Job creation on the Oakland Global project has been a topic of public discussion during the past several months, including presentations at Oakland City Council committee hearings, the project’s Jobs Oversight Commission meetings and in local publications.
Since the project broke ground 10 months ago on a five-year infrastructure phase, it has created 450 jobs. That number is consistent with projections estimating that construction would produce 2,428 jobs and that later operations and related work would generate more.
In addition, a job center born out of the project’s job policies and agreements has helped scores of individuals enter the workplace. The West Oakland Job Resource Center’s reporting data, which covers the period from March 2013, when the center opened, to July 2014, shows that 673 individuals attended orientations. Out of that number, 328 were screened for work history and interests and directed to social services, apprenticeship programs or employment. 214 individuals entered pre-apprenticeship or apprenticeship programs, or were hired by an employer.
A driving force for the job center was to help the Oakland Global project and other contractors working with the city to meet local hiring requirements. According to the project’s construction jobs policy, each contractor must follow a specific, documented hiring and referral process intended to result in at least 50 percent of work hours being performed by local residents for each trade utilized on the project.
But despite the positive employment results on the project thus far, a handful of critics has publicly questioned whether the project is creating “enough” jobs and has argued that more jobs should be going to West Oakland and African-American residents. A claim has even been made that the legally-binding jobs policies and agreements do not reflect what was negotiated between the City of Oakland labor groups, community groups, and developers — and approved by the Oakland City Council.
One example is a local newspaper quote from Margaret Gordon. Gordon is a member of the project’s Jobs Oversight Commission and a representative of a West Oakland environmental organization focused on air quality. She questioned the very agreement that she signed — which specifies the terms of local hiring and related jobs policies on the project.
“People negotiated one thing, but then the agreement went to labor and other ‘stakeholders’ and it was changed before it went to the City Council,” Gordon told the paper.
In reality, there rightly was not a provision in the jobs policies that a particular Oakland neighborhood or ethnicity would receive priority over another. And so far, project hiring has been diverse. The top four ethnicities represented in hours worked on the Oakland global project are as follows: Hispanic – 42.1%; Caucasian – 31.6%; African-American – 15.3%; and “Failed to state/Other” – 10.2%.
At an August 21 project-related Jobs Oversight Commission meeting, Julian Gross, an attorney who was hired by the City of Oakland to help create the jobs policies and agreement, told commission members that a West Oakland hiring preference was not present in drafts of the agreement, which were circulated — to Gordon and others — multiple times from late May 2012 to September 2012 when it was finalized.
“The notion that there were surprise twists and something was changed in the back room without everyone who signed the cooperation agreement knowing about it, is not a fair or accurate representation of the city’s process here,” Gross said. “I personally sat down with, or at least offered to sit down with, every party to the Cooperation Agreement, walked through the documents to go over what was in them and what was not in them, and everybody had a chance to know what was in those documents.”
Gross noted that commissioners retroactively critiquing agreements that they themselves have approved and signed, undermines the credibility of the commission and commissioners.
“If community groups want public entities to sit down and do these things with them and they want to have legally binding agreements that get them seats on commissions, they need to be full participants in those things and take those deals seriously. And part of the deal with the Cooperation Agreement was written indications that you’ve reviewed these things and that you think they’re ok.”
