Organized Labor

I have previously written about CityBuild, the San Francisco program to bring City residents into the trades through a pre-apprenticeship “academy.” CityBuild has been very successful in placing graduates in our apprenticeships. We are now starting to look at how well its graduates achieve careers with us. The trades have always argued that those careers should be the program’s primary goal and replace the City’s former approach to “local hire,” which amounted to “counting heads” on particular jobs, to saying “This is how many residents you must employ right here.”

That job-by-job approach may have put a few dollars in residents’ pockets but did not serve anyone’s long-term interests, least of all theirs. Following our own reasoning, we should work with CityBuild to support long-term careers for City residents. To this end we have discussed mentorships.  

In our trades journeymen and journeywomen mentor apprentices to some extent already. Every day on the job they provide advice, not just on work, but on a host of matters at the juncture between the apprentice’s life and work. Apprenticeship coordinators and instructors do so as well. Mentorship is a natural concept to us, more than in most other industries and certainly more than in the non-union sector of our own industry. These mentorships are informal, though. However natural its roots may be, the kind of formal mentorship program we are contemplating for CityBuild will require considerable thought and preparation.

For example, we might ideally pair an apprentice with someone who has succeeded in the trade while coming from a background like his or her own. While many City residents served by CityBuild come to it with a history of working hard but in low paying jobs with little future, others have had scant experience of employment and no experience of unions. Some come from neighborhoods where unemployment and crime are high and where many friends will not understand why anyone would accept the physical exhaustion that results from our heavier work. Some have come recently from prison or addiction. In the trades we have all known great crafts workers from similar backgrounds. What application and interview process will we follow to pair these top hands with those apprentices?

We will have to answer many other questions to set up mentorship programs. Each union will have to coordinate its own, even if its framework is developed jointly. Who in each union will coordinate it? At what cost in time? If more time is required than already busy agents or apprenticeship coordinators can spare, will a mentorship program even be possible without funding from somewhere other than the union’s limited finances? Should the mentor contact the apprentice regularly? How often? How often face-to-face, how often by phone?

In many cases the best advice a mentor can give will be to refer the apprentice to the union’s services. Never having belonged to a union before, the apprentice may be unaware that such services exist. The mentor will have to be in touch with the union, and vice versa. How frequent and how regular should this contact be?

Should retirees mentor? Certainly they could give more time than active members. Certainly their years of work would command the respect of the apprentice. But could they advise the apprentice well about current work and union conditions?

What if an apprentice believes that a mentor’s advice has led to an injury or job loss? Can the mentor be held legally liable? Can the union be held liable because it has helped establish the relationship between the mentor and apprentice? Will we be obliged to have them sign formal agreements to avoid this? Will we be obliged to provide the mentor detailed guidelines?

So a thing that seems natural becomes complicated. These are all questions we will consider in coming months. I discuss them here because if we decide to establish mentorship programs we will turn to you, our readers, and to your coworkers to seek mentors.

It is traditional in some of our trades to “shake out” apprentices. Some cannot or should not perform our work or find that they have no taste or aptitude for it, and often neither they nor we see this until they have tried it awhile. Others, though, may “shake out” because they do not understand something about the dispatch system or the apprenticeship, or because something in their lives away from work leads to a temporary disruption in it that they misinterpret as necessarily permanent, or because they feel that a clash with a particular foreman means the entire trade will be unfriendly to them, or for many other causes that might be undone with a little good advice. Why would we want to waste their training? Why forego their potential?

Some among us may say, Why single out San Francisco residents for attention? Maybe we should eventually make mentors available to any apprentice who wants one, not just to CityBuild graduates. This is sure to be a large undertaking, one we may not want to shoulder except after a smaller scale trial run. Meanwhile it is only fair to give back as we can to the City that gives us work. A few words of advice over the phone weekly or so, an occasional conversation over pancakes and coffee, a couple of questions now and then to a business agent: This should not be much to give in return for what this City gives and has given us.