By Jeanne Kuang and Ben Christopher, CalMatters
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When Gov. Gavin Newsom last week signed the biggest effort in years to undo red tape for housing development, he singled out one group for credit.
“This is the third of the last four years we’ve been together signing landmark housing reforms, and it simply would not have happened without the Carpenters,” Newsom said.
The California Conference of Carpenters has emerged in recent years as one of the most influential voices on housing in Sacramento. The new law rolls back California’s landmark environmental review law to exempt urban apartment developments, an idea once considered a legislative third rail. It’s the most significant yet in a string of bills intended to boost housing production that lawmakers have passed with the union’s help.
The Carpenters’ involvement has given some Democratic lawmakers the opportunity to address the housing crisis with the blessing of a construction union.
They’ve presented an alternative to more traditional demands from organized labor embodied by the State Building and Construction Trades Council, which has opposed nearly all high-profile proposals to lower hurdles for developers that do not include minimum pay levels and union hiring requirements that some housing advocates see as so stringent and costly they effectively hamper building more housing.
The Trades, an umbrella group of 14 affiliated construction unions, are a force in the Capitol. Their members turn out reliably for campaign door-knocking and they are affiliated with the powerful California Labor Federation. Over the past 10 years, the Trades’ statewide and regional councils have donated more than $6.7 million to legislative candidates; the affiliated unions have collectively donated at least another $32 million.
The Carpenters, with its northern and southern councils, spend a formidable amount themselves: nearly $6 million on legislative races in the past decade, rivalling any of the Trades’ unions.
“Unions carry a lot of weight in Sacramento and for good reason,” said Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat and an author of the environmental carveout law. “It’s important that we’re supporting good-paying jobs and I don’t want to take anything away from them. But we have to look around at what’s working and we have to build 2.5 million homes. The Carpenters have come to the table with more creative solutions.”
Division bursts into public view
Not everyone is on board. The carpenters’ stance has created a split in the labor movement that makes lawmakers uneasy and sometimes spills into public view.
With the Carpenters’ backing, lawmakers and Newsom last month tried at the last minute of budget deliberations to push through a version of Wicks’ bill that included minimum wages for residential construction workers. The proposed wages were higher than most of the typical non-union wages for private developments, but $40 to $60 lower per hour than the prevailing wages required on publicly subsidized projects — a state-calculated figure that amounts to union-level pay.
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Backlash came swiftly. Following the Trades’ lead, union leader after union leader lined up at the Capitol to slam the proposal, arguing it would undermine their members’ higher wages. Lawmakers quickly scrapped the proposal.
“The Carpenters, in my view, are a pariah” in the labor movement, said Scott Wetch, a lobbyist for Trades-affiliated unions representing electrical workers, pipe fitters and sheet metal workers. “They’re willing to sell all workers down the river and pursue really unlivable wage rates so they can try to capture other unions’ work.”
But lawmakers say what caught their attention was more of a philosophical difference. Non-union laborers produce the majority of the state’s housing, and the Carpenters’ approach viewing them not as cheaper competition but as potential members of their union has made them “game-changing,” Wicks said.
“The role of unions is to protect the workers in their organization,” said Danny Curtin, director of the California Council of Carpenters. “But in the larger perspective, it’s to protect all workers, and then bring them into the union movement.”
Home building: The Wild West of construction
The intra-labor rift is as much a story of the American workforce as it is of California politics.
With the exception of affordable and publicly subsidized projects, housing has been largely built with non-union labor for decades. In the late 1960s, corporate giants began backing contractors to resist union demands and promote non-union labor. An influx of immigrant workers, willing to accept lower pay, made it possible. Construction unions of all stripes found the small, scattered worksites of the residential market too difficult to organize when larger commercial, industrial or public works projects provided members steadier work, said UC Santa Barbara labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein.
Labor groups see home building as the Wild West of construction, rife with fly-by-night contractors, wage theft and physical hazards.
In 2001, the national United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America split from the AFL-CIO, which includes the building trades unions. Douglas McCarron, president of the national carpenters’ union, claimed at the time that the labor umbrella group was overly focused on protecting existing members and failing to “shift resources to organizing” new ones.
In 2022, Jay Bradshaw, the then-newly elected executive secretary-treasurer of the Northern California Carpenters Union, brought that approach to the state’s housing debates.
Before then, development advocates and lawmakers could barely even introduce housing streamlining proposals without the Trades’ insertion of their favored labor standards, lobbyists and current and former lawmakers said. Sometimes, the Carpenters agreed with them.
