Organized Labor

The San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement (OLSE) celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. More than ever, City government needs to support it fully.

When I hung up my tool belt to work as an organizer for the Iron Workers in 1999, I quickly learned not to waste time seeking enforcement of the City’s prevailing wage law. That law, as other such laws, was supposed to ensure that workers on projects funded by City taxes were paid a wage prevailing here, which was a total of union wages and benefits. The City had established no means of enforcing the law. Even collection by City agencies of the certified payrolls by which employers reported the wages they claimed to have paid their workers was spotty.

Meanwhile, under my predecessors Stan Smith, Sr. and Stan Warren, the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council was pushing both politically and through the courts for establishment of an agency charged specifically with enforcing prevailing wage. In 2001 this push succeeded.

I launched the OLSE on its first case. Walking a job at the zoo, I struck up a conversation with a carpenter doing finish work. Even though I was working for the Iron Workers and not the Carpenters, I asked him in Spanish what he was being paid. Twenty-five dollars an hour with no benefits, he replied. And for whom was he working? For the general contractor, he said. Having done research on the non-union general contractor before visiting the job, I believed that it was not carrying workers’ compensation insurance, and it claimed to employ no one directly.

I thanked the carpenter and walked on.

Not far away I came upon two carpenters doing formwork. Again in Spanish, I asked what they were being paid. Fifteen dollars an hour, no benefits. And who was their employer? They named a subcontractor.

I had spoken to only three workers, and not one was being paid prevailing wage. One was apparently working for an employer with no workers’ comp. This was a common experience for us on City-funded work at that time. Although workers would often confess their underpayment freely in conversation, they were harder to convince to file a formal complaint. No City agency was checking actual facts on the jobsite against the contractors’ certified payrolls, which frequently lied. Inspectors’ reports of work performed and of workers on site were often cursory, or too generic, or simply wrong. A worker’s complaint would then come down to his or her word against a contractor’s. There was moreover no standard process by which to pursue a complaint or to get a cheated worker paid. Faced with no clear path to redress and with the risk of losing a job or even being blacklisted among other employers while getting nothing out of it, why would any worker attempt a formal complaint?

I walked off the jobsite and immediately called the new OLSE. They investigated, found several violations and pursued a successful case. They instantly proved their value thereby.

And they instantly acquired enemies.

While most contractors are responsible, always some have relied on cheating their workers to make or maximize profits. When caught, some claim that racial or ethnic bias and not their own cheating have prompted OLSE action against them. In San Francisco, so racially and ethnically mixed, such claims make politicians and other City agencies nervous.

Unless we make those politicians and agencies even more nervous, there will always be pressure on the OLSE to relax its vigilance, and there will always be attempts through understaffing and underfunding to diminish its ability to be vigilant.

The new “local hire” ordinance will make the OLSE even more important.

One of the likely effects of the ordinance is that more City work will go to small local contractors. These contractors are already given a percentage advantage in City bidding. As I noted in last month’s column, their small size means that they are unlikely to work or to hire far from the City. Their local workforces make them attractive to general contractors and project managers seeking to assemble competitive bids under the local hire ordinance.

But the small size and reach of some of these contractors means also that they have never developed the efficiencies or the skilled workforces that would allow them to grow. Many such contractors are non-union; they can’t compete in the union sector.

On City work, where they are required to pay prevailing wage, they will be able to compete only by cheating.

Without the vigilance of the OLSE, their local workers will not earn what they should, the vaunted economic stimulus effect of the ordinance will be undercut, and union workers will have been deprived of work for no good end – indeed for no end at all except to spread that ancient, ineradicable weed, the enrichment of a few at the expense of workers.