Who Cares About San Diego Workers? Everybody Should

Despite their problems, unions are the answer to what ails us most

Over the first few weeks of the existence of The Jumping-Off Place, several people have told me that focusing as much on labor as we do is less likely to result in us developing a huge following.  While we have done very well so far, increasing our subscriber list by over 10-fold in a short period of time, I acknowledge the point. Labor unions, for the average reader, may not be as sexy as a laundry list of other topics more fit for quick social media hits.

Indeed, in another context, I have heard from some New York publishers that, not just the subject of labor but even a focus on the city of San Diego is seen as “niche” in their circles.   

So perhaps, a virtual soapbox featuring San Diego labor, politics, and culture is hopelessly marginal from the word go.  We may as well just give up the ghost and go with animal videos and more catchy memes. 

Nevertheless, like Sisyphus, we persist. 

Last week Hamilton Nolan wrote a very solid column on his Substack, “The Distance Between You and the Revolution: How to Get People to Care about Labor Reporting,” where he addresses the decline of labor reporting nationally and ponders why it is so hard to get folks, who are workers themselves, to read or care about the labor movement. 

 Refusing to give up, he observes that:

Most people who are not union members feel remote from the labor movement. They have a hard time believing that the machinations of organized labor somewhere far away from them matters to them. The trick is to draw the line from the life of a regular person—You!—to the labor movement. There are many ways to do this. One effective method is: 

·       You have a job—> Your job sucks—> Imagine if your job could be better—> That’s what unions do—> Let me tell you about it. 

This method can reach just about anyone, on a very personal level. I also like to use a more politically focused argument that I think is central to the reason why everyone should care about the labor movement and its power: 

·       America sure is fucked up today—> Why?—> 50 years of rising inequality—> How the hell do we fix that?—> Give working people the power to take back their fair share of the money—> Unions. From there he goes on to add that folks can also be brought into the labor universe by arguing that “fascist strongmen” like Trump have been made possible by the death of the American Dream, and that “The American dream died due to 50 years of the rich getting richer while wages stagnated for the working class.”   The loss of union density that has accompanied this, he notes, has also made it possible for new technologies like AI to “eat your job” in the absence of robust worker power. 

Translating that same argument to San Diego, one can make the case that the historic lack of union density in our region has resulted in the disproportionate power of moneyed interests and thus government policies and economic trends that favor the affluent rather than working people, particularly in an hourglass economy like San Diego’s that has a large and growing number of low-paying, unorganized service sector jobs.  Those in the “middle” of the local economy are precarious while those at the bottom are screwed by employers, landlords, and politicians who see them as disposable or irrelevant.

Hence, when the bad budget times come, city officials don’t look to mine the “slush fund” of tens of millions of dollars in corporate giveaways for hoteliers and others before asking for sacrifices from city workers, Brigette Browning, the Secretary-Treasurer of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Labor Council, observed at the UCSD Labor Center launch last Friday. 

So the weather here is great for visitors from elsewhere, but lots of other things are not always so sunny for San Diego workers. 

Why do so many jobs suck?  Why is housing unaffordable?  Why are there huge numbers of homeless people?  Why doesn’t the government serve the interests of most San Diegans better?  The answer is that workers in the largest sectors of our economy are unorganized and lack the economic and political power to exercise enough influence to change their circumstances. 

While there are a number of local elected officials today who are trying the push back against the tide of our region’s history, it is a heavy lift, and, frequently, it’s easier to placate one part of the working class while neglecting the majority of it. 

The course of San Diego’s history will only truly change in this tourist town when most of the service sector and other unorganized workers are more heavily unionized and have enough leverage to force their way into the political calculations of our leaders. 

As San Diego City Council President, Sean Elo-Rivera, pointed out during his speech at the opening of the UCSD Labor Center, once we start to “build movements” to “grow power,” we can finally go on the offensive rather than engaging in so many defensive battles.

Until that day comes, one can expect more lip service than action.  Lots of corporate equity talk without much effort to address economic inequality in any real way.  Not laying people off is good but paying them a living wage would be better. 

That’s why local workers are fighting for the San Diego Service Worker Minimum Wage Ordinance that would bring a $25 per hour wage increase for tipped and non-tipped employees in union and non-union hotels in the City of San Diego. This ordinance would also include hotel stagehands and janitorial positions. 

So while the story of one large labor union muscling its way into a favorable position in San Diego’s Democratic Central Committee gets lots of play and shines a negative light on labor as a whole in the local press, the bigger story about rampant economic inequality and the difficulties faced by most working class San Diegans has been and will continue to be untold.  And that is the story that really matters. 

Hence, we persist.