OCT. 2, 2009 :NWLP
9/29/09
9:53 AM
Page 7
Portland City Council resolution
Construction unions break into residential ‘green jobs’
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
Unions may get a foothold in Port-
land’s “home energy retrofit” market
— and be a part of reducing the city’s
greenhouse gas emissions — thanks to
a Sept. 30 City Council resolution.
Under the resolution, contractors se-
lected for the city’s Clean Energy
Works Portland pilot project will be re-
quired to enroll new hires in a certified
training program. The Oregon and
Southern Idaho Laborers Employers
Training Trust will likely be the first
such program ready to go.
The resolution also requires that
contractors commit to neutrality toward
any decision by workers to unionize,
and agree to recognize a union if a ma-
jority sign authorization cards. And
contractors will be required to pay the
prevailing wage or 180 percent of the
Oregon minimum wage, whichever is
higher.
Clean Energy Works Portland was
developed by the City of Portland,
Portland in line for ‘Emerald
City’ green jobs pilot program
Portland is one of 15 U.S. cities be-
ing considered for participation in a
new project known as Emerald Cities.
The Emerald Cities Collaborative
— led by the AFL-CIO Building and
Construction Trades Department
(BCTD) and environmental justice
groups like Green For All — proposes
to do a comprehensive city-by-city en-
ergy efficiency retrofit of America’s ur-
ban building stock. The goal is to re-
duce the carbon footprint and energy
consumption of government, commer-
cial, and residential buildings — and
generate good jobs, as well as path-
ways for women and minorities to ca-
reers in the building trades.
Starting in five cities, Emerald
Cities Collaborative will offer organiz-
ing assistance, training investments,
and help raising private capital to local
coalitions of labor and minority com-
munity groups.
Many details are still being worked
out, but as envisioned, local alliances
of labor and minority community
groups would pool their influence on
local elected leaders to try to get public
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support for city-wide retrofits. Women,
minorities, and low-income residents
would be targeted for access to the jobs
and contracts, which would include
wage and quality standards, and com-
mitments to training, so that workers
could move beyond entry-level weath-
erization jobs.
The BCTD would develop a cross-
trade retrofit training curriculum for the
workers, which would serve as a stan-
dardized pre-apprenticeship program
preparing participants for apprentice-
ships in the building and construction
trades. And low-income neighborhoods
would have priority in getting the resi-
dential retrofits, both as a matter of jus-
tice and practicality. Typically older,
less well maintained buildings are
where the greatest energy efficiency
improvements can be made.
Portland-area building trades lead-
ers heard about the project at a Sept. 22
meeting at International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers Local 48 hall.
The decision will be made by the end
of October whether Portland will be
one of the first five cities to take part.
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modified by the Oregon Legislature,
and funded by a $2.5 million stimulus
grant from U.S. Department of Energy.
The program loans homeowners
money to do retrofits, which can con-
sist of insulation, air and duct sealing,
and installation of more efficient fur-
naces, heat pumps, and hot water
heaters. The loan is then paid back over
a 20-year period on gas and electric
bills. Since the energy savings begin
right away, homeowners can expect to
have no increase on their bills, even as
they enjoy the increased comfort of a
better-insulated home.
A pool of 12 contractors for Clean
Energy Works Portland will be selected
using a “best value contracting”
process, which gives extra points to
employers that provide health insur-
ance, hire graduates of pre-apprentice-
ship programs, and employ women,
minorities, and formerly incarcerated
individuals.
“Any effort to raise the floor on stan-
dards is going to help us,” said Labor-
ers organizer Ben Nelson, “because the
contractors we want to work with are
the ones that want to have benefits. And
a lot of things you agree to do as a
union contractor are going to add
points in this best-value bidding
process.”
A city-appointed committee will en-
force the resolution and certify the
training providers.
Laborers training director Al DeVita
said the Corvallis-based center is ready
in October to start training weatheriza-
tion installer technicians, supervisors,
and home energy auditors. Based on
employer demand, the classes could be
held in Portland. Workers new to the
field would take a two-week general
construction and safety training class,
followed by a two-week weatherization
installer tech class.
Laborers union representatives are
pursuing talks with several contractors
about a special residential wage and
benefit rate, which would be lower than
the union’s regular scale for commer-
cial work.
Representatives of the Pacific
Northwest Regional Council of Car-
penters and the Sheet Metal Workers
have also shown interest, and could fol-
low up with training programs of their
own.
