Dear Editor,
Chris Daly, and others of us, are justifiably outraged over the SF Labor Council’s endorsement of Prop. G and its alliance with Lennar Corp. Sup. Daly is not alienating Labor from progressive causes — labor in this case is doing that itself.
Prop F is a grassroots initiative being pushed by Bayview leaders, activists and residents because it better serves the interests of the neighborhood and its residents. Making wealthy Lennar Corp pay for more affordable housing is not an unreasonable community demand. The SF Labor Council should humbly respect and defer to a neighborhood struggling to resist economic displacement.
Organized labor has in the past allied with gentrifying forces in San Francisco, in the name of jobs for union members. But I say: at what price? In the long run, this approach hurts potential union members who can’t afford to live in the city anymore, and alienates the Labor movement from righteous community efforts and alliances.
I am proud to be part of the Labor movement, to work with the SF Labor Council on issues and struggles that promote the rights and power of workers. But I have to respectfully disagree with my Labor brothers and sisters on this one.
Sincerely,
Renee Saucedo
To the Editor:
We can’t read this morning’s attack on Bayview Hunters Point and Supervisor Chris Daly by Randy Shaw in Beyond Chron without responding. Completely omitted from Shaw’s tirade is our neighborhood, Bayview Hunters Point, the land Lennar will grab if Prop G passes today. And if Prop G passes today, the labor leaders Shaw is defending and Daly is rightly criticizing will be largely responsible.
What I hear Shaw saying is that it’s OK for progressives to support a neighborhood that’s 91 percent people of color – predominantly Black – and the poorest in San Francisco so long as labor approves or abstains. But when labor sets itself at odds with us, we don’t count.
It’s true that Blacks have disappeared from most San Francisco unions – not only the construction trades, where Blacks were never welcome, but today few Blacks can find unionized work as maids, janitors or even Muni drivers or postal workers. In San Francisco, nearly every door to making a legal living is closed to Black people, even those that once were forced open by the community’s sheer will power.
Never have we heard a word of concern about the exclusion of Blacks from the San Francisco labor force by the Labor Council or any member union local. Their attitudes are no better today – and in some cases worse – than in the ’60s, when Blacks had to file dozens of lawsuits to integrate San Francisco locals, from the firefighters’ to the building trades’.
The Labor Council made its last minute deal with Lennar, prettied up with the acquiescence of ACORN and SFOP, for the same reason Lennar is grabbing our land: Greed. Speaking for the San Francisco Building & Construction Trades Council, Secretary-Treasurer Michael Theriault says as much. See http://www.sfbuildingtradescouncil.org/content/view/247/32/.
In exchange for labor’s backing of Prop G, Theriault’s members – almost totally devoid of Black workers – get the jobs. “With a project labor agreement already in place for much of it, [Lennar’s] project means years of work for us,” Theriault writes.
The purpose of the Lennar-Labor Council deal, a nonbinding promise to raise the portion of Prop G housing that’s alleged to be affordable from 25 to 32 percent, is to convince progressives to vote for Prop G and against our grassroots community sponsored Prop F.
Chris Daly has nothing to gain from Prop F. He supports Prop F and opposes Prop G because he has the guts to practice the progressive principles he preaches. We in Bayview Hunters Point love him for that and hope more progressives will follow his much too lonely path.
The people of Bayview Hunters Point have everything to lose if Prop Greed passes and everything to win if our initiative, Prop Fairness, passes. To defend labor’s deal with the devil, Lennar – and if you think that description of Lennar is too strong, check the web for the fury unleashed on Lennar by people all over the country who’ve bought their shoddy homes – is to tell the people of Bayview Hunters Point to go to hell.
The people of Bayview Hunters Point don’t need a so-called Master Developer – Lennar or any other – to be given our land for a dollar to develop or not as it pleases, as Prop G would do. The homes to be built on our developable land, once it’s thoroughly clean as San Franciscans mandated in 2000 with Prop P, can and must be built the same way the rest of San Francisco neighborhoods were built, by local neighborhood builders and workers.
We demand the right to put our own people to work building our own homes. We know how to make them truly affordable. And we invite labor and all progressives to stand with us, to work with us.
If labor would stop jumping in bed with big business, as the San Francisco Labor Council has jumped in bed with mega-corporation Lennar, its membership and political influence is sure to rebound. If not, labor’s power will keep plummeting – and taking the Democratic Party and progressives too down with it.
Prop F – Prop Fairness – is the people’s initiative. Its leading proponents and spokespeople are Black. When Randy Shaw’s Beyond Chron, like its nemesis the San Francisco Chronicle and major media across the country, equates Prop F solely with Supervisor Chris Daly, they are demonizing him as a straw man. Are they afraid to target a movement that, while very broad based, is Black led?
