Organized Labor

Here and elsewhere, Stan Warren has been often and well eulogized. We needed then to honor his life and our past together.

Now we must look at the ways his work pointed this council toward its future.

Stan prepared and seeded the ground for many of the efforts we will be undertaking. He continued the vigorous engagement of the Council with community organizations that he inherited from his predecessor, Stan Smith. This engagement has done great good both for the trades and for the city's communities. We will continue it. The City is contemplating a program called "CityBuild" through which it hopes to coordinate the work of community organizations. If the City implements the program, we will insist on being involved. We can claim the right to be involved because of our long engagement with those organizations, and if the program is to have any chance of success it will only be through our early and direct involvement.

Both in the Roofers Union and later, through his direction of the Building Trades and his place on the board of the Instituto Laboral de La Raza, Stan brought Hispanic workers more fully into the unions in every sense. He recognized and we recognize that many and perhaps most of the tools on California job sites today are in the hands of Hispanics, and that to build and represent the trades we must acknowledge both certain practical realities of these Hispanic workers and their human rights as workers, which cannot be affected by politics or borders.

Stan began to reach out to the Asian Americans Contractors Association, while at the same time insisting on the rights and well-being of workers through the establishment of the City's Office of Labor Standards Enforcement and through obtaining a project labor agreement with the San Francisco Community College District. Those who know me well know of my commitment both personal and professional to closer ties between the Building Trades and the Asian Community of San Francisco. We will continued to reach out to that community and to the Asian American Contractors Association as one part of it. We will also continue to defend the Office of Labor Standards enforcement and to advocate project labor agreements.

Stan's successful work to negotiate and win approval for the project labor agreement with the Community College District gave us a document that should serve as a template in negotiating a project labor agreement with the San Francisco Unified School District and in seeking to negotiate a project labor agreement with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. We are taking steps now to bring these negotiations to life.

Whether before the Board of Supervisors, before the mayor, or before the many city commissions, Stan spoke well and often on behalf of the Council. In this, he kept the Council in the prominent place in the political life of San Francisco it has held from its very beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century. We will continue to insist on that place and to speak out for our work and our workers.

Each of the Council's member locals has its own particular needs, and the Council can and should serve as a forum to express many of these so that other affiliates are aware of them. The ultimate purpose of the Council, though, must always be to find and pursue the causes and to argue for the values we hold in common. As I follow Stan, I will do my best to heed that purpose at all turns and to make this a true union of unions.