But Bradshaw, who did not respond to interview requests for this story, was motivated by low pay and labor violations on non-unionized residential jobsites, which he often called “crime scenes,” said Sen. Scott Wiener, a major author of housing bills. Bradshaw wanted housing bills to include rules to improve those workers’ pay and conditions, but in contrast to the Trades, he was OK with those hired not being union members.
“It changed everything,” Wiener said. “It created more space for more dialogue and less of the ‘my way or the highway’ approach.”
The theory was that by improving workers’ conditions and visiting job sites to enforce the new rules, the union could one day organize them.
Carpenters focus on non-union workers
So the Carpenters in 2022 broke away from other unions to push for a bill Wicks authored that made it easier to convert strip malls and commercial properties to housing. It included requirements for developers to pay union-level wages, and for bigger projects, provide workers health benefits and agree to be monitored for wage theft and other labor violations. It did not include language favored by the Trades to hire a “skilled and trained” workforce — essentially, union labor.
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The bill passed against the Trades’ wishes, though lawmakers also passed a second, similar bill with the Trades’ hiring language. The following year, they used a similar formula to pass a pair of streamlining bills. Along the way, the support of the Carpenters garnered the support of public school employees and service sector unions, and even some Trades-affiliated unions.
“Count us shoulder-to-shoulder with anyone who will continue to drive to pull those workers up and in, as they should be,” Bradshaw said at last week’s bill-signing ceremony, “to support union labor and protect that, but to make sure that union labor should be held to account to represent all workers.”
Other unions use a similar method of organizing in an era of low unionization rates and an economy defined by subcontracting and franchising.
The Service Employees International Union, which has backed some of the Carpenters’ efforts on housing bills, has also spent years pulling non-union, heavily immigrant workers into the labor movement in part by making policy demands. Its signature Fight for $15 organizing effort in fast food restaurants, an industry notoriously difficult to unionize, got California lawmakers to mandate a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers in 2023.
But in restaurants, there isn’t a union of well-paid, skilled workers looking to safeguard their own jobs.
Major reforms to California environmental law
There were already bouts of bad blood between the Carpenters and the other construction unions over the years. In particular, the San Francisco Trades council has accused the Carpenters of bidding on projects for their own members, “attempting to claim and steal the work” from other specialized craftspeople.
So attempts to write alternative labor standards into housing laws have come across to the Trades’ unions as undercutting their contracts — or, as Wetch described it, “trying to benefit your organization to the detriment of others.”
The dispute over minimum wages last month sent that dynamic into overdrive.
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The new wage standard the Carpenters backed was presented as a way to provide a minor wage hike for the lowest paid construction workers, who are virtually all non-union.
Chris Hannan, president of the Trades council, said the organization was so outraged by the proposal because it could have undercut wage schedules incorporated into union apprenticeship programs. He also said writing new construction wages into state law that are below the union-level prevailing wages would “set a dangerous precedent that may extend outside of residential construction.”
To Hannan, promoting union hiring is how lawmakers can preserve California’s middle class. If lawmakers can guarantee there are new projects for Trades workers, the Trades would expand apprenticeships to bring new workers into well-trained, well-paid positions.
He declined to discuss in detail his disagreements with the Carpenters. But he said the proposal for lower-than-prevailing wages went too far.
“In the past, whether we thought a labor standard (proposed by the Carpenters) was sufficient or not, at least they were meaningful,” Hannan said. “This here, this time, was just a complete non-starter.”
In the end, the California Environmental Quality Act changes passed without the controversial wage proposal, which made the Trades neutral rather than opposed to the bill. It includes labor enforcement language the Carpenters said would help them root out the worst actors, such as adding liability for the developer if their contractors or subcontractors are caught underpaying workers.
The Trades say they, too, got what they wanted. For new infill apartments to skip CEQA review, the law requires union-level wages for projects with 100% affordable units, and some union hiring for projects that are taller than 85 feet.
Most developments over 85 feet use concrete and steel frame construction, which require a higher skilled labor force that is often unionized anyway, and most entirely income-restricted housing projects make use of public subsidies that require union-level wages. These were relatively modest concessions that Wicks said “we were happy to make.”
That leaves market rate and mixed-income apartment buildings under seven-or-so stories, which define the bulk of urban development in California. Hannan acknowledged that those new developments can now skip CEQA review without any new labor rules — whether favored by the Trades or the Carpenters.
“There's a lot of work to be done there,” he said.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
