San Diego Labor Wins Big with Council Vote for Citywide Project Labor Agreement
San Diego labor scored a historic win last week that upended our city’s long tradition of antipathy towards the union movement. Building on the momentum created by the passage of Proposition D in 2022, which ended San Diego’s decade-long ban on Project Labor Agreements with the city, the council unanimously voted to embrace PLAs for future projects.
As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported:
San Diego made some fundamental and impactful changes Tuesday to how it builds large construction projects like fire stations, libraries, sewer pipelines and bridges. The City Council approved a union-friendly project labor agreement that will soon apply to every city project over $1 million that could make projects more expensive but will also boost wages for local construction workers.
The same article goes on to point out that the San Diego PLA will, in addition to setting wages, establish safety protocols along with “hiring disadvantaged local workers like former foster children, homeless people and veterans.” It also cites Council President Sean Elo-Rivera’s argument in favor of the measure where he notes how, “For decades, San Diego was a test lab for what comes when a greedy, conservative establishment runs a big city . . . It doesn’t work.”
Elo-Rivera is correct that this vote represents a historic power shift in city politics in favor of working people. Carol Kim of the San Diego Building and Construction Trades echoed Elo-Rivera’s sentiments last Tuesday in her comments to the Council, observing that:
Twelve years ago, wealthy businessmen funded and passed a measure that they believed would codify, in perpetuity, their personal and professional entitlement to practices that allowed them to enrich themselves on the public’s dime, feasting at a table set only for them, on the backs of working people. But that changed because two years ago, you gave us—the workers and voters of San Diego—the chance to clear that table—and rewrite the menu. And we did. Our legacy is in the policy before you today.
This PLA won’t erase the injustices of the past, but it can write a better, more equitable future. We cleared the table, and today, you have the opportunity to reset that table, ensuring that there is a seat for every worker that labors on a public works project for our city—that the way we build our communities empowers, uplifts, and protects working people as well as business owners and, of course, the broader public.
Lucas O’Connor of the Progressive Labor Alliance provides more historical and political context for this vote as he explains how:
Decades ago, a national network of right-wing billionaires and operatives made San Diego the lab rat for all of their worst ideas to strip a city for parts. They capitalized on a global financial crisis to turn desperate working people against each other, illegally eliminating pensions for city workers and outright banning even the consideration of union protections for construction workers on taxpayer-funded projects.
After a decade of crumbling infrastructure while contractors lined their pockets and workers struggled, voters did their part to fix things by voting for pro-worker, pro-union candidates and ballot measures. The work to fulfill the mandate starts after Election Day, and this PLA is the follow through that guarantees billions of taxpayer dollars will now support safe, sustainable, local careers as we rebuild San Diego after decades of mismanagement.
Nothing could underline O’Connor’s point about San Diego’s crumbling infrastructure more than the recent devastating flooding that has harmed so many of our neighbors in Southeast San Diego.
As Andrea Guerrero of Alliance San Diego observed in the wake of that disaster, “the floods [were]caused by poorly maintained infrastructure in lower income communities.”
While I will dedicate next week’s column in this space to that issue, it is worth underlining that this victory for workers needs to be followed by many more wins for the working-class folks in those historically neglected communities if we hope to overcome the “decades of mismanagement” that O’Conner calls out.
Now it’s time to rebuild a more just San Diego with union labor and begin to address both past and present inequities.
Note: For those interested in diving even deeper into the history of the right wing assault on San Diego government, a good place to start is the 2005 Center on Policy Initiatives report Target San Diego: the Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy and Smart Governance by Lee Cokorinos. I wrote about this report in the now defunct San Diego City Beat and followed that with two columns in the OB Rag that summarize that work and reference some of the deeper history covered in the book I wrote with Mike Davis and Kelly Mayhew, Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, the paperback edition of which deals with the toll of San Diego’s longstanding antipathy to revenue measures, another political albatross for another column.