THE KENNEY administration's Rebuild initiative could
result in up to $500 million in public and private funds being pumped into
refurbishing parks, recreation centers and libraries.
By committing $100 million to the project, the William
Penn Foundation essentially has bet that Rebuild will become the racially
inclusive six- or seven-year employment project that the administration has
promised it will be.
Mayor Kenney, in promising that the project will
eventually ramp up to include a 40-percent minority workforce, is making a bet
of a different kind. He's betting that the building trades unions, which have
spent decades engaging in systemic discrimination, will suddenly throw the
doors open to people of color. He is betting that a system that has essentially
become South African apartheid will morph into the Rainbow Coalition. He's
betting, in essence, that he can negotiate an end to racism in the building
trades.
Fat chance.
The racial discrimination that permeates the building
trades has prevailed for generations - even when black tax dollars helped to
fund it. That was true in 1948, when City Council enacted the Fair Employment
Practices Ordinance that yielded little change. It remained true in fiscal year
2015, when a city-commissioned study found that 44 percent of city-funded
construction projects included no minority workers.
I have little faith that it will significantly change
with Rebuild.
That's a shame, because the Kenney administration is
trying. It plans to use non-union labor for the smaller Rebuild jobs, whose
budgets are below the $3 million threshold at which the city requires union
labor. It is planning a preapprenticeship program to bring neighborhood workers
directly onto job sites. It's planning loans and other supports to help
non-union, minority-owned companies bid more competitively. But none of that
would be necessary if Kenney used the power available to him.
The mayor could sign an executive order eliminating the
project labor agreements requiring that city-funded projects with budgets over
$3 million go to union workers.
But that would be political suicide. Not only because
Kenney got millions in campaign donations directly from building trade unions,
including the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 98. It
would be political suicide because Kenney is a Democrat, and the party depends
upon a coalition built on the money of special interests, the manpower of
organized labor and the votes of people of color.
Such coalitions work well as long as the participants get
what they want. This one is no different.
The special interests that support Democrats get
legislation. Building-trade unions get billions in government-funded work. And
while people of color got health care, job growth and reforms to a
discriminatory criminal justice system under President Obama, we get very
little from local Democrats, especially when it comes to taxpayer-funded
construction projects.
I wish I could say this is a new phenomenon, but it's
not.
Discrimination was persistent despite protests that took
place in the 1950s, when all-white work crews built University City over the
bulldozed remains of the Black Bottom. The numbers barely moved in the 1960s,
when protesters went to the home and office of then-Mayor James Tate to protest
the all-white work crews constructing Philadelphia's Municipal Services
Building. Racial exclusion was an ugly reality when blacks protested the
taxpayer-funded construction of the Leslie P. Hill Elementary School in the
black neighborhood of Strawberry Mansion.
And the Jim Crow-like system that keeps blacks in the
Laborers union - the lowest-paid of all the building trades - while virtually
excluding them from membership in the skilled trades such as the Electricians
and Carpenters, remains an ever-present reality.
I know because the city-funded Economic Opportunity Plan
Employment Composition Analysis by Econsult Solutions found that while 41
percent of skilled minority workers were available to work on city-funded
projects in FY 2015, only 22 percent were utilized.
John Dougherty, the Philadelphia Building Trades
Council's business manager, recently told the Inquirer that things are
changing. He cited a union-backed preapprenticeship that helped a diverse group
of 1,000 young people get employment.
That may very well be true, but Philadelphia's
construction worksites remain filled with white male workers, just as they were
in 1948, when City Council made its first attempt to address racial
discrimination in employment.
If, after 68 years, Philadelphia still can't get it
right, perhaps it's time for things to change.
Voters of color can't remain the only members of the
coalition that keeps Democrats in power locally.
If we don't get at least half of the money being
generated for Rebuild, perhaps it's time for us to take our votes elsewhere.
Source: Philly.com
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