Editorials

New: Building Berkeley Better

Becky O'Malley
Sunday September 06, 2015 - 09:01:00 PM

Labor Day weekend used to be about more than backyard barbecues and mall sales—and in some places it still might be. Seems to me there used to be an Alameda County Labor Day picnic. A quick Google produced no evidence for 2015, though there was one in 2014—but I might just have missed the notice.

Labor, in this context, has always meant union labor, but the percentage of workers represented by unions continues to shrink. In January, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the 2014 union membership rate nationwide—the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of unions—was 11.1%, down 0.2 percentage point from 2013. And this doesn’t even take into account all those people who wish they had jobs, but can’t find them. The latest figures seem to say that unemployment is dropping, the lowest it’s been since 2008 at 5.1%, but job growth—the number of new jobs created—was a good deal slower than the gurus thought it should be.

Labor Day picnics I have known in the past, both here and in Michigan, were an opportunity for Democratic primary candidates to show their chops and press the flesh with union members, but these days money seems to speak louder than glad-handing at picnics. Candidates of both parties, however, continue to promise Jobs, Jobs, Jobs—but what exactly does that mean? 

The ordinary meaning of a job, the one candidates and economists reference, is work done in exchange for money, and customarily it’s regular work, not just a one-time thing. There’s a lawsuit right now over whether Uber drivers have a real job or not, whether they’re employees. People who don’t have “real jobs” are called in legal jargon “independent contractors”—and dispute over exactly what these terms mean provides steady jobs for labor lawyers (who are not usually union members). 

Here in the Bay Area there’s a lot of discussion about the job-housing balance. The technical corporations which originally proliferated in the area around Stanford, once called the Santa Clara Valley but now re-dubbed Silicon Valley, are starting to gravitate toward the sexier city of San Francisco, and their highly skilled workers (mostly non-union) are moving to The City even faster than their employers. The result is that places to live in the city and its environs, for what used to be called working people or perhaps the lower middle class in our supposedly classless society, are increasingly scarce. Even the middle and upper-middle classes are feeling pinched. 

But at the same time politicians continue to promise to bring more jobs into an already crowded Bay Area. Workers qualified for the booming technical economy are doing fine and are able to pay top dollar for housing, but those who lack the skills needed for high-tech jobs are not. 

What should such people do to make a living? 

In 1928 famed economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that a hundred years later technical progress would make it possible for most people to work much less, since what needed to be done would be done with many fewer workers aided by technological progress. Sadly, however, our society doesn’t seem to be on the road to recognizing or appreciating that this might be possible. 

The standard solution, espoused sometimes even by progressive gurus like Paul Krugman, is that we should create more jobs by building more stuff. But on a planet threatened by climate change, this is often a really bad idea. 

Building stuff just to create jobs, especially when built out of steel and concrete, is adding a huge amount to the world’s carbon footprint. And it’s not just in China’s ghost cities, those immense new towns with no inhabitants. 

In the already-developed world international flight capital is spearheading the construction of enormous and unneeded luxury buildings in all major cities. But the reasonable scale buildings needed for affordable housing go unbuilt and the existing viable housing stock and the built infrastructure are allowed to rot. 

Even in Berkeley, progressive Berkeley. On Thursday the Berkeley Zoning Adjustments Board will spend a scant hour considering whether or not an 18-story project which promises to create 250 to 300 union construction jobs for the two and a half year period the project is under construction would be a significant community benefit or a grievous error which would add significantly to global warming. 

The last Berkeley ZAB meeting on this project was attended by a delegation of five or six burly men whose tee-shirts proclaimed that they were members of the Ironworkers’ Union. Their spokesperson, a statuesque African-American woman with a resonant voice and a lot of personal magnetism, spoke of her union’s fervent support for the project in question, and it’s not hard to understand why they’d want it to be approved. 

But is it really a good idea to build an environmentally costly building which will consume copious amounts of energy-intensive concrete, steel and water in order to provide jobs for a relatively small number of construction workers for a relatively short period? 

Is building an unneeded luxury apartment complex a significant benefit for the community as a whole, or just for a couple of hundred well-paid union workers for a couple of years? Especially in a city where our civic built environment (e.g. the Maudelle Shirek Old City Hall, Willard Pool, the Berkeley Rose Garden etc. etc.) is drastically in need of work? 

I’m aware that ironworkers have not been trained to restore existing structures, which is why they want to promote construction of new steel-frame projects. They could be retrained, however, to do more sustainable and more needed construction jobs in areas like restoration and solar retrofitting. 

And here’s a really radical idea. Maybe it’s time to start moving the construction industry in the direction Keynes envisioned. Maybe we should think a whole lot harder about making it possible for people to make a decent living while working less. And without accelerating global warming to boot. 

I’ve seen two unions, the ILWU (longshoremen) and the ITU (typographers), work out reasonable accommodations to technological change that protected their members. It can be done. 

In Sunday’s S.F. Chronicle, Berkeley economist Robert Reich riffed on Keynes’ theory. He mused on a few ways under the current capitalist system that would make it possible to pay people more for working less. Read it and think about it. 

Is it possible that Professor Reich could be persuaded to attend Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustments Board study session on Thursday to join in the discussion about how ironworkers and other construction unions could make a decent living without building environmentally destructive projects that we don’t need? 

If you know him, you might ask him to come. It’s at the (disintegrating) Maudelle Shirek Old City Hall on Thursday at 6. 


P.S. at 10 a.m. on Sept.7, thanks to Igor Tregub for forwarding: 

From the desk of Josie Camacho Executive Secretary-Treasurer [Alameda County Labor Council] 

Please join us at the Labor Day Picnic! 

Monday September 7th 2015
Alameda Point, 11:30am-4:30pm 2700 Saratoga Street Alameda 

FREE ADMISSION, FOOD, AND FUN FOR MEMBERS
AND THEIR FAMILIES! BRING BLANKETS, CHAIRS AND OTHER PICNIC ITEMS! 

DIRECTIONS:
1) 880 NORTH, TO BROADWAY TO WEBSTER STREET TUBE.
2)MAKE A RIGHT ON ATLANTIC
3)MAKE A RIGHT ON MAIN
4)MAKE A LEFT ON NAVY (GUARD SHACK)