Organized Labor

At the time of its founding and for many years after, the San Francisco Building Trades Council was loudly and unapologetically anti-Asian. It excluded Asian workers from its ranks.

It was at the forefront of movements to exclude them from the United States. Some columns and articles in early editions of this newspaper are nearly impossible to read now, so ugly is their racism. If the Council's anti-Asian rhetoric softened somewhat in later years, its exclusion of Asians (as of African-Americans, in many locals) remained a plain fact for generations.

No one could honestly claim that we have scoured all racism from the Trades now. Our ranks hold all the good and ill of California society. At the same time, those ranks have come to look like California, at least where race and ethnicity are concerned. Some of our locals have organized and recruited very successfully in Asian communities and have a substantial Asian contractor base. No local excludes Asian workers or contractors, and our Master Agreements contain language explicitly prohibiting exclusion on the basis of race or ethnicity by either the union or its signatory employer.

Most of the union-signatory Asian contractors belong to the Asian American Contractors Association (AACA), as do many non-union contractors. Founded in 1975, the AACA claims almost three hundred affiliates, most of them contractors but some of them insurance or law firms or construction suppliers, and one of them a newspaper, Asian Week. Relations between the Building Trades and the AACA in years past were difficult at best. When I first began attending the AACA's annual banquet as an organizer for Iron Workers Local 377 some eight or nine years ago, the anti-union Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) also took seats there. I made a point of going up and introducing myself. Although the ABC as an organization seems to have been absent recently from the banquet, it is not absent from the AACA, as some AACA affiliates are also ABC members.

Organizers know that few contractors become union signatory of their own accord. Very likely most that do are owned or run by our members or former members, who understand how to take advantage of our skills and to use our dispatch systems to access them. A contractor who has no direct knowledge of these things is likely to see our higher wage rather than our higher skill and to see the dispatch system as a probable burden rather than an actual advantage. If we have excluded a population from our unions for generations, then we can hardly expect it to produce union contractors spontaneously once we open to it. Add to this the resentments that come from that exclusion, and you have brambles for organizers but berries for the ABC.

Nonetheless our organizers have made real inroads into the AACA. They are signing contractor after contractor to our agreements. Afterwards, many of these contractors thrive. Some of the AACA's most prominent members are union-signatory. AACA members used to testify routinely against project labor agreements (PLAs) when these came up for consideration before City boards and commissions; lately their testimony has sought instead not to block PLAs but to modify them. Most of its present officers own union-signatory companies.

Some of us in the Trades were surprised and disappointed, then, when the AACA in early October took out full-page advertisements in the Chinese language newspaper Sing Tao Daily to attack Eric Mar, our endorsed candidate for Board of Supervisors in District One, in large part because of his support for our PLA with the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). The advertisement began, "In 2008, Eric Mar voted against giving local Asian contractors the opportunity to contract San Francisco school construction projects, by supporting the 'Project Labor Agreement.' This agreement excludes non-union companies, the qualification requirements for the employees of these companies are obviously unfair."

The advertisement was discussed by Heather Knight in the San Francisco Chronicle and by Ken Garcia in the Examiner.

The AACA's claim was simply untrue. Public-sector PLAs cannot exclude non-union contractors. A provision in the SFUSD PLA expressly prohibits such exclusion. The PLA does require that all contractors, union or non-union, live up to the terms of our union agreements and do some of their hiring from our halls. Given that the total package of wages and benefits – the "prevailing wage" – is supposed to be the same for all contractors, union or not, on public works, and given the generally higher level of training and productivity in the unionized workforce, the PLA's requirements, far from being a disadvantage, would seem to present some actual advantages to non-union contractors. These requirements certainly amount to nothing like an exclusion, and in fact non-union contractors have been obtaining work regularly under the PLA.

No one should ever mistake the preference of some contractors not to work under a PLA for their exclusion by it.

We responded to the advertisement by a half-page counter-advertisement in Sing Tao Daily purchased through the independent expenditure campaign of the San Francisco Labor Council. We also sent a letter to Florence Kong, President of the AACA, that pointed out the untruthfulness of the attack. We circulated the letter to all San Francisco elected officials, because "so public an attack must have a public response…." We have probably blunted the effect of the attack on PLAs themselves, then, although its effect on the candidacy of Eric Mar is still difficult to figure.

But we are left with the question, Why would the AACA attack PLAs so stridently now, when the ties between our two organizations are growing almost daily? No answer is likely to come in the near term from the AACA itself, and so we are left to speculate. Maybe the more anti-union elements in the AACA were firmer in calling for the attack than were the union-signatory members in resisting it. Our very success in penetrating the organization may have alarmed these anti-union elements, and they may have sought to recreate the old divisions between us. Maybe developer and business interests who were backing candidate Sue Lee over Eric Mar and who were themselves sending hit pieces on Mar into the neighborhood prevailed on the AACA to join in their attacks, possibly with the promise of work in return. Maybe a politician who likewise favored Lee over Mar made a similar promise, something like a "carveout" or exemption from coverage of a substantial portion of the work under an important possible future PLA, such as for the new acute care and trauma center for General Hospital. Maybe it was some combination of these.

We don't need an answer. We can see the future, and it includes both us and the AACA.

Investment from China in San Francisco is already heavy. The City is seeking more as part of its economic recovery plan. The City's population of Asian Americans continues to grow, as does its role in our political life. The AACA will likely have a growing importance in the City.

But we, too, are growing, and we have shown we can organize among Asian workers.

We and the AACA will be dealing with each other, then, for countless coming turns of the tide through the Golden Gate.

It would be best if we learned to deal with each other well, to our mutual benefit.