Organized Labor

“The San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council supports provision of health care to all San Francisco workers and their families.

“If San Francisco businesses claim that the plan put forth recently by Supervisor Tom Ammiano is not an appropriate and practical step in this direction, we believe it is the obligation of those businesses to offer an appropriate and practical alternative.”

The San Francisco Labor Council was coordinating support for the legislation. We gave the Labor Council the letter to use as it saw fit.

I don’t know if the Labor Council ever circulated the letter, or if businesses ever saw it. No matter; businesses should not have needed any reminder of its points. Nonetheless the most prominent representatives of San Francisco business have complained that businesses will be harmed in San Francisco, jobs lost, and the City placed at a competitive disadvantage by Supervisor Ammiano’s mandate. After several months they have failed to offer an alternative plan.

We in the Building Trades likely sympathize more with business than do many other unions, particularly public sector unions. The great majority of our members work for private employers. In our economic system, we thrive only when those employers thrive. And we likely sympathize more with small businesses than do even many private sector unions. Most of our employers are small businesses. Their owners often have come up from our ranks. They have been our apprenticeship classmates, our coworkers, our friends.

Sympathy for businesses that do not provide health care for their workers comes harder. The current form of Supervisor Ammiano’s ordinance mandates that businesses of twenty to ninety-nine employees pay $1.06 an hour toward their health care and that businesses of a hundred or more employees pay $1.60 an hour. This is far less than almost all even of our smallest employers pay. Our employers are obliged to compete with non-union employers that generally pay nothing for health care. Few of those non-union employers are of a size to be affected by this ordinance. If we have any complaint about the mandate, then, it could well be that it doesn’t go far enough.

I and other officers of the Council have supported the ordinance in a variety of meetings with politicians.

The opponents of the mandate argue that by putting San Francisco businesses at a competitive disadvantage with businesses elsewhere in California and the country it will oblige them to move or close. Were the Building Trades to accept this argument uncritically, we would contradict the very premise under which we negotiate our own wages and benefits. Those wages and benefits are often better in San Francisco than in other parts of California, and are better than in all but a very few other parts of the country. Our premise in negotiating them is that the San Francisco market both demands and can accommodate them. More than a century of experience supports this premise. For us, the burden of proof in this must be on the opponents of the mandate.

If we grant any heft to the argument of a competitive disadvantage for San Francisco businesses, however, it pulls us only to what we already know: That any local health care ordinance is a partial response to the challenge of achieving health care for all Americans. The other arguments of the ordinance’s opponents — that it contains “holes,” that it does not cover the unemployed, that it charges for workers who do not live in San Francisco and who will never use the City’s health care system, that it does not cover San Francisco residents who work outside the City, that it will encourage employers to cheat by declaring fewer than twenty employees while working more than twenty — pull in the same direction. We know that we need a comprehensive national health care system.

At the 2005 National Legislative Conference of the Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO, Senator George Voinovich of Ohio, a “Building Trades” Republican – that is, a Republican willing to “cross the aisle” to vote on our behalf on such issues as prevailing wage – spoke of how General Motors was profitable in Canada but not in the United States. Many of us in the audience were hoping that he would go the next step, that he would acknowledge that the lower cost of health care in the Canadian national system was what permitted General Motors its profit there. He did not, but it was clear to us that he was poised to take that step.

Senator Voinovich is famously independent of his Party’s line. Fortunately other Republican senators and members of Congress also have their own minds. We might expect that some of them will join us at the right moment. We might expect that the Democrats, having failed to give us a comprehensive national health care system when they last had the chance, will not fail at the next opportunity.

This will be far likelier if at least some businesses join us in demanding it. Maybe Supervisor Ammiano’s mandate will prod San Francisco businesses in that direction. We would welcome their help.