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.

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.

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.

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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.

“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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