With Rebuild, Council aims to diversify the Trades

If all goes as anticipated with Thursday’s City Council vote on Mayor Jim Kenney’s $500 million Rebuild initiative — aimed at improving the city’s recreation centers, parks and libraries — Philadelphia will undertake its biggest public project in years, complete with plans for a gender and racially diverse workforce helping to bring it to life.

But will those diversity workforce plans work, and will their impact be sustaining?

An analysis of union goals for diversity hiring on the city’s last recent, comparable public project — the Pennsylvania Convention Center expansion — might offer a glimpse at how effective such aspirations are in actually translating into real jobs and union entrance for Black and brown people.

In a document obtained by The Tribune on the Convention Center expansion project that began in 2008, 12 of the 15 local Building Trades unions signed on to a diverse hiring project labor agreement (PLA). Most of those unions listed their current membership demographics and goals to hire more Black, Hispanic, Asian and women workers. And indeed, the project achieved its diverse workforce goals – 25 percent African American, 10 percent Hispanic, 5 percent Asian, 10 percent women and 50 percent Philadelphian.

But while the Convention Center expansion workforce was diverse, the historically white Building Trades remained white, years after the expansion began. The racially exclusive legacy of the Trades has current and former government officials flailing for a method to provide a systemic pipeline into the Trades for workers of color and women.

“Nobody trusts them, nobody believes them, and their history says at the end of Rebuild they’re going to be all white still,” Jay McCalla, former deputy managing director under former Mayor John F. Street, said of the Trades.

It’s because of this long-standing perception that a number of council members are hoping to create a sustainable pipeline for minorities, especially Black and Hispanic workers, into the Trades. Earlier this week, Council’s Committee of the Whole passed several amendments to the Rebuild bill, requiring contractors to commit to drawing from a diverse pool of pre-apprentice and job training participants and graduates, and adding a requirement that Philadelphia residents comprise 50 percent to 60 percent of the workforce.

Council also updated the bill’s diversity goals to reflect that of the city’s recent annual disparity study: Minority workers should account for 45 percent of the overall workforce, with 27 percent African-American participation. There will be an oversight committee to monitor contractor compliance with the city’s workforce goal, and Council clarified, the authority project users — the lead organization at a Rebuild site — have to terminate contracts for non-compliant entities. These measures seek to help Council and the city monitor and remediate companies’ diversity efforts.

The Rebuild legislation was heard on first reading this week, and is up for passage at the final council session before summer recess on Thursday.

Lessons from the past

In his former role as deputy managing director, Jay McCalla headed up Street’s Neighborhood Transformation Initiative. NTI, as it was known, began in 2002 and used minority businesses for 39 percent of the project’s subcontracts, and employed a workforce that was 72-percent minority with 82 percent Philadelphia residents.

McCalla said there was no model involved in achieving the city’s goals for employment. It was just a simple matter of hiring diverse candidates.

“There’s a lot of things we can do but somebody’s got to be in charge,” McCalla said. “This is why I have no confidence in the flurry of memos and a flurry of amendments because they don’t amount to a thing if you’ve got a wimp trying to accomplish it.”

According to the Convention Center expansion PLA, 20 percent of the members in Cement Masons Local 592 were Black, and 12 percent of the members in Bricklayers & Allied Craftworkers Local #1 and Iron workers Local 401 were Black. Locals 14, 690, 19, 692, 420, Elevator Constructors #5 and District Council #21 had Black membership rates in the single digits, with some figures as low as two percent. The Laborers, the most diverse union in the trades, was 66 percent Black according to data from the 2008 PLA. This is in a city that has been about 40 percent Black for decades.

Plumbers Local 690 set the most robust hiring goal, seeking to increase their African American members, at the time just 4 percent, by between 25 and 30 percent at the end of the five year Convention Center expansion.

“I think we achieved all our goals and reached all our requirements,” said John Kane, business manager for Local 690. “We work as hard as we possibly can to bring minorities in this local here and I don’t think there’s another trade out here that holds a match to us.”

Kane said he’d just become the union’s business manager at the end of 2007, and inherited the workforce numbers reflected in the PLA, but has worked to make Local 690 look more like Philadelphia.

International Union of Operating Engineers Local 542 didn’t sign the order because they were already under a federal court order to increase diversity according to an article published in 2008 by Bloomberg BNA.

International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 98 and the Carpenters Regional Council refused to sign the PLA or release their workforce profile.

As of June 2010 about 30 percent of all Convention Center workers were minority, 3 percent were women and about 41 percent were city residents. However, at the end of 2012, four years after the Convention Center expansion began, union membership was 99 percent male, 76 percent white and 67 percent suburban according to a 2013 Axis Philly piece.

Axis Philly obtained data about Trades demographics through a right to know request to the Office of Housing and Community Development, which is required to keep workforce participation data for its projects.

