Construction workers wear masks as they cross a street Thursday, May 14, 2020, in Los Angeles. | Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo
OAKLAND — California Democrats are losing patience with a powerful labor ally just as a gubernatorial recall and contentious legislative primaries loom.
The State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, known colloquially as "the Trades," has killed some of the Democrats’ most ambitious bills to tackle climate change and the state’s housing crisis, and legislators and others working on the issues are increasingly willing to voice their frustrations.
The divisions in this deep blue state reflect an internal struggle Democrats nationwide will face as their environmental efforts run headlong into once-reliable union jobs. The standard line has been that the party and labor can accomplish shared goals together, such as moving fossil fuel workers into alternative energy jobs. But cutting-edge California, which often sets the tone for other states on green goals, is showing how complicated that path actually is.
Tensions spilled into the open the previous month when Democratic state legislators joined a conservative Republican in opposing a bill that effectively would have required oil companies to use union labor. Legislators who opposed the measure worried it could benefit Trades members at the expense of displacing non-union oil workers.
“Let’s not pretend the Building Trades don’t have tons of power in this room, in this building, and let’s not pretend like this bill is not helpful for them,” said state Sen. Susan Eggman (D-Stockton).
The state Senate ultimately approved the bill, further proof of the union's power. But the episode was frustrating for some Democrats who saw the Trades torpedo their earlier bill to rein in petroleum production. To those legislators, the 450,000-member union thwarted their environmental goals, then had the gall to ask for their help to expand its membership base in the oil fields. It was a stark illustration, for several legislators, of a power imbalance that consistently favors the labor group.
“I want to find a place where we're able to have difficult conversations where labor is at the table and we go beyond just saying ‘no,’” state Sen. Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara) said in an interview. “When members face personal attacks and are continuously bullied,” she added, “mistrust is going to occur.”
Organized labor rarely struggles to make its voice heard in Democratic-dominated Sacramento. But tensions have grown in the past year between unions and their legislative allies as labor has blocked Democratic proposals in the Capitol, overpowering environmentalists and affordable housing advocates. Another rift developed this past school year between teachers unions and Democrats when labor rejected attempts by Sacramento leaders to force schools to open.
To the Trades and its supporters, they are simply doing what their members expect: fighting to ensure the Legislature includes working people in its efforts to build millions of housing units and dramatically reorient the energy economy. To that end, labor has linked arms with oil industry employers against environmentalists and pushed to ensure that bills to accelerate affordable housing construction preserve a place for union-trained workers.
“There’s half a million really hardworking people that are depending on the state building trades and all the local affiliates to help them have a life here in California, and it’s not cheap to have a life here in California,” said Erin Lehane, chief of staff for the Building Trades. “We're privileged in our work to have such a righteous battle.”
Some Democratic legislators argue the group is wielding its clout with an increasingly heavy hand, thwarting action on increasingly urgent housing and climate issues. It’s a tension that has implications for national Democrats as President Biden touts the creation of high-wage labor jobs through an infrastructure package that could include climate programs like a clean energy standard.
“There’s enormous frustration with the Trades,” said a Democratic lawmaker who asked for anonymity to avoid antagonizing a powerful group. “To not be able to make progress on housing and climate is totally unacceptable, and they’re a huge part of the reason we’re not making progress.”
Despite frustrating some Democratic legislators in California — and, at times, Gov. Gavin Newsom — labor unions retain significant clout in Sacramento. Several legislators have longstanding ties to unions, dating back to their earliest days in politics. During campaigns, unions supply not just money but boots on the ground that are necessary to encourage union members and other Democrats to vote. Labor has already contributed $4.4 million toward Newsom's effort to defeat the recall this year and has devoted to providing an "army" of volunteers.
On energy, the group has been targeting bills to rein in petroleum production in order to retain its members’ jobs. On housing, it argues that bills to accelerate affordable housing construction must include guarantees that developers use “skilled and trained” workforces — shorthand for union-represented jobs.
Labor backers say such provisions ensure construction workers are paid fair wages and suppress an underground economy rife with exploitation. They point to a recent University of California, Berkeley study finding that several construction workers rely on welfare.
“Our number one obligation and commitment is to protect construction workers from exploitation in the underground economy,” Lehane said.
But developers and some Democrats pushing for more construction in this housing-starved state argue those demands either render bills unworkable for builders or unpassable in the Legislature.
