whether or not they are our members is also important to us. They will need residences they can afford – such as those for which MAC has argued.

And it must be apparent to MAC that preservation of the existing housing stock in the Mission cannot be the sole means of keeping working families there. Whether or not large market-rate, “gentrifying” projects are built there, the neighborhood is changing. Individual property owners sell homes and individual landlords rent out apartments at market rates. A stroll through the Mission suggests that their buyers and renters are increasingly from the professional and investor classes. Construction of new units approved under the condition of long-term affordability to working families must be an important way of countering the “gentrifying” effect of these. To perform this construction at anything less than union wages and under anything other than union conditions would contradict MAC’s advocacy on behalf of those families. We also provide some of the last and best blue-collar opportunities in the City. MAC, then, has good cause to work with us, as well.

Shortly after I became Secretary-Treasurer of the Council in 2005, Eric Quesada of MAC and I found ourselves in line together to testify before a committee of the Board of Supervisors on a proposed project. In a whispered conversation while waiting, we discussed our traditional opposition and agreed that we should be discussing the ideals we shared. For most of the next two years representatives of MAC and I exchanged phone calls and e-mail messages without ever managing to put together the face-to-face meeting so helpful to a real exchange of ideas.

The controversy over a project at Cesar Chavez and Mission may have changed this. Seven Hills Properties, the owner wishing to develop there, on a site formerly occupied by a Kelly-Moore Paints store, came to us in early 2006 to request our support for its proposal of sixty condominiums atop a Walgreens and small retail spaces. The developer pledged to build the project all-union. The developer would fulfill the City’s requirements for providing “affordable” units (and at this point has in fact exceeded them). The project would not replace existing residences, nor would it push out existing jobs, but would add to the City’s housing stock. The Walgreens it included would employ only union workers. We agreed to support the Seven Hills proposal.

Later in the year MAC came up with an alternative proposal for the site in collaboration with the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center (BHNC). In place of condominiums, they proposed low- and moderate-income rental units. In place of the Walgreens, they proposed a larger day laborer center to replace the storefront center across Mission and a few doors east on Cesar Chavez. The AFL-CIO had just concluded its pact with the National Day Labor Organizing Network, and I was beginning conversations with the San Francisco day labor center and Renee Saucedo (Organized Labor, November 2006). Ms. Saucedo arranged a meeting between me and Joseph Smooke of BHNC.

At that meeting I reaffirmed our support for the Seven Hills proposal. Mr. Smooke told me that his organization would build its project union, although he expressed some trepidation that requirements of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission for use of “small and micro local contractors” might present some barriers to this. I assured him that we had many contractors that fit the requirements, and that close work with us would mean that he could fulfill them while building all-union. I committed to him that in supporting the Seven Hills proposal I would not work against the BHNC alternative.

For a while Seven Hills and BHNC negotiated toward a possible buyout of the site. Those negotiations collapsed recently, with Seven Hills unconvinced that BHNC could come up with the necessary funding. MAC began working politically against the Seven Hills proposal.

And so the Council and MAC found themselves on opposite sides of an issue again.

This time, however, through Pilar Schiavo of the San Francisco Labor Council we arranged a meeting. At that meeting I again reaffirmed our commitment to support the Seven Hills project, and again pledged that I would not work against the BHNC alternative. I said that I would publicly encourage Seven Hills to resume discussions with BHNC. All sides understand that those discussions depend on identification of funding for the BHNC proposal. We did not at that meeting discuss broader principles and possibilities of common ground except cursorily. We did, however, agree to meet again – and soon – to begin that discussion at last.

We are now looking at dates at the end of July or in early August for that meeting.

Not even MAC would claim that it speaks for the entire Mission District, but it speaks for a substantial constituency there. An understanding with MAC can be important to our work in a large part of San Francisco for some years to come, and by providing our members and other union members places in the City to live that work could also mean not just votes on our behalf, but shorter commutes, more time with families, more time to rest and recover from the deep physical demands of our labor.

That understanding cannot come at the expense of our long-standing friendships with other Mission District organizations, such as the Mission Housing Development Corporation, that also find themselves at times on the opposite side of an issue from MAC. Nor should such an understanding be seen as placing us in one camp or another in battles between politicians. It should be seen simply as this: We want what we see as best for our members. MAC wants what it sees as best for its constituency. Our wants overlap. We will see by how much, and we will decide if it is enough to permit us at times to make common cause.