Activism

Council Establishes Task Force to End Racially Inequitable Employment on City Construction Projects

Established by a unanimous vote of Council members at their October 5 meeting, the task force will be composed of members of the building trades and those who have been excluded from the unions and good-paying construction jobs, as well as representatives of agencies and community organizations that have a stake in the outcome of these discussions.

Published

3 years ago

November 14, 2021

Ken Epstein

The work of the task force will not be easy. Participants must design proposals that undo the historic job discrimination that dominates the construction industry, which has long been protected by the building trades unions nationally and locally.

By Ken Epstein

The Oakland City Council is taking steps to implement a new report calling for the end of racially inequitable employment on construction projects by setting up a task force that is expected to come up with proposals to require steadily increasing equity in hiring for building projects that are funded by city money.

The report comes in the wake of the building trade unions’ request for a citywide Project Labor Agreement (PLA) that would guarantee that most city construction jobs would go to members of their unions.

The council’s policy goal is to produce equity in city-funded construction employment. Of the unions that reported, 2% of current union members are female, and 5% are Black.

The task force is scheduled to meet for about three months and to report back to the City Council in January with its conclusions or to inform the Council how it is progressing. Meetings of the task force will be open to the public.

“The City of Oakland’s commitment to embed ‘fair and just’ into all the city does calls for reframing of building trades agreements to address the historical exclusion of Black, indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) and women from building trade union membership and employment,” stated a report submitted to the City Council by Darlene Flynn, director of the city’s Department of Race and Equity.

“It will require a completely redesigned approach that assigns shared responsibilities to begin to reverse over 150 years of exclusionary history and its impacts,” the report said.

In her verbal report to Council members, Flynn said the written report to the council was difficult to produce because information was hard to obtain. Ultimately, 10 of 28 building trades unions submitted data on gender, race and ethnicity of their members.

“We’ve been working on this a couple of years to get to this point,” she said. “It’s been difficult to move the equity conversation forward because of the lack of information and data.”

Though difficult, obtaining data is key, she said.

“We use racial disparity data to start our conversation,” Flynn said. “Unemployment for Black residents nationally and in Oakland is always twice that of what it is for white residents. Unemployment for Latinos in the Oakland area runs about 1.5 times as high as white residents. These are the disparities that, over time, we want to close.”

Previous Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) have focused on the interest of labor, “which are very important,” Flynn said, but they neglected workforce equity. Now, the city can use a PLA “to advance workforce equity.

Looking at long-term job discrimination, Flynn said, “There has been no meaningful increase in the representation of Black workers in the building trades to date. This is not particular to Oakland; it is historic and embedded in the industry.

“We know we have to remove structural practices and barriers to inclusive opportunities for historically underrepresented groups in trades journey-level (jobs). It’s embedded as systemic racism and sexism are in our history and our institutions.”

Flynn emphasized that intentional equity work is the priority. “As a prerequisite for a PLA, (we must) do equity work first and then design and prepare the way for PLA workforce equity proposals.”

“This is an opportunity to do something very different as opposed to tweaking around the edges. Small changes are not going to make big outcomes,” she said, emphasizing that policies need to be stronger, and they need to be enforced.

Part of the change must be to educate workers on construction jobs to end racial and gender harassment against Black and women workers, Flynn said. “This is always part of change and culture shift from one reality to another.”

Councilmember Carroll Fife underscored the seriousness of the work the Council was undertaking.

“This conversation is painful for so many reasons,” Fife said. “This is going to be challenging for all of us because we have to course-correct where things have not been equitable historically, specifically for Black folks. And we have got to be honest about that.”

This is the second of a series of articles on Project Labor Agreements and racial equity analysis.

Ken Epstein

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Oakland Post: Week of October 9 – 15, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of October 9 – 15, 2024

Published

7 hours ago

October 13, 2024

Oakland Post

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‘Respect Our Vote’ Mass Meeting Rejects Oakland, Alameda County Recalls

The mass meeting, attended mostly by members of local Asian American communities, was held in a large banquet room in a Chinese restaurant in Alameda. The Respect Our Vote (ROV) coalition, consisting of concerned community members and groups, is organizing meetings in Oakland and around Alameda County leading up to the November election.

Published

2 weeks ago

September 28, 2024

Oakland Post

Some of the leaders who spoke at the Respect Our Vote – No Recalls!” mass meeting were (left to right): Elaine Peng, Mariano Contreras, Pastor Servant B.K. Woodson, and Stewart Chen. Photo by Ken Epstein.