Efforts toward a better future

The bill in question does a few different things, but most importantly it authorizes the Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development to issue bonds for Rebuild projects to begin. The city’s soda tax is being used to fund the project, but until litigation about the tax is complete, the city has just $8 million siphoned in the general fund for Rebuild.

On at least four separate occasions, City Council delayed the vote to approve legislation for Rebuild, with Council President Darrell Clarke pointing to ongoing negotiations about a memorandum of understanding (MOU), an agreement Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration is crafting with the Trades to secure a commitment to diverse hiring, as the cause of the delays.

Earlier versions of the MOU did not have any demographic data for union membership, Councilwoman Maria Quiñones Sánchez said. As a result, Council tried to enshrine ways for contractors to meet the city’s goals in the legislation, rather than relying solely on the MOU.

Without a clear path to penalize contractors who are failing to meet their diversity goals, though, Quiñones Sánchez pressed Rebuild Executive Director Nicole Westerman during a hearing to clarify what action the city could take.

“What happens?” asked Quiñones Sánchez.

Westerman replied: “Before we terminate we’d like to have a discussion with the district councilperson. And we’d like to for example do something like stop payment first and see if that is an adequate incentive to them taking the actions necessary to achieve the participation requirements.”

Quiñones Sánchez said she now feels penalties for non-compliant contractors are more clearly answered in the legislation, with power going to the project users overseeing a Rebuild project.

“We did speak to a little bit about the project users being able to take the contracts away,” Quiñones Sánchez said about language added to the bill. “Councilman [David] Oh in fact is working for language that authorizes the appropriations committee to take those contracts away so how you operationalize that becomes real important.”

Ryan Boyer, business manager for Local 332, during an editorial board with the Tribune last year, said the Convention Center expansion reached its goals because adequate penalties were articulated for contractors that failed to do so.

“[You] had enforcement provisions contained in the contract to allow for removal of a contractor if they didn’t live up to the agreement that they signed,” Boyer said of the 2008 project. “Thirdly, it was adequately communicated to the contractor community, the labor community, and a board was willing to act.”

Looking back at that project, Local 98, for example, didn’t sign on to the diversity agreement at the time. The union was still allowed to work on the site and the union’s spokesman Frank Keel said Local 98 still met it’s diversity goals for the project.

“IBEW Local 98’s certified payroll records show that our Convention Center expansion workforce was 48 percent minority from the start of the Convention Center expansion project to the finish,” Keel said in an email to The Tribune. “Elaine McGuire-Pierce, an accomplished African-American female union electrician, served as one of two job stewards for Local 98 on the job, the largest public works project in the history of Pennsylvania. IBEW Local 98 remains committed to diversity in its workforce.”

Additionally, Keel said, “IBEW Local 98 — does not release information regarding the race, gender or ethnicity of our full membership.”

Cracking the union membership code

Similar to the Convention Center expansion’s diversity agreement reliance on initiatives like the Lucien E. Blackwell Pre-Apprenticeship Program, Rebuild has pushed the PennAssist pre-apprenticeship program as an example of a process to include minorities into the Trades. PennAssist was created in large part with the help of Councilwoman Jannie Blackwell, who has used it to hold the University of Pennsylvania to certain inclusion standards during the school’s construction projects.

Legislating the required use of several citywide apprenticeship programs like PennAssist was part of Council’s effort to help contractors, especially unions, along with diverse hiring Councilwoman Cindy Bass said.

Deputy Mayor for Labor Rich Lazer said the administration plans to partner with Philadelphia Works to help track participation progress on Rebuild projects and that Local 98 and the carpenters are “prepared to execute” the MOU.

“Because Rebuild will be operating its own program, in partnership with the trades and other pre-apprentice programs, we will be able to track our participants,” Lazer said in an email through Rebuild spokesperson David Gould. “So we will know how many minorities and women gain membership in the trades through the Rebuild program and will be tracking them and supporting them to ensure their success.”

In a statement, Gould called the favorable committee vote “a critical step toward launching Rebuild,” and Clarke said he expects the bill to pass Thursday.

Regarding the number of times the committee vote was delayed, Clarke said, “You want to make sure you get this right. This is a very significant program ... There are a lot of individuals in the city of Philadelphia that have already taken the test for apprenticeship, that are currently not working. We think this lays out a strategy and an opportunity to get those individuals on the job, in the union, and to be able to move forward for a very productive opportunity.”

Quiñones Sánchez recognized that through council’s changes to the bill the unions have the choice to, or less of an excuse not to, grant diverse participates and graduates from city training programs who have worked on Rebuild projects entrance into the unions.

“We want whoever’s been trained in the past through a Building Trades collaboration ... those guys are getting on Rebuild jobs immediately with no more tests or standards or anything else,” Quiñones Sánchez said. “It is up to the union to decide if they want to give them a card or not. We would hope that they do but we can’t get them to do that. They have to be willing to do that.”

Source: The Philadelphia Tribune