This Election Day, San Francisco voters face a clear choice: the corporate Prop Greed or the people’s Prop Fairness. Lennar reports spending almost $4 million so far on Prop G, the most spent on any
initiative in the history of San Francisco.
In addition to the Labor Council, Lennar has won – or bought – no less than the support of both the Democratic and Republican parties, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, one of the Senate’s richest members, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her nephew by marriage, gubernatorial wannabe Mayor Gavin Newsom. Yet Lennar’s own polls show more San Franciscans support Prop Fairness than Prop Greed.
In spite of such a dazzling display of power that was supposed to scare us into submission, Prop F’s flock of poor folk, with no money, collected 11,818 signatures in less than 10 days to put Prop F on the ballot. During the campaign, part of the awe-inspiring grassroots movement that’s met every Thursday for well over a year at the church known as “ground zero” next to the Hunters Point Shipyard, our folks have walked over 200 precincts door to door all over San Francisco. Our young grassroots leaders have brilliantly argued and advocated for Prop Fairness and torn the mask off Prop Greed in countless forums and all over Bay Area airwaves.
We ask labor and progressives to decide: Which side are you on?
Willie & Mary Ratcliff
San Francisco Bay View newspaper
To The Editor:
Proposition F was put on the ballot by members of the D10 community after Chris Daly could not find a fourth supervisor to send the measure to the voters, just like the redevelopment referendum shot down by Dennis Herrera was a community initiative. A more important question than why labor sells out would be why our progressive supervisors are so out of touch with San Franciscans when it comes to affordable housing on public lands?
One might understand why the Labor Council would cut a deal if Prop F were losing. But as polling showed it winning significantly–San Franciscans support affordable housing especially when there is no public price tag attached–then the Labor Council’s negotiations to undermine Prop F in order to give scarce land away to a private developer amount to a sell out pure and simple.
Combine this sell out with the Sean Elsbernd Publicity Act of 2008–Prop B which creates a two-tier vesting system that requires future city workers who would get lifetime healthcare benefits after 5 years of service to wait longer–and we see a labor movement that is in retrenchment rather than taking the affirmative initiative.
The Labor Council laudably pushed for Healthy San Francisco, which included an employer mandate to expand healthcare in the private sector. Yet for the public sector, the Labor Council is encouraging the City to cut health care costs. How does this political posture facilitate the creation of coalitions to further gains on expanding access to health care?
Here in San Francisco, we should be on the forefront of expanding access to healthcare, not further restricting it at the behest of our local corporate elite, and we should be pushing the envelope on affordable housing, not selling out to a rapacious, speculative development behemoth that would make Hunters Point into an auto-oriented retail experience, a carbon copy of Orange County.
Representatives of organized labor who have been participating in organizing for improved transit service likewise have blocked efforts to organize MUNI riders, blocked efforts to create a mass membership based organization and blocked efforts to advance revenue measures that would make downtown pay its fair share for intensive MUNI service.
As labor carries water for downtown, they sell out working San Franciscans for a place at the corporate political table.
Truth be told, the Labor Council has not been instrumental in winning many elections in San Francisco over the past decade or so other than arguably the independent expenditure effort to reelect Chris Daly in 2006.
It seems that the Labor Council has no shame and will do what it takes for it to have a seat at the table, no matter how marginal, but hopefully San Franciscans will reject such short selling of our position by our supervisors and labor.
If the Labor Council keeps sucking up to Gavin Newsom and his developer supporters, keeps kowtowing to corporate San Francisco, insists on prioritizing union head count in city jobs over policies that benefit working people while the quality of city services delivered to residents continues to deteriorate, then the Labor Council is going to have a very difficult row to hoe when their pet projects–such as the SFGH rebuild–come before the voters we’ve just sold out again.
When labor leaders care more about their relationships with the captains of industry and the “new democrats,” the moniker “labor boss” fits.
Marc Salomon
San Francisco
To the Editor:
I totally agree that the Board of Supervisors should not be meeting on Election Days. I’ll take it one step further. Holding elections on Tuesdays is an antiquated and obsolete process, like that of winner-take-all elections instead of proportional representation, that is now used to maintain power for those who already have it, in this case by suppressing the vote.
Tuesday was designated as federal election day because people were in church Sunday and had to travel to the polls, on foot or by horse, on Monday. Modernly, there is no reason to not hold elections on Sunday, except to keep people for whom it would be a big hassle from voting. These are, of course, the people who tend to vote more liberally or progressively.
So, let’s advocate for an official city holiday on all election days. While San Francisco cannot change election days to Sundays on its own, it could at least ensure that all city workers, most importantly those at City Hall, are not working on those days.
Jeff Hoffman
San Francisco
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