Organized Labor

In San Francisco, the City and the Trades have developed a partnership that is both mutually beneficial and that contributes to the advancement of City residents, particularly from underprivileged neighborhoods.

This partnership arises from the tremendous amount of work linked in one way or another to City government now and in coming years. Previous editions of Organized Labor have discussed the four-billion-dollar-plus retrofit of the water system stretching from the Sierra Nevada to the City. Soon to come also will be a rework of the sewer system, including replacement of the old brick sewer lines that underlie so many of the City’s streets, my own among them. The dollar value of the sewer work will approach that of the water system retrofit, and all the work will be in the City itself. A new and “green” headquarters building, including power generation, is planned for the Public Utilities Commission. Man-made Treasure Island will be reinforced and a new neighborhood, virtually a small city, will be built on it. A new Transbay Terminal will be built at First and Mission, and highrise buildings will go up to help finance its construction. CalTrain will be extended underground to it from Fourth and King. Muni Metro may be extended underground to Chinatown. General Hospital will be rebuilt. Under a plan recently brought forth by the Mayor, public housing will be rebuilt and affordable and market-rate housing added to it. The City is also considering alternative power facilities, including tidal power at the Golden Gate. If it can line up financing, the Port’s aging piers will need substantial work. We may yet build a new stadium for the Forty-Niners.

Add all this to the usual work on streets, parks, clinics, libraries, and so on, and the City will have a profound need for the skills that we in the unionized Trades are best at providing.

Add it in turn to expected office and residential development, to the continued buildout of Mission Bay, to expansion of the University of California – San Francisco, to new facilities for City College, to hundreds of millions of dollars of work for the San Francisco Unified School District, to seismic retrofit or replacement of private hospitals, to the retrofit of Doyle Drive and the latter phases of the Golden Gate Bridge retrofit, to the construction of the new single-tower suspension “signature span” of the Bay Bridge, to the retrofit of the tunnel through Yerba Buena Island, and to the possible growth of biotech and other industries in the eastern part of the City, and we ourselves will certainly need a steady stream of new workers to replace retirees and others who leave our active ranks. We will very likely need also to grow our locals.

Then there are the cries for employment opportunities in parts of San Francisco. Those readers of the San Francisco Chronicle who get to the second and third pages of the “Bay Area” section will know something of the violence that wracks those neighborhoods. Even those back pages don’t tell the full story. Residents of some neighborhoods know that much violence goes unreported in the newspaper. In my relatively quiet neighborhood, the Excelsior, I’ve heard gunshots and seen their results far more often than the Chronicle has reported them. Building Trades jobs cannot by themselves be a solution to that violence. Several Building Trades members were in fact among those whose lives were claimed by violence in the City in the last two years. Their jobs didn’t save them. And despite the volume of work coming our way, neither can there be enough employment in the Trades for everyone in those neighborhoods who needs it, nor is our work for everyone. On the other hand, it seems self-evident that opportunities in the Trades can and must be a part of the solution by offering as many residents as possible hope, resources, and a sense of accomplishment.

The needs of the City, of the Trades, and of those residents intersect

The City has long had “local hire” goals on its projects. As administered for many years, their achievements were mixed with failures. While many San Franciscans made their way into the Trades successfully through them, many others arrived on jobsites for the first time in their lives with no idea of what they were getting into and all too often fell away from the trades they had entered long before completing their apprenticeships. While many local journeymen and journeywomen found work through them, all too often to fulfill “local hire” goals they were kept on to do jobs for which they had not developed skills. For these and other reasons “local hire” goals acquired a bad reputation among many supervisors and companies. They also applied to non-union contractors, which were not at all uncommon on City work, and so new workers were sent to employers that did little to train them and less to launch them into construction careers.

To help address the failures of “local hire” goals the City, City College, the Northern California Regional Council of Carpenters, and this Council worked together to assemble the CityBuild Academy, an intensive pre-apprenticeship program on which we have reported and editorialized in earlier editions of Organized Labor. This was the first part of the partnership we developed. The Academy has placed in union apprenticeships virtually all of its graduates who have wanted to be placed, and retention rates are good. As part of the broader CityBuild program, “local hire” goals have been revised to mesh better with the realities of our industry. For example, contractors do not have to keep residents on City projects to receive credit for them, but can move them to others where they are more needed or for which their skills or skill levels are better suited. Another example: The Sheet Metal Workers take in apprentices not continuously but on a regular periodic basis; to facilitate access to the trade between entry periods, Sheet Metal contractors can be credited for employing CityBuild graduates as pre-apprentices on private work.

The second part of the partnership was the recognition of the importance of project labor agreements (PLAs) to the success of CityBuild. It would make no sense to “leverage” City projects to achieve entry of residents into the Trades if there was no guarantee that work on those projects would actually pass through our hiring halls. Although public-sector PLAs cannot exclude non-union contractors, they generally require that half or more of the employees of those contractors on the covered work come from our hiring halls. Our PLA for the water system retrofit is structured in this way. We will be working toward PLAs on the other major projects listed above. And these will also close the disconnect between giving non-union contractors local hire goals and giving those local hires construction careers; the local hires will be our members, going through our apprenticeships.

I will suggest here a third part of our partnership: The City should work with us to reestablish shop classes in San Francisco schools. A bill now passing through the California legislature may mandate this. Even if it does not, it is in everyone’s interest to see those classes return. The subject is good for another column in a later edition of Organized Labor. For the moment I will say just that shop classes could provide a longer and more thorough introduction to our work than the CityBuild Academy and if well constructed could help many students understand the value of an education that they now see as having little bearing on their lives. The City’s Human Rights Commission is exploring a possible cooperation with us on this.

Mr. Jones has said that meetings of the National Community Development Agency of late frequently include litanies of complaints of the progressive withdrawal of the federal government from support for community development. He wants to show a positive alternative.

We can do that.