Organized Labor

“Progressive” may be a common term in San Francisco politics, but it has never been well defined. No one has written The Progressivist Papers, no one The Progressivist Manifesto; no recent de Tocqueville has bicycled our streets and returned to France to write Progressivism in San Francisco. Progressives, then, can be forgiven some confusion at times about just what they should do, and for being sometimes in some sense the opposite of progressive and relying instead with little reflection on old reactions and old entanglements.

A reactionary Progressivism: This is what we see sometimes in the City.

Take for example the traditional alliance between Progressives and such “Not in My Back Yard” or “NIMBY” types as the Telegraph Hill Dwellers.

Through much of the second half of the last century Business, the Trades, and City government struck a grand if informal bargain – inspired by Catholic teachings on the value of work and the responsibilities of Business toward workers – that brought many years of prosperity to us and produced much of what makes the City work today.

At the same time we pierced through City neighborhoods and walled them from the Bay with freeways. We razed poor and working-class neighborhoods in the name of redevelopment and sent their residents packing. Many in the Trades supported this work uncritically.

This in turn brought resentment, then backlash. Neighborhood groups concerned about views and other “quality of life” issues allied with neighborhood groups outraged at displacement of communities to combat many kinds of development. They stopped new freeway construction. They saved housing for the poor and working class. They protected renters. Their achievements were real, and the City is in many ways better for them.

But this alliance has come to be as often uncritical in its opposition to development as we have been in its support. As I discussed in my May column, the tower proposed for 555 Washington blocked no views and displaced no one. The Telegraph Hill Dwellers, one of the neighborhood groups active longest on “quality of life” issues, opposed it because they believed it set a precedent that could threaten views and successfully pressured Progressive politicians to do the same. No housing was saved thereby, no renters protected. No benefit came to the poor or working class. On the contrary, the sole members of the working class affected by the project, we in the Trades, were harmed by this opposition.

The Dwellers and groups like them represent a modern version of the old landed gentry. Instead of fields tended by peasants and woods tended by gamekeepers, their wealth resides in views. They guard every degree of these from even the most remote threat as vigorously – if by less bloody means – as a feudal overlord his domains. Such unions as the Hotel Workers pose no threat to them, and so they can feel they have given sufficient alms to the working class and earned indulgences by supporting these workers in their just struggles.

We are much harder for them to tolerate. We are Whitmanesque, large, unkempt, noisy, profane. And much, even most of what we do to earn our keep alters a view.

For the Progressive politicians traditionally allied with this landed gentry we pose the additional problem of our history of uncritical support of development. But however those Progressives define their movement, it must have as a basic tenet support for the working class. Insofar as we do not support development uncritically, then, but do so with consideration for issues of displacement and quality of life, we should under this tenet have the support of Progressives.

I have tried in my tenure as Secretary-Treasurer of this Council to approach development in this way. I have argued with considerable success in our deliberations for this approach and found many others who agree with me.

Progressive politicians should in turn reflect on their old alliance with the landed gentry. Rather than react uncritically on behalf of the landed gentry when it invokes fealty, they should recall always that their more essential allegiance and responsibility is to the working class, and so to us.