Tweet
Local or loco, lessons from a liberal bacchanalia....
For Local Hiring Law to Succeed, Plenty of Cooperation Is Required
By JONATHAN WEBER
Jonathan Weber writes a regular column for The Bay Citizen.
With “buy local” becoming a mantra among those who think about improving their communities’ well-being, it’s no surprise that “hire local” efforts would be gaining steam as well.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave initial approval last week to legislation that will eventually require 50 percent of all work on city-financed construction projects to go to San Francisco residents — the strongest such law in the country. It seems like a straightforward step to boost the city’s economy, but the thicket of political, social, financial and philosophical issues surrounding the measure is dense, indeed.
Its author, Supervisor John Avalos, has gotten high marks for nuance and for building broad support, but the implementation will take a lot of care if the policy is to succeed.
From a strictly economic view, tying jobs to residency makes little sense, especially in a place like San Francisco. Such requirements make the labor market less flexible — never a good thing from the perspective of mainstream economists — and San Francisco is a relatively small city that’s the hub of a very large labor market.
Any job that goes to a San Francisco resident does not go to a resident of a neighboring Bay Area community, and thus is a wash for the regional economy. To look at it another way, if every city in the region had such a law, the positive economic impact for any individual municipality would be nil, but the inefficiencies in the market would raise costs for everyone. A reciprocity provision in the San Francisco law would treat workers from other jurisdictions with local-hire rules as locals. But if such laws were universal, they would have no impact.
It’s also the case that these requirements cost money. The original version of the San Francisco legislation would have increased expenditures by $9.3 million annually, according to a city analysis, because contractors might have to pay more if they’re drawing their workers from a smaller pool, or pay penalties if they don’t hit the local hiring targets. (The administrative costs add up as well.) Changes to the legislation have brought that number down, though it’s not clear by how much.
Perhaps the most complicated dimension of all this is that construction jobs on city projects in a union town are not entirely controlled by the contractors. The unions also have a lot of say, and they will bear much of the burden of finding qualified city-dwelling workers. Not surprisingly, the unions have tended to support or oppose the legislation depending on how much of their membership lives in town.
And that brings us to the nub of the issue. The initiative is not really about local hiring; it’s about creating opportunities for unemployed people from low-income neighborhoods. The legislation mandates that half the local hires be “disadvantaged workers.”
A group called Aboriginal Blackmen United has had some success in demanding jobs for residents of the economically depressed neighborhoods where some of the largest city projects are being developed — notably Bayview-Hunters Point. In doing so, it has at times run head-on into unions, protesting at construction sites to demand jobs.
Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, said the key to local-hire efforts is to have a pathway for the people whom they are really supposed to help. The San Francisco law requires that half of all building trade apprenticeships go to local residents as of next month; the full 50 percent local-hire rule will be phased in over seven years. For that to happen, the unions will need to play ball.
With the city planning to directly spend about $10 billion on public works over the next decade, there is a baseline logic in trying to use that spending to help those who have been hurt most by the recession.
But the local-hiring mandate will work only if everyone — the city, the unions, the contractors and the aspiring workers — gets behind the idea of using construction projects as a tool of social policy. Ideally, hundreds of low-income San Franciscans will get stable, middle-class jobs in the construction trades. But safety-valve provisions in the legislation could invite mischief, and leave city taxpayers with higher bills and not much more.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/us...anciscobayarea
For Local Hiring Law to Succeed, Plenty of Cooperation Is Required
By JONATHAN WEBER
Jonathan Weber writes a regular column for The Bay Citizen.
With “buy local” becoming a mantra among those who think about improving their communities’ well-being, it’s no surprise that “hire local” efforts would be gaining steam as well.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave initial approval last week to legislation that will eventually require 50 percent of all work on city-financed construction projects to go to San Francisco residents — the strongest such law in the country. It seems like a straightforward step to boost the city’s economy, but the thicket of political, social, financial and philosophical issues surrounding the measure is dense, indeed.
Its author, Supervisor John Avalos, has gotten high marks for nuance and for building broad support, but the implementation will take a lot of care if the policy is to succeed.
From a strictly economic view, tying jobs to residency makes little sense, especially in a place like San Francisco. Such requirements make the labor market less flexible — never a good thing from the perspective of mainstream economists — and San Francisco is a relatively small city that’s the hub of a very large labor market.
Any job that goes to a San Francisco resident does not go to a resident of a neighboring Bay Area community, and thus is a wash for the regional economy. To look at it another way, if every city in the region had such a law, the positive economic impact for any individual municipality would be nil, but the inefficiencies in the market would raise costs for everyone. A reciprocity provision in the San Francisco law would treat workers from other jurisdictions with local-hire rules as locals. But if such laws were universal, they would have no impact.
It’s also the case that these requirements cost money. The original version of the San Francisco legislation would have increased expenditures by $9.3 million annually, according to a city analysis, because contractors might have to pay more if they’re drawing their workers from a smaller pool, or pay penalties if they don’t hit the local hiring targets. (The administrative costs add up as well.) Changes to the legislation have brought that number down, though it’s not clear by how much.
Perhaps the most complicated dimension of all this is that construction jobs on city projects in a union town are not entirely controlled by the contractors. The unions also have a lot of say, and they will bear much of the burden of finding qualified city-dwelling workers. Not surprisingly, the unions have tended to support or oppose the legislation depending on how much of their membership lives in town.
And that brings us to the nub of the issue. The initiative is not really about local hiring; it’s about creating opportunities for unemployed people from low-income neighborhoods. The legislation mandates that half the local hires be “disadvantaged workers.”
A group called Aboriginal Blackmen United has had some success in demanding jobs for residents of the economically depressed neighborhoods where some of the largest city projects are being developed — notably Bayview-Hunters Point. In doing so, it has at times run head-on into unions, protesting at construction sites to demand jobs.
Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, said the key to local-hire efforts is to have a pathway for the people whom they are really supposed to help. The San Francisco law requires that half of all building trade apprenticeships go to local residents as of next month; the full 50 percent local-hire rule will be phased in over seven years. For that to happen, the unions will need to play ball.
With the city planning to directly spend about $10 billion on public works over the next decade, there is a baseline logic in trying to use that spending to help those who have been hurt most by the recession.
But the local-hiring mandate will work only if everyone — the city, the unions, the contractors and the aspiring workers — gets behind the idea of using construction projects as a tool of social policy. Ideally, hundreds of low-income San Franciscans will get stable, middle-class jobs in the construction trades. But safety-valve provisions in the legislation could invite mischief, and leave city taxpayers with higher bills and not much more.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/us...anciscobayarea
Comment