By Ken Epstein

A recently organized coalition, “Respect Our Vote – No Recalls!,” held a standing-room only mass meeting on Sept. 14, urging residents to vote ‘No’ on the two East Bay recalls funded by conservative billionaires and millionaires with the help of corporate media and instead to support the campaign to protect residents’ democratic right to choose their representatives.

The mass meeting, attended mostly by members of local Asian American communities, was held in a large banquet room in a Chinese restaurant in Alameda.

The Respect Our Vote (ROV) coalition, consisting of concerned community members and groups, is organizing meetings in Oakland and around Alameda County leading up to the November election.

Speaking at the meeting, prominent East Bay leader Stewart Chen said that local leaders, like Alameda County D.A. Pamela Price and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, worked hard to get elected, and our system says they get four years to carry out their policies and campaign promises. But rich people have “broken” that system.

Within two months after they took office, they were facing recalls paid for by billionaires, he said. “(Billionaires’) candidate did not get elected, so they want to change the system.”

“(Our elected leaders) were elected through the process, and the people spoke,” said Chen. “It’s the entire system that the billionaires are trying to (overturn).”

“If a candidate does something wrong or enacts a policy that we do not like, we let it play out, and in four years, we do not have to vote for them.

“The democratic system that we have had in place for a couple of hundred years, it needs our help,” said Chen.

Pastor Servant B.K. Woodson, a leader of the coalition, emphasized the diversity and solidarity needed to defend democracy. “We need each other’s wisdom to make our nation great, to make it safe. We are deliberately African American, English-speaking, Latino American, Spanish-speaking, and all the wonderful dialects in the Asian communities. We want to be together, grow together, and have a good world together.”

Mariano Contreras of the Latino Task Force said that people need to understand what is at stake now.

The recall leaders are connected to conservative forces that will undermine public education, and bilingual education, he said. “The people behind (the recalls) are being used by outside dark money,” he said. The spokespeople of these recalls are themselves conservatives “who are wearing a mask that says they are progressives.”

In 2017, Oakland passed an ordinance that gave teeth to its “Sanctuary City” policy, which was brought to the City Council and passed because it was supported by progressive members on the council.

“That would not be possible anymore if the progressive alliance – Sheng Thao, Nikki Fortunato Bas, and Carroll Fife – if they are pushed out,” he said.

Elaine Peng, president of Asian Americans for Progressive America, said, “I strongly oppose the recalls of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price.”

Citing statistics, she said Alameda County’s murder rate was higher when Alameda County D.A. Nancy O’Malley was in office, before Pamela Price was elected to that position.

“The recall campaign has been misleading the public,” said Peng.

She said Oakland is making progress under Thao. “Crime rates are falling in Oakland,” and the City is building more affordable housing than ever before and is creating more jobs.

Attorney Victor Ochoa said, this recall is “not by accident in Oakland – it is a political strategy.”

“There is a strategy that has been launched nationwide. What we’re seeing is oligarchs, (such as Phillip Dreyfuss from Piedmont), right wingers, conservatives, who can write a check for $400,000 like some of us can write a check for $10.”

“They aligned themselves with so-called moderate forces, but they’re not moderates. They align themselves with the money, and that’s what we have seen in Oakland.”

Ochoa continued, “You got to put up signs, you’ve got to talk to your neighbors, volunteer whatever hours you can, have a house meeting. That’s the way progressives win.”

Pecolia Manigo of Oakland Rising Action spoke about what it will take to defeat the recalls. “This is the time when you are not only deputized to go out and do outreach, we need to make sure that people actually vote.

“We need everyone to vote not just for the president, but all the way down the ballot to where these questions will be. Remind people to fill out their ballot, and mail it back.”

Former Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, who had herself faced a recall attempt, said, “In this recall, they used a lot of money, had paid signature gatherers, and they moved very fast. I talked to many of the people gathering signatures. They didn’t know what was going on. Many of them didn’t live in Oakland. It was just money for them.”

“Sam Singer, the guy who is their spokesperson, is a paid PR guy. He has media ties, so they’ve swamped the media against Sheng,” Quan said.

‘Oakland is… a city that implemented some of the first rent control protections in the country. So, developers and big apartment owners would love to get rid of rent control,” said Quan.

“We also established ranked-choice voting, which allows people with less money to coalesce and win elections,” she said. “That’s too democratic for people with big money. They would rather have elections the way they were.”