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MAY 31, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

Building Our New Electric Fleet

In a signal victory last week, an activist group prevailed on a major
bus manufacturer to hire its workers from local, historically
disadvantaged communities.

In 1997, after a campaign of several years' duration, the Los Angeles
City Council voted to establish the nation's first living wage
ordinance. Under its terms, businesses with which the city had
contracted to do its work-for which the city's taxpayers were
footing the bill-were required to pay their employees a specified,
decent wage, as well as offering them a modicum of benefits.

The ordinance, and the campaign that pressured the council to enact it,
were the brainstorm of Madeline Janis, the attorney who'd founded and
led the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE). "Taxpayers
should not be subsidizing poverty-wage jobs," Janis argued.

At roughly the same time, in tandem with another progressive community
organization, LAANE also persuaded a number of local developers to sign
community benefits agreements (CBAs), which obligated those developers
to hire local residents-in effect, disproportionately minorities and
women-on major construction projects. Previously, such projects were
built by a heavily white male workforce that lived nowhere near the
city's center, even as those projects uprooted the self-same minority
communities who'd lived and worked there. With the coming of CBAs,
minorities began to gain much greater entry to union construction jobs
that offered pay and benefits that otherwise would have remained out of
reach.

As living wage ordinances and community benefits agreements spread
across the nation's cities in the aughts, Janis moved on to an even
more challenging task, or, more precisely, a dual task: bringing
manufacturing back to America, and ensuring that the jobs created in the
process hired locally and from historically disadvantaged communities.
She created Jobs to Move America (JMA), which sought to ensure that the
new railcars and buses that city and county governments purchased (an
increasing number of which are electric) were manufactured in the U.S.
by the same kind of workers who'd benefited from CBAs. (In the last
decades of the past century, when a transit district had bought new
railcars, they had had to buy them from abroad, as no one was building
them in the States until JMA came along.)

Last week, Jobs to Move America won a signal victory when bus
manufacturer New Flyer agreed that 45 percent of its new hires would go
to minorities, women, and veterans at its Anniston, Alabama, plant,
where it manufactures buses under a $500 million contract with Los
Angeles's L.A. Metro transit district. New Flyer has a number of
factories across the nation that now may also come to adopt similar
standards. And as the largest purchasers of railcars and buses are the
transit authorities of major cities, where Democrats dominate
politically, it's likely that those authorities will favor such
standards in their contracts going forward, and that Jobs to Move
America will take manufacturers to court if they don't comply. It
required the combination of these two strategies to convince New Flyer
to come to terms.

Like the railcars and buses themselves, the campaign to bring
manufacturing home, with a representative workforce at good wages, has
many parts. Earlier today, United Auto Workers president Ray Curry and
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten called on
local governments to purchase their new electric fleets from unionized
and local workers. The transit allocations in President Biden's $1.2
trillion infrastructure act certainly give local governments the means
to do that. The campaigns waged by Jobs to Move America-modeled in
part on the campaigns Janis herself initiated a quarter-century
ago-gives them the way.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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