Organized Labor

Anti-union organizations long argued that higher thresholds were necessary to permit minority contractors to obtain public work. When California’s Proposition 209 – which the usual conservative allies of these anti-union organizations supported, and which unions did not support – forbade consideration of minority status in the awarding of contracts, the anti-union organizations began to argue instead that higher thresholds were necessary to permit small, local contractors to obtain public work.

Both arguments ignore the basic legal requirement honored in all public sector PLAs, the requirement noted above: A contractor does not have to be union-signatory to obtain public work.

When anti-union organizations do acknowledge this requirement, they resort to other arguments. Contractors have accustomed means and methods, they say, and to have to work with union workers under union conditions would prevent them from using these means and methods and so keep them from being profitable.

This argument denigrates the high degree of union training and the high productivity of union workers and claims they are incapable of adapting to alternate methods of work when necessary. It is worthy of little more than scorn.

Anti-union organizations say that non-union contractors often have monolingual non-English-speaking workforces, and that the mixing of crews that might be required under a PLA would be unworkable.

On the contrary, even in largely monolingual non-English-speaking crews someone – usually a foreman – speaks enough English to discuss details of construction with inspectors, engineers, architects, project managers, and so on. That person can convey instructions, coordinate workers, and answer any questions in a linguistically mixed crew. Second, much construction information is conveyed not verbally, but through drawings. Third, in recent years San Francisco unions and their signatory contractors have made extraordinary and successful efforts to incorporate non-English-speakers into their workforces. The Roofers, the Carpenters, the Electricians, the Bricklayers, the Ironworkers and others have offered training for non-English-speaking workers. Not only do these efforts demonstrate that linguistically mixed crews are workable, they unmask the argument of anti-union organizations as an advocacy of a lower, less socially responsible standard for the non-union sector, one based in the desire to maintain complete control over workers and not in any hope for their advancement.

Beyond all this, in San Francisco the very premise of the argument for thresholds is false. The City’s construction unions in the last several years have filled the ranks of signatory employers with small, local, and minority contractors aplenty. Those of us who have involved ourselves in the successful push to accomplish this have done so often at real political risk to ourselves. Any City politician who gives any credence at all to the argument does not just ignore the facts, but offers us a slap in the face for our efforts.

This is why, despite considerable loyalty to Mayor Newsom, who had endorsed him, the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council absolutely rejected Doug Chan’s bid for Supervisor in District 4 at our Candidates Night August 17.

On Tuesday, August 29, the Buildings and Grounds Committee of the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education stepped into our ongoing negotiations with their staff on a PLA for work under their last (2003) bond measure and imposed a threshold three times higher than that to which we and their negotiators had agreed. The committee did so ostensibly to provide work for “small, local contractors.”

We were outraged. We had good cause to be outraged. We will accept no such threshold.

As of this writing there remains some slight chance that the three members of the Buildings and Grounds Committee will recognize the fallacies in the argument. In light of that chance we are continuing negotiations.

But what is certain is this: The argument that thresholds should be established in project labor agreements to permit small, local contractors to obtain public work should leave San Francisco, never to return again.