The City Council resolution is for-
mally known as the “Community
Workforce Agreement on Standards
and Community Benefits in the Clean
Energy Workers Portland Pilot Proj-
ect.” Local union reps call it a break-
through, and possible model for other
locales. Federal investment in retrofits
is rapidly growing, but unions have had
little presence in residential work. The
Portland program is starting small: 500
homes are supposed to be completed
by next summer. So the immediate im-
pact of the resolution is modest. The pi-
lot project is expected to employ about
40 workers, and about 10 of those
would be new hires who would go
through the training program.
But the work is on track to scale up
rapidly. Project managers envision
home energy retrofits for 100,000
homes in Multnomah County in the
coming years. Portland is competing
with other cities for an additional fed-
eral grant of $100 million, and may
know by the end of the year whether it
will get that funding.
The Portland resolution was the
product of months of complex multi-
party negotiations. Local Laborers took
part, with support of representatives
from the international union and
Change To Win, plus Green For All,
Oregon Tradeswomen, Inc., several mi-
nority pre-apprenticeship programs,
and the labor-faith-community group
Metropolitan Alliance for the Common
Good. The resolution spells out that a
project goal is that 20 percent of the
dollars go to minority, women or
emerging small business contractors,
while 30 percent of the workers be
women, minorities or from low-income
communities. To meet the latter goal,
contractors sign “first source” hiring
agreements with qualified training pro-
grams.
Up to now, there hasn’t been an offi-
cially established “prevailing wage
rate” for the “weatherization techni-
cian” classification, since there was
never any requirement that contractors
pay prevailing wage. But the U.S. De-
partment of Labor, asked to do a sur-
vey, found that for Multnomah County
the standard compensation was $15 an
hour plus 29 cents an hour for benefits.
That would be the wage under the res-
olution, since 180 percent of Oregon’s
minimum wage is $15.12 an hour.
The City Council meeting to vote on
the resolution took place after this is-
sue went to press, but there was no
known opposition.
Remembering the real Norma Rae
By BOB BUSSEL
Crystal Lee Sutton, the textile
worker and union activist whose expe-
rience was dramatized in the movie
“Norma Rae,” died Sept. 11 after a long
battle with brain cancer. She was 68.
During the late 1970s, I worked for
the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile
Workers Union as the New Jersey co-
ordinator for the national consumer
boycott of J. P Stevens, the company
that employed Crystal Lee Sutton.
J. P. Stevens was the WalMart of its
day — a serial labor law violator. In
1978, the company became the poster
child for our ultimately unsuccessful
effort to reform the National Labor Re-
lations Act and ensure the right to or-
ganize.
I met Crystal Lee when she came to
New Jersey as part of a national tour af-
ter the movie’s premiere. Crystal Lee
did not always adapt easily to her role
as public spokesperson, some of my
union colleagues said. She could be de-
manding with the union and was not as
disciplined as campaign organizers
NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS
would have preferred. She could be un-
comfortable when she was asked larger
political or strategic questions.
Like many of us, her life was
marked by contradiction, no doubt
made bigger by the gap between her
real story and Sally Field’s mythic por-
trayal of her on the movie screen.
Shortly before her death, Crystal
Lee reflected on the events that led to
her being thrust into the spotlight:
“When I went in the plant with my
union pin, you would have thought I
had the plague, and that is when the
trouble started. It was truly different be-
cause a woman had never done or
dared to do such stuff.”
Within the culture of the southern
textile mill town, Crystal Lee’s actions
were audacious. She did in fact scrawl
“union” on a sheet of cardboard and
prompt her fellow workers to turn off
their machines. As depicted in “Norma
Rae,” that memorable scene shows how
an act of individual courage can inspire
others to acts of solidarity — one of the
most cherished values of the union
movement.
I am always moved to tears by that
scene, as the deafening roar of the mill
diminishes one machine at a time, to
near silence, and workers revel in their
collective defiance of the employer
who has dominated their lives.
Many unions now give “Norma
Rae” awards to honor courage and ac-
tivism among their members, and I
have no problem with giving these
awards in the name of a fictional per-
son. However, we should not forget that
“Norma Rae” was a real person, Crys-
tal Lee Sutton, who in a shining mo-
ment showed us the meaning of
courage, the power of solidarity, and
perhaps most importantly, that trade
unionism can become the vehicle en-
abling ordinary people to accomplish
extraordinary things.
(Editor’s Note: Bob Bussel is direc-
tor of the Labor Education and Re-
search Center at the University of Ore-
gon.)
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