Organized Labor

I was appointed some months ago to the Workforce Investment Board of San Francisco, which is charged with overseeing how some government workforce training and development funds are allocated. The Board recently established a “green sector” committee. I asked to sit on it and was accepted. We met for the first time in mid-December.

We discussed retrofit of buildings for greater energy efficiency. One of the committee members said that we needed to “break down silos” separating tasks in green building retrofits, that we needed to cross-train a new class of “green” worker.

Most around the table nodded.

Not me.

I thought, She is talking about a green handyperson.

I questioned aloud the potential longevity of such a worker’s career. Sooner or later the entire building stock of San Francisco can have been retrofitted. The more serious the effort, the sooner this is achieved. What will such a green worker do then?

Others replied that the day of the City’s final energy efficiency retrofit is far, far off, and that by the time all possible with present technology has been done, advances will have given us new means and reasons for retrofit, new efficiencies not yet imagined.

This is a leap of faith. Only the test of years can show if it lands true or ends abysmally. We in the Trades may make a comparable leap in believing that there will on average be enough construction through ups and downs to sustain us, but we do have for encouragement a few millennia of precedent.

Let us nonetheless assume for discussion’s sake that faith in a lifetime of green retrofit work is justified.

Those of us whose hands have developed a few calluses may have a few questions about the practicality of a green handyperson that may not occur to those who have never made a living with their hands.

A green handyperson might weatherstrip doors in homes. He might caulk windows or add insulating films to them. She might blow insulation into attics. He might rack solar panels. She might do simpler window replacements.

But could that handyperson safely or effectively install new heating systems? Could she replace windows in more complicated settings in a way that is dependably weather tight or architecturally adequate? Could he tie solar panels into the building’s electrical system?

And in San Francisco buildings exhibit more than a century and a half of different building methods. Many predate codes. Some seem to have been improvised on the spot. Through reworks and additions over many years, any one building may have been built in several different manners, with a variety of materials and systems used in various ways with varying skill. How would a green handyperson, trained across crafts but not well trained or experienced in the history of materials and methods of any one craft, be able to do good work in San Francisco?

If a green handyperson is limited by the nature of the work and of the City’s building stock to relatively low-skilled tasks, this raises the additional question of how well paid he or she can be. How real in terms of personal economics is the “career” of a green handyperson?

This brings us to a long-standing Trades suspicion of a handyperson classification: That it may be no more than an employer’s excuse for a low-paid worker who can be pushed to take on work for which he or she is not well prepared. This serves the employer better than either the property owner or the worker.

Green retrofit work that respects traditional craft lines offers the worker the additional career advantage of flexibility. My own work as an Iron Worker ranged from wall rails in single-family homes to structural steel in high rises. Respect for traditional craft lines gives a worker in green work a similar range of employment options, so that the inevitable ups and downs of green retrofit work become less damaging, and so that no leap of faith in the longevity of that retrofit work is required to assure the worker a career.

This is not the kind of flexibility of which employers speak when they denigrate traditional craft lines with terms like “silos.” It is instead a flexibility that serves the worker.

While we respect the genuine needs of employers, it is the kind of flexibility for which we in the Trades are obliged to argue.