Strangest thing I ever saw…
Somebody convened a City Council meeting to determine the Building Trades’ level of participation in a $700 million project, and the Building Trades didn’t even bother to show up. No members chanting, no signs, no threats, “no nothing.”
Even stranger, the session was necessitated by the fact that the member unions in the aforementioned Building Trades Council had simply refused to provide the Equal Opportunity Plans (EOP’s) that Council had requested in its mid-December ordinance.
Did the unions know something that we didn’t know about Monday’s agenda?
Can you say “The fix was in,” boys and girls?
I attended the session along with a group of about 35 African-American contractors, construction workers and community representatives. They were “in the house” that day because they recognized how important it was for Council to finally “send a message” that the City would no longer sit idly by and allow some of its most attractive blue-collar employment opportunities to go almost exclusively to white males who don’t even live in Philadelphia.
The community representatives clearly understand how this ongoing elimination of African Americans and minorities from the City’s construction work sites has contributed to economic marginalization, desperation and a propensity for some to delve into the “alternative economy” and crimes of violence, here in the City.
They also understand how ironic it is that the Commonwealth is about to build an extension to the Convention Center in the hope of attracting visitors to a City that already has the highest poverty rate among the country’s 10 largest municipalities. At the rate construction industry exclusion relegates City residents to unemployment and social dysfunction, this may not be a place that people will choose to visit─even with a spanking new wing on the Convention Center.
I must say that the black construction workers and community representatives were admirably well-mannered during the tortuous Council session, which was late-to-start (after 10:30 am), frequently recessed and didn’t offer a final decision until almost 5:30 pm.
Maybe they were too well-mannered as they fanned out to state their case to their Council representatives during the numerous “breaks” in the agenda. Perhaps they were lulled to sleep when they saw virtually no representation from the Building Trades in the chambers, over the entire seven-hour session.
Maybe they naively assumed, as voters too often do, that their elected officials actually do have the best interests of Philadelphia citizens at heart when they go to a negotiating session, whether it’s in the “front room” or the “back room?” I think they learned Monday that that’s not always the case.
Maybe the Building Trades already knew that the “fix” was in and that they didn’t even have to do their normal, boisterous “song and dance” to have the project “green-lighted” and the jobs made available. Maybe they realized that the closed meetings they had previously held with elected officials, with Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce representatives, and with Convention Center Authority representatives guaranteed that there would be “business-as-usual” on this project, no matter what the City’s long-disenfranchised black and minority construction workers had to say about it.
Perhaps the unions knew that on the day of the session, the Governor would arrive in the same City Hall, purportedly to talk about police budgets, but, also to emphatically reinforce the idea that he and the members of the General Assembly were losing patience with these minority participation delays and that Council had better get its act together immediately or risk losing the funding for the project.
Maybe that’s why there was such an eerie lack of union presence in the room. Maybe that’s why certain Council people, when asked about the mostly incomplete and, in some cases, totally absent union EOP plans, said they were delighted that the unions had been nice enough to actually sit and talk with them about the topic of inclusion, at all. At least, that’s what several Councilmembers said.
Apparently, unbeknownst to the citizens of Philadelphia, Monday’s Council session wasn’t really about finally holding the construction industry’s “feet to the fire.” Rather, it seems to have been about celebrating the fact that the unions had been kind enough to talk to Council members about a touchy subject, and about giving the unions a pass on a piece of legislation that wasn’t even two months old.
Maybe that’s why Councilman Goode was the only dissenting vote in the otherwise unanimous approval of the incomplete EOP plans and the granting of the “notice to proceed” with Convention Center construction.
It looks as though City Council, with just one stalwart exception, decided not to confront the unions any further on this vital economic issue and to “punt” the responsibility to the Mayor’s new commission on construction inclusion.
If that new Commission’s agenda is also going to be driven by back-room deals and a lack of meaningful accountability, black construction workers and contractors, and perhaps the City’s overall local economy, are “dead in the water.”
Say it ain’t so, Mayor Mike. Say it ain’t so.
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