Organized Labor

In December’s column, “The Local Hire Mandate,” I promised to detail steps that would be more effective than Supervisor John Avalos’s recently approved “local hire” legislation in achieving its goal of better access to careers in our Trades for San Francisco residents. Those steps are accelerated GED programs, VESL programs, childcare with construction hours, shops in the schools, expanded pre-apprenticeship, mentorship, bonding assistance and business education for small local contractors, more middle-income housing and more work. This last may seem obvious; to some “Progressives” it is not.

Accelerated GED Programs

From the very beginning of CityBuild, I have argued that the City should support accelerated General Educational Development test (GED) programs. Entry to almost all apprenticeships requires a high school diploma or GED. In communities with low high school graduation rates, GEDs would provide to many not just the possibility of entering our apprenticeships but alternatives if, in time, they decide our work is not for them.

An accelerated GED program would evaluate an individual to determine his or her strengths and weaknesses and would then teach to remedy those weaknesses.

The New York Times in a recent editorial (Dec. 31, 2010 online; Jan. 1, 2011 print) argued for this. It praised an Iowa program with a 98 percent success rate, and enthused over early accomplishments of a pilot New York City program.

It said, “… states … will need to invest much more heavily in programs that prepare people for the GED. At stake is their economic future – and the country’s.”

Some of the millions the City will spend on the Avalos ordinance would be better invested in the future of disadvantaged workers and the City through accelerated GED programs.

VESL Programs

We in the Trades have our own vocabularies, idioms, turns of phrase. A bevel is not a chamfer is not a miter, even though all are angled edges. Just as GED programs would be most effective if tailored to particular needs of individuals, so English as a Second Language classes would be most effective if they are vocational, focused on the working needs of adults. CityBuild has offered Vocational English as a Second Language (VESL) classes. So have some Trades.

The union sector, then, has made considerable use of VESL programs. Meanwhile many non-union workers feel trapped by bars of language in work for contractors that underpay, cheat and work them in unsafe conditions.

I have long worked with Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), one of the most respectable backers of the Avalos legislation, to advocate VESL programs. CAA, though, has put all its pressure on the union sector in this. If CAA were completely true to advancing Chinese-language workers, it would advertise and encourage VESL classes among non-union Trades workers. At the least, this would give them greater mobility and possibly better pay and conditions in the non-union sector. It could free them to demand redress for underpayment. It could help them feel free to come to us.

These classes would cost a small fraction of the millions the City will spend on the Avalos legislation. Maybe CAA and the supervisor could enlist some of the local contractors who will benefit from it and who were vocal on its behalf to offer financial support, to help communities from whose work they profit.

Childcare with Construction Hours

Any of us in the Trades who have tried to find it know how nearly unobtainable is childcare that accommodates construction work hours. Childcare services don’t accept children before 7 a.m., our standard start, and later than on many jobs. They levy substantial penalties for picking up children after 6 p.m. This leaves little time to reach them after 10-hour days and guarantees penalties after longer. We can’t walk away from a concrete pour or a tower crane jump, and so our penalties quickly exceed what we earn through overtime, so that in effect we pay to work.

A few small, home-based childcare services have more flexible hours, but these rarely offer the educational opportunities of larger programs. I know also from unfortunate experience with my own sons that their standard of care can be very dubious, even if they are state approved.

Just as with accelerated GED programs and VESL programs, I have advocated establishment of childcare with construction hours since the beginnings of CityBuild. My predecessor, Stan Smith Sr., even worked with the City to seek sites for a program. So far, CityBuild has identified only small home-based programs. If a high-quality, educational childcare program with construction hours were established in a location convenient to City residents, somewhere maybe in south-central or southeast neighborhoods, this would open opportunities to many residents whose family demands keep them from our Trades. CityBuild itself has noted that childcare needs make many potential candidates decline the program.

