What's at stake:
Unions have been making a lot of headlines over the last six months.
In Fresno, they are also taking a stance on suburban sprawl issues.
Dillon Savory is the executive director of the Central Labor Council, which represents 50 unions and 105,000 workers in Fresno, Madera, Tulare, and Kings counties.
In an interview with Fresnoland last week, Savory said that he opposed SEDA, the city of Fresno’s proposed 45,000 home mega-development in southeast Fresno.
Fresnoland sat down with Savory to talk about why the Central Labor Council opposes a project that is ostensibly in the wheelhouse of the labor movement: building things. In the interview, Savory spoke about the limitations of the city’s strategy to use suburban sprawl as a jobs and housing program.
This interview was conducted by Fresnoland’s Gregory Weaver. It was condensed and edited for clarity.
What’s the problem with SEDA, from labor’s perspective?
There are so many problems. Really every citizen – not just members of labor unions – should be concerned about SEDA. And the more I dive into it, the more I find that other groups, on different policy issues, have problems with it as well. SEDA’s just poorly planned. It’s a giveaway of money that is unnecessary.
What the city is planning to do is give millions of dollars to the developers to help a smaller pocket of people move out of the city, instead of helping fund what we could be doing in downtown, which is leverage state and federal funds to build tall housing complexes and develop jobs, break open old streets, redo the sewer lines, all of the things that the city desperately needs to do.
From a labor perspective: this is about the city continuing to finance plans that put taxpayers in debt for decades and not finance other projects that would be more beneficial to homeowners and low-income families who need housing most.
Note: the city does not currently have a plan for how to pay for SEDA’s $600+ million infrastructure.
SEDA is not helping to get anybody that’s in poverty into an affordable house, which would then address the biggest issues in Fresno: rent affordability and homelessness. And most of all: it’s not really money that multiplies. SEDA will have a hard time leveraging state funds or federal funds, because it’s private sprawl development.
The city leaders are trying to invest in something that all their successors are going to have to deal with for many, many years. But none of the current staff or elected officials are going to be there at the completion of this project. SEDA is going to require the city to put up an estimated $600+ million on infrastructure to connect streets, sewage and utilities to the new developments, but that infrastructure, that money, is not helping to sustain any living wage jobs after we connect to the sprawl development.
So basically, we’re throwing a massive chunk of money at the developers for them to create fancy new homes for people that already probably have pretty good homes. That doesn’t do anything for real, systemic problems in Fresno that every single resident tells every single elected official we need to solve – which is better jobs, affordable housing, homelessness, and safe neighborhoods.
Will building SEDA use a large portion of union labor? And under the major developers, what wages would union and non-union workers make?
It’s hard to determine if that number is 0% or maybe around 10%, which is probably the maximum it would be for the entirety of the project.
In terms of the housing that’s going to be built: there will be zero union workers on those projects, because the developers of residential housing in the Central Valley do not build with union labor, ever. At all. They prefer to build as cheaply and fast as possible to make the maximum amount of profit. There is no investment in their workforce.
The only time that they use union labor is when they’re building prevailing wage projects, which are not residential sprawl developments. Occasionally they build an infill housing unit downtown or somewhere with financial incentives, which would have state money involved and trigger prevailing wage requirements. But privately funded residential housing is a 0% union industry.
Note: the city has no estimate of how much of SEDA’s 45,000 homes will be affordable housing.
And so, there will be almost no good jobs at all from SEDA.
The difference between a non-union construction worker in residential housing and a union worker is at least $35 an hour. Non-union construction workers generally make under $25 per hour, with no benefits or apprenticeship to further their skills. The full package of a union construction worker is somewhere between $35 and $55 more per hour when you include the benefits that union workers have in their package: a secure pension, health care for their family, and a fair wage. It all depends on the level of training and the type of craft in our industry.
Now, undoubtedly, you always see a few corporate super-centers, like Target and Walmart, get built directly into the new community and occasionally one union contractor might get a piece of that new Target, maybe the painters might get the outside of that Target for instance. But those types of shopping centers are private construction and most of them will be built nonunion.
And there is a certain amount of loss to the retail sector when it comes to these sprawl developments and brand-new super centers because they generally eat away the customer base at union stores, small businesses and local operations in the urban core.
At best, the $600+ million the city is trying to invest in sewers, streets and infrastructure for SEDA will have some union labor involved in opening up sewer lines and electricity and those types of things. But why would the city give all that money away when we have more important things to invest in?
