Cities Part 3: Black and Urban Power Under Siege

“While many of these projects are bringing sorely-needed jobs and tax revenues back to areas that have been disinvested, there is no guarantee that the “ripple effects” of the projects will benefit those residents who need them most. CBAs give a role in the process to community residents, and help insure that the people who remained loyal to the cities during the darkest years share in the benefits as urban areas are rediscovered. Developers of these large projects have a particular social responsibility, not only because they are moving into existing communities, but because taxpayer dollars subsidize their projects.”

More than just a mechanism to pry loose a few jobs from developers, the goal is to awaken communities to the possibilities of their own futures, to mobilize citizens to stand up to Big Capital and the Black, brown and white politicians that serve it. It is through movements such as this that a new Black politics can be born.

One step leads to another

In California and elsewhere, the Living Wage Movement is the tie that binds most of the players together. Greg LeRoy looks forward to a “terrific broadening of the living wage movement to expand into subsidies.” San Francisco this week passed a ballot measure to raise the citywide minimum wage to $8.50, boosting the salaries of more than 50,000 low-income workers “with only moderate costs for most businesses affected,” according to New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.

Black labor was midwife to the Living Wage Movement. In 1994, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) President Bill Lucy, Secretary-Treasurer of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union, brought together the “AFSCME-led coalition of labor and religious leaders in Baltimore [that] won enactment of a law that required private firms to pay their workers a living wage, or lose their contracts with the city.” (See “The Living Wage Movement: A New Beginning,” May 8, 2002.) More than 110 cities have passed Living Wage laws, to date.

Organized labor will be the weighty presence at the Milwaukee “Tools for Communities that Work” conference, November 9 – 12. With $4 billion invested in its Housing and Building Trusts, the AFL-CIO’s pockets are deep enough to earn a seat at the urban development table. (The total value of pension funds is $7 trillion but, as Greg LeRoy points out, “In no case do unions have more than half the seats” on the boards that administer those funds.) Activists will engage union executives in a discussion of “Labor, Sprawl and Smart Growth,” a debate that inevitably leads to the need for public intervention to tame and resist, rather than hold the hands, of Big Capital.

CBTU President Lucy, in his capacity as AFSCME’s number two executive, is urging local presidents and secretary-treasurers to find ways to “marry” social investment strategies with projects undertaken by churches, even the storefront kind. He encourages his troops to “broaden their thinking” to examine what can be done with union pension funds “within the scope of their authority.” And there lies the essential urban challenge to labor in general, and Black labor most particularly. Labor accepts (and the CBTU embraces) its social responsibility to the larger community. Union pension managers also have a fiduciary responsibility to the men and women whose deferred wages they are investing. The world of development is much like a battlefield. Sometimes, there can be no quarter.

For example, anti-union Wal-Mart, the ultimate “big box” retailer, packs a kill-radius of miles. “There are times when a project is so bad, it should just be stopped in its tracks. Like Wal-Mart,” says Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy executive director Janis-Aparicio. “It’s a death star, killing all the local businesses.”

If labor cannot muster the popular forces necessary to beat back a Wal-Mart invasion of a neighborhood, it cannot protect its social investment in that area – its fiduciary responsibility.

No more dreams deferred

As corporations “rediscover” the cities, unions must leap with all four feet into the realm of city planning, and allocate substantial resources to those urban movements and community institutions that can ensure the viability of union-backed projects. Labor must commit itself to safeguarding the assets and internal economies of the cities by aligning itself with those who will fight Big Capital’s most destructive, people-dispersing schemes.

Labor must take the lead in nurturing Plans, tailored to every targeted locality. In the process of formulating plans for the cities, people’s dreams become tangible – and as Dr. Martin Luther King understood, dreams are the real stuff of movements. It is the stuff that is lacking in far too many Black-led urban political groupings, circles that care more about a piece of the next corporate contract that floats their way than the stability, prosperity and dignity of African Americans as a whole.