Most important, childcare with construction hours, though benefiting both men and women, would benefit women most, since more single custodial parents are women. The Avalos legislation can do nothing in and of itself to increase the participation of women in the Trades. Some of what the City will spend on it could instead establish a childcare program with construction hours. This program could charge on a sliding scale, so that CityBuild pre-apprentices would use it free, early-period apprentices would pay a small amount, and journeylevel workers or higher-level apprentices in well-paid Trades would pay full boat. Use by enough workers at full price might make the program self-sustaining. The only necessary City contribution would then be seed money.

Shops in the Schools

Teachers are often advised that boys benefit from hands-on learning. Through middle school, though, when many boys begin to withdraw from education, and then through high school, when far too many drop out, the only hands-on instruction most receive is in the occasional science laboratory session.

We in the Trades have seen tremendous intelligence in many of our coworkers from underprivileged communities. We know that shops in the schools would keep many boys and girls from those communities engaged in education. Shop classes could draw students into other subjects, especially mathematics and science. The Bayview knows this, too, and the Excelsior, and the Mission, and Visitacion Valley. They know that academically rigorous shop classes would mean higher graduation rates, better employment opportunities and fewer dropouts slipping into crime.

Also, if industry ever returns here, it will not be heavy industry employing semi-skilled workers but artisanal or technical industries requiring high skill. Local hire mandates will never bring such industries. A pool of skilled workers could. Shop classes would help fill that pool.

Shops are just now beginning to return to City public schools, through a pilot program at John O’Connell High School, where more than 20 years ago numerous shop classes fed dozens of students annually into our apprenticeships. (Private, academically accomplished Lick-Wilmerding High School has always had shops.) The school district could use many more.

There is no money for them.

Supervisor Avalos believes there is money, though, to pay for the higher contracting costs and enforcement costs of a local hire mandate.

Pre-apprenticeship

The CityBuild Academy, which has long had support from several Trades, has for the most part provided effective pre-apprenticeship training. The program can be improved. I will be working with it to incorporate the pre-apprenticeship curriculum of the Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO.

The Academy could also do better at identifying and preparing candidates for the “list trades,” those that test and establish a waiting list for entry. At every application period, CityBuild should have candidates lined up, well prepared for tests and interviews and with necessary documents in hand. This is not what CityBuild has done, and yet it complains about its failure to place candidates in those trades.

Every employer prefers prior knowledge and experience in new hires. A good pre-apprenticeship program provides these, and its reputation spreads. Improved performance by CityBuild Academy will assure a greater presence of City residents throughout our industry, not just on City-funded work.

This program is already funded. Improvement should cost little if anything.

Mentorship

Outsiders to our Trades and industry understand little of how things work with us. If this is true in a broader working world where few now wear a blue collar, it is truer still in communities where a generation of high unemployment has left many unfamiliar with even that broader working world.

When we bring individuals from these communities into our Trades, we can expect them to have misunderstandings and questions. How does someone navigate a dispatch system? How does someone handle problems with foremen or coworkers? Where does an apprentice who feels he or she is not getting adequate instruction and support from journeymen on the job turn? When should an apprentice rely on himself or herself, or seek the union’s help?

Pairing such individuals with mentors long experienced in their Trades would help them. Ideally, these mentors would have come from the same communities and have faced and overcome similar challenges.

In 2007, under my instruction, a Coro intern drafted a mentorship program for CityBuild graduates, along with application and evaluation forms. I have these on file, ready to go.

As I was preparing to take the program with CityBuild representatives to Council affiliates, however, private sector work crashed, and with it opportunities for CityBuild graduates. Then CityBuild first eliminated Trades instructors from its pre-apprenticeship program (a move later corrected), and next under political pressure moved beyond pre-apprenticeship to involve itself in journeylevel hiring. Many in the Trades had warned CityBuild that this would lead to clashes with our dispatch systems. Our warnings came true. Joining CityBuild representatives to convince our unions to embrace any program became a problem.

Now the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, of which CityBuild is a branch, has been charged with enforcing the Avalos legislation. Clashes may multiply.

A mentor’s internal knowledge of a Trade will help the career of the mentored individual much more than would external imposition of requirements by those with little or no direct experience of the Trade.

