Smart Growth is Becoming a Union Thing

By Greg LeRoy
Director, Good Jobs First

Few union leaders are aware of sprawl by its name. But unions locally and nationally are beginning to recognize that because sprawl harms cities, it also harms union members.

Anti-sprawl resolutions have recently been adopted by the national AFL-CIO, by one of its largest affiliates, and by a state labor federation. One union — the 1.4 million-member United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) — knows the sprawl issue because of its long antagonism with virulently anti-union Wal-Mart. And a few unions that represent public transit workers, especially the Amalgamated Transit Union, have long advocated for transit service. But the labor movement is a complex amalgam, and most labor leaders do not (yet) see their self-interest in smart growth – even though America’s 16 million unionists are heavily concentrated in urban areas.

Don Turner, president of the 500,000-member Chicago Federation of Labor, is an exception. He believes that sprawl will be the dominant issue for urban America for the next 20 years. He joined the board of directors of Chicago Metropolis 2020, a business-civic association formed to promote smart growth policies (see article, page XX), and prevailed upon it to pay for the development and delivery of a curriculum about sprawl and unions.

The curriculum, created by Good Jobs First and entitled “Smart Growth, Good Jobs,” drew 107 local union leaders for an all-day conference in April, 2000; attendees spanned the CFL’s entire membership. The gathering, the first of its kind, served to demonstrate sprawl’s specific harms and smart growth’s potential benefits and to help build an informed policy consensus among CFL leaders. Besides union-specific issues, it covered public opinion, development subsidies, regional governance and smart growth policies. Readers can get a summary of the curriculum’s main points in a Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse monograph entitled, “Talking to Union Leaders About Smart Growth”

The sessions pointed out how workers in several industries are affected by Chicago’s sprawl:
Hospitality: Good Jobs First mapped unionized hotels and hotel jobs. The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) has only three contracts outside of centrally located Cook County. This is a typical pattern for HERE, which has suffered due to the growth of “edge cities” and their companion hotels.

Health Care: A map of hospital closures since 1972 shows they are completely concentrated in Chicago and in immediately-adjacent parts of Cook County. Seven of the 27 closed facilities were unionized, affecting four different unions. Both health care jobs and access to care are being driven away from the core.

Public Employees: According to research by Myron Orfield, union members live in areas that are disproportionately low in taxing capacity. Union households have to pay higher property taxes just to keep basic services.

Public Transit: We charted commuting data and noted that more people are driving alone instead of car-pooling or using rail or bus, lengthening commute times and harming air quality. We made it clear that this is caused by sprawling job growth off the transit grid rather than by commuter choice; a Chicago-area poll found that more than a third of commuters who drive to work would switch to transit if they had a choice. We also explained how declining air quality threatens manufacturing jobs, since the Chicago region has been designated a severe “non-attainment zone” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
We finished the day by mapping the voting records of state legislators and members of Congress, based on non-partisan ratings by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education. The maps clearly show that elected officials from Chicago and its inner-ring suburbs to the south and southwest vote far more often for working families than those everywhere else.

Soon after the Chicago conference, the CFL executive board authorized Turner to represent the federation’s interests on smart growth. Together with the Contra Costa County Central Labor Council and the Cleveland Federation of Labor, Chicago submitted a smart growth resolution that was adopted at the national AFL-CIO’s December 2001 convention. Since then, similarly-worded resolutions have been passed by the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO and by the national convention of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), one of the AFL-CIO’s most politically active unions.

In popular communications terms, sprawl is both “hard” (i.e., abstract) and “cool” (i.e., not easily approached). Focusing on specific companies and jobs, we can overcome these barriers. When we name names and demonstrate specific harms, we make sprawl issues tangible and engaging so that remedies become more enticing.

The smart growth movement needs the diversity unions can bring to the table. Not just their racial diversity, but also their occupational, geographic and ideological diversity. The organizing discipline needed to recruit union members is a map for the smart growth movement to build a winning coalition.

Greg LeRoy directs Good Jobs First, a resource center promoting accountability in economic development.