Organized Labor

The end of the yellow brick road, ruby slippers, the great and powerful Oz and the little man behind the curtain – “Emerald Cities” is a term that will always project those images on the screens of our minds. I don’t know if those who named the Emerald Cities program did so with a little laugh, then, but I am certain that it involves not a tornado-ride from Kansas to a fantasy, but a path through hard work to new possibilities of employment for our members and to new members and greater strength for our unions.

In brief, the Emerald Cities program would have the Trades ally with community organizations. We would reach deeper into those communities to help their members into our apprenticeships and our ranks. They would join us in advocating before government and business for work that uses our well-developed skills in a market that is just now developing, the deep retrofit of existing buildings for energy efficiency. If efforts to expand and participate in this new market are successful, we can provide work both for ourselves and for new members.

The Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO, is promulgating the program. San Francisco is one of the first ten cities to which the Department has brought it. The San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council committed to it by a vote of its Board of Business Representatives 2 March.

The energy retrofit market, though nascent, holds a degree of certainty unknown in the housing and commercial real estate markets for which we have traditionally built. Quite apart from the matter of global climate change and the potential costs to property owners of government actions to curtail it, odds are that energy prices will only go up. Property owners can make a simple calculation: The less energy used, the more money saved. Lenders can figure that long-occupied properties will continue to be occupied and that deep enough savings in energy bills will allow owners to repay loans while still having savings left over. Although there are variables here – how steeply energy prices will rise and how much in savings the retrofit of a particular building may achieve, for example – there is no speculation.

San Francisco does not have the broad swings of temperature that would keep its buildings alternating between furnaces and air conditioners going full blast, but through most of the year it shivers at something just below the threshold of comfort, and so the old radiators clank, the old wall heaters sputter into action. Most of our building stock is well past middle age. Most walls and many attics are uninsulated. Boilers and furnaces are frequently aging and inefficient. Bare hot water pipes travel close to cool exterior walls. Windows leak heat out through their panes and let drafts in through joints opened by decades of shifting and wear. Roofs soak up heat when they should be staying cool and let heat out when they should be holding it in. Years and sometimes more than a century of repairs and remodels have been made with no concern for energy use.

We have work we can do here.

Clearly the temptation for many a property owner who has not habitually used union contractors will be to go cheap in a new energy efficiency market. We have real value to offer that non-union contractors cannot, though. Our much greater productivity means that disruption to occupants of a building can be minimized. Our much more extensive training means makes us more adaptable to the tremendous variety of the City’s buildings and ensures a higher quality, more dependable product and so higher long-term savings.

The temptation for government will be to overlook the social good we offer and to focus just on the financial mechanics of energy retrofits. Financial support through loans or grants for energy efficiency retrofits without tying the work to apprenticeship programs and to employment that provides decent wages, health care, and retirement benefits may help some property owners, but fails much of the public.

Lenders will be tempted to overlook a type of loan even of such a high degree of certainty of repayment as energy retrofits would provide, because such loans do not fit in their present categories, no matter how flawed those categories have proven to be.

We fool ourselves if we believe that we in the Trades can counter these temptations by ourselves. Already the City has rolled out a system of loans and grants for energy retrofits that takes no account of us or how the work can be structured both to greatest practical and social effect. Suggestions I made to individuals in City government in this regard a year and more ago never reached the ears that needed to hear them. We need allies to make sure we are heard where, when, and as clearly as we need to be heard.

The Emerald Cities program can help us develop and work with those allies. It may not lead to a future of sparkling towers and singing citizens, but it can lead to a future that works for us and for San Francisco.