The only expense for mentorship would be in coordination. This expense would be minimal.

Bonding Assistance and Business Education for Small Contractors

The City demands bonds to protect it from the risk of various failures by contractors. Bonding requirements are often too stringent for small local contractors to bid successfully on City work. If only by dint of being too small to work or hire far from home, many such contractors employ primarily City residents.

This is not a union versus non-union issue. Many small local contractors are our own members, signatory to our agreements but early in contracting careers.

The City could assure more participation of these contractors, and so of their resident workers, by providing bonding assistance. This contradicts somewhat the purpose of bonding, since a contractor that does not have capacity to obtain adequate bonding may not have the capacity, financing and stability of cash flow to work without greater risk of non-performance.

The City could improve performance of these contractors and so reduce its risk by requiring a certain level of business education in exchange for bonding assistance. It could work with City College to provide this education.

This means some expense, but the Avalos legislation, if it intends to steer work to small local contractors without confronting fundamental reasons they do not perform more City work already, will create its own expenses. Either the City will accept higher bid prices by the limited set of local contractors that can bond for its work, or it will accept more risk by lowering bonding requirements.

Middle-Income Housing

A chart in the last City Planning Department “Housing Element” (p. 98) demonstrated that while the City has met 153.4 percent of the goals for market rate housing and 82.8 percent of the goals for very low income housing established for it by the Association of Bay Area Governments and the State Department of Housing and Community Development, it has met only 52.4 percent of its low income housing goals and – most important to retaining Trades workers – only 12.9 percent of its moderate income goals.

We in the Trades have bemoaned this for years. Trades workers are priced out of San Francisco at both ends. San Francisco’s median income is $81,136. This represents about 1,900 work hours for a Glazier or Carpenter. Those hours are hard to come by now, but are about what I averaged in my years in the field, through booms and recessions.

We take in San Franciscans from disadvantaged communities constantly only to watch them leave town when journeylevel pay lets them seek better homes for their families.

City Progressives have traditionally supported low- and very low-income housing but ignored the range in which most of the Trades live. Supervisor Avalos recently (Jan. 3) on KQED-FM’s Forum reiterated that traditional support, but said nothing about middle-income workforce housing.

This is something the Supervisor and I discussed repeatedly after he proposed his legislation. Any attempt to build Trades capacity to fulfill a 50 percent “local hire” mandate will fail unless this fundamental problem is addressed.

Work

More work means more opportunities for San Franciscans in the Trades.

Supervisor Avalos voted against the project at 110 the Embarcadero.

He voted against 430 Main.

He voted against 555 Washington.

His vote helped kill those projects, and with them many hundreds of person-years of our work.

He voted for changes that would have killed Lennar’s project at Hunters Point and Candlestick Point; fortunately, he was outvoted.

He voted against 222 2nd Street, but was outvoted again.

Even the projects he helped kill could have been improved to an acceptable point by a supervisor genuinely committed to providing us work, and through us, opportunities for San Franciscans. Anyone who doubts these opportunities should consult the same Luster and Associates report to which the Avalos legislation refers in its recitals. The report shows that intake of City resident apprentices peaked in 2001 and 2007. These peaks represent the dot-com and condo booms, periods of robust private-sector construction.

We are entitled to fear that Supervisor Avalos may use his legislation as an excuse to keep old habits. He may claim he has taken care of San Franciscans with City-funded work, and that private work is for out-of-towners and not worth the efforts of the Board of Supervisors.

That claim would be demonstrably wrong.

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Candidates well prepared for apprenticeship through shops in the schools, accelerated GED programs, VESL programs and pre-apprenticeship; apprentices well supported by childcare with construction hours and mentorship; journeylevel workers well sustained by housing in the City and more employment through small local contractors and private sector construction, and possibly freed for better employment by VESL classes – these were what was really needed to help members of underprivileged communities into successful careers in our Trades before the Avalos legislation.

They are what is really needed, still.