Victory!
BREAKING: A win for San Jose families! At the August 29th San Jose City Council meeting, UA 393 members and union brothers and sisters in San Jose showed up to advocate for the Museum Place Project’s Project Labor Agreement to ensure family-supporting wages on the project. The council voted unanimously to approve the project. We appreciate Mayor Sam Liccardo and Councilman Raul Peralez’s leadership on this. We also appreciate Insight Realty’s Managing Director Dennis Randall for his work within the community and with labor groups ahead of the vote.
Here is the letter issued by UA Local 393, UA Local 483, SMART Local 104, and IBEW Local 332 on August 29, 2017
Honorable Mayor and City Council
City of San Jose
200 East Santa Clara Street
San Jose, CA 95113
RE: City Council Meeting Agenda Item 10.4
Museum Place Development Project
Dear Mayor Liccardo and City Council,
We are pleased to offer our strong support for the adoption of the memorandum dated August 25, 2017 and signed by Mayor Liccardo, Vice-Mayor Carrasco, Councilmember Peralez and Khamis that would approve the Museum Place development project.
Hundreds of local construction workers, that will build this project and be paid a family sustainable wage, want to express their appreciation to the Mayor and the City Council for working to facilitate a project that will provide a substantial benefit to the community. We are also pleased that the developer and the local union workforce were able to negotiate in good faith and produce a Project Labor Agreement that will ensure local workers are hired, apprentices are trained and those that build the project will be paid a fair and decent wage.
The authors of the memorandum also expressed their pleasure with this process when they wrote:
“We are pleased that the developer and the trades have not only engaged in good faith conversations, but come to Project Labor Agreements with UNITE HERE and the Building and Construction Trades Council.”
There is no reason, other than increasing their profit margin, as to why other developers are so opposed to working collaboratively with local workers to ensure a tangible benefit to the community from similar development projects. Approval of this project demonstrates that when pure greed and ideology are set aside, developers and workers can come together and produce a profitable project that hires local workers and pays them a family sustainable wage.
We strongly urge the Mayor and City Council to approve the Museum Place project as outlined in the memorandum referenced above. We also encourage the Mayor and City Council to evaluate what policy tools you could utilized to ensure that private sector projects, such as Museum Place, provide a tangible and substantial community benefit in the form of good paying local jobs to grow and sustain a vibrant middle-class.