“We've gone further than we’ve ever gone before with labor, to be met with a flat-out 'no, do it our way or not at all,' so there is really not a negotiation going on,” said Ray Pearl, executive director of the California Housing Consortium, which was among a coalition of affordable housing developers that submitted a compromise proposal the Trades summarily rejected. “It's definitely a scorched-earth, sort of my-way-or-the-highway-at-all-costs strategy.”
California voters consistently place climate change and housing atop their list of concerns as wildfires grow ever more devastating and housing prices continue to soar. The Trades and its allies argue that bills to address either issue can't neglect blue-collar workers who built the state’s economy. But Democratic legislators, environmentalists and affordable housing developers have increasingly come to blame the Trades for creating an insurmountable impasse.
When the Trades take a position on a bill, they come with reinforcements. Committee hearings routinely feature a half-hour of testimony from other unions lining up to “stand with the State Building Trades.” Such shows of force resonate in labor-friendly Sacramento.
“I think that we've a huge amount of supporters in the Capitol that support working families,” Lehane said. “We’re kind of overwhelmed with the amount of support we get from legislators in Sacramento.”
Labor allies often invoke the Trades’ leader by name: Robbie Hunter, a famously hard-nosed negotiator who has clashed repeatedly with Newsom and legislators in recent years. While the union and governor have patched things up, sources said the Trades’ relationship with Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon has disintegrated in the years since the group funded attack ads against a Democratic assemblymember accused of s3xual misconduct.
The Trades have also taken out ads excoriating Democrats for proposals seeking to expedite housing construction, like Assemblymember Richard Bloom (D-Santa Monica), who faced ads calling his affordable housing bill the previous year a “developers’ Trojan horse.” The group retracted an ad depicting state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) brandishing money in front of a Monopoly board after Jewish groups condemned the spot as anti-Semitic.
The group's take-no-prisoners approach, a growing graveyard of sidelined legislation and what legislators describe as a barrage of threats have legislators both fuming and struggling to chart a way forward.
“It’s one thing to have a couple bills a year you go nuclear about,” said another Democratic lawmaker who requested anonymity to speak candidly concerning the union. “But when you have 30 — not everything can be a relationship-ender, and some of these are relationship-enders.”
Some legislators are maintaining optimism. Wiener, the Legislature’s foremost Democratic advocate for accelerating housing construction, lost a coveted endorsement from organized labor the previous year and saw his bill to build housing on church land collapse amid Trades opposition. But Wiener said on a housing panel the previous week that he believed it was possible to reach a larger bargain that increases housing production and thus jobs while expanding training programs.
“If we’re strategic about it, I think we can really come up with a grand deal and fix this. We can build the housing we need and pay construction workers good wages,” Wiener said. “It’s a tough, tense time now in that particular dispute, but we can move past it.”
The standoff over California’s enormous energy sector could prove harder to resolve. Organized labor and environmentalists are both mainstays of Democratic power in California. But an intensifying effort to combat climate change by transitioning away from fossil fuels has increasingly put both constituencies at odds, with the Trades fighting to protect well-paying refinery jobs that they say green energy employment simply can't replace.
This session alone, the Trades have killed a fracking bill and a measure to add environmental justice representatives to a powerful Southern California air quality agency, and they are opposing a bill to enshrine the state’s goal of carbon neutrality by 2045.
After years of diplomacy, environmental advocates are sharpening their rhetoric. California League of Conservation Voters president Mary Creasman said in an interview that the standoff has been building for years but “in the last couple years, it’s really kind of gotten fever pitched.”
“I think at this point the leadership of the building trades have kind of gone off the deep end. They’ve lost credibility. It’s like they’ve become this pawn of corporate polluters, and they’re acting actually against the best interest of their members and California in general,” Creasman said. “It’s not about members anymore. It’s about ego and power and control.”
The Trades point to their support of renewable energy projects, like wind and large-scale solar, that can reduce carbon emissions while creating stable jobs. But unions argue the energy economy can't yet sustain a shift at the pace some Democrats and environmentalists want.
“We do not believe we should be killing off industries we remain dependent on until we're no longer dependent on them,” Lehane said. “It’s going to happen that we're going to not be dependent on fossil fuels, but we’re just not there yet.”
State Sen. Henry Stern (D-Canoga Park) is trying to play a longer game. He has one bill aimed at bringing oilfield work under the union umbrella along with the refinery jobs that are already unionized. He's still shepherding the bill despite the Trades and oil industry undermining his separate proposal to accelerate greenhouse gas targets.
"It's trench warfare at this point; everyone's sort of dug in," he said. "But while you're in the trench, you've got to be thinking concerning the path to peace, the whole time. I swear there's some nugget of progress to be made in here, and showing some good faith to those working in the industry."