What types of projects does labor want to build in Fresno?
Labor wants to build projects that benefit people. Typically, we are the most skilled workers working on the most complex projects. And usually, those complex projects are things that are extremely important to get right. They usually benefit a whole region.
So you’re talking about retrofitting of historic buildings, building affordable housing units, parking garages, and transit systems, whether it’s high speed rail, inner-city transit, or making sure an expansion of the airport runs correctly. This is part of the core infrastructure that makes a good city work: that’s what the unions want to work on.
When you’re building cardboard houses for the upper middle class: there’s not as much skilled labor required in those types of developments. And that’s why they look like the way they do when you go through them: they all look like they were carved out of a cookie-cutter.
What’s the future of organized labor in Fresno? How do you plan on expanding the labor movement?
The expansion is inevitable. Everybody under 30 – there’s like an 88% approval rating of labor unions right now in the country. They’re itching to get into good jobs.
I think there’s a misconception that young people don’t want to stay at a job for very long. But there’s this fundamental idea that if you’re valued, you have a good, secure job and you like where you live: that element of stability is what people are yearning for.
But with student debt, income inequality and a lack of affordable housing, you’re seeing young people jump all over the place just to try to find where a happy place is for them. So, the expansion of unions is inevitable.
Right now, the building trades are booming. I mean, we’re busting at the seams. There’s so much work, and we barely represent 9% of the construction industry in California. We’re only at 9% in California, and things are rockin’ and rollin’. Organizing new members and apprentices has never been more successful.
In retail right now, you’re seeing in the last five years, there’s been a record amount of NLRB petitions for new unions across the country. Starbucks, cannabis shops, REI, there’s a long list of retail workers organizing.
At the same time, we’re seeing so many new industries trying to come to the valley because we’re one of the cheaper places in California to bring new industries and train new workers. For example, Reedley College has this really amazing forestry program right now.
And agriculture is failing, due to water supply issues, the transition to nut farms, and less worker-intensive crops. They are converting farmland to solar farms at a record pace. Which is great for us because large solar farms are almost exclusively union built. It’s unfortunate for the farmworkers, however. They have been underpaid and overworked by the Ag industry for 100 years and now their available work is decreasing.
So, we have this perfect storm that I think industry really wants to capitalize on. The climate transition is fully underway and there’s an intense need for open land to build green projects on. We just have to train the workforce to meet the demand.
From labor’s perspective, how should the city address the affordable housing crisis?
Well, we’re off to a decent start. That’s because Joaquin Arambula and Jerry Dyer secured up to $250 million to start ripping up the streets in downtown and making infrastructure viable for larger buildings. I think that is going to spur some of the private investments in downtown Fresno.
This will help address the affordable housing crisis, in the sense that these upgrades will allow for the restoration of older buildings to be made into affordable housing. Affordable housing means putting realistically priced units in buildings that go upwards 10 to 20 stories high, mixed in with market rate units. That’s what we need – more than any single-family unit.
That’s where you can, if you don’t have a car, you can walk to a grocery store, you can walk to the transit system. You can thrive without needing a car.
You bring up Newsom, Dyer, and Arambula’s $250 million investment in Downtown. What’s Labor’s hope for how that money, and other city resources are invested in downtown Fresno?
Best-case scenario is that instead of spending several hundred million dollars financing three more decades of sprawl development, like SEDA, we would pair that money with the state of California’s $250 million and begin actually addressing the needs of the residents of Fresno, which is affordable housing, transit systems, homelessness, safe neighborhoods and, you know, build a community where people can thrive without needing a $3,000 mortgage.
Developers are saying developer fees are too high and they price homeowners out of their budget. How should we pay for the costs of suburban sprawl?
We should not pay for the cost of suburban sprawl. The developers, like many industries, pass 100% of the costs that are levied upon them by governments onto the purchaser, and when demand is high, amongst an affluent group of citizens, they can get away with that.
That is unfortunate, because estimations show that developers are making somewhere between 20% and 25% profit on every unit because of what they pay their workers and their ability to buy huge amounts of land decades before a project begins.
So, we should not finance sprawl development at all. We should be financing the things that help non-affluent, struggling Fresno residents, which are the grand majority of Fresno residents.
Really novel approach in this area especially if it has legs. Like a breath of fresh air. Something we don’t see too much of around these parts either.