By Lorena Gonzalez / San Diego Union-Tribune Op-Ed / July 13, 2025
Abundance.
Of course!
But abundance for whom?
The labor movement has always been supportive of dreaming big, building large projects, increasing housing supply and completing massive infrastructure projects.
That’s what union workers do — skillfully build things, advocate within our communities for government-driven investments and large infrastructure projects, and support campaigns for those investments. And, I would argue, our unions know better than anyone what happens when government-funded infrastructure projects and jobs get held up with unnecessary delays, duplicative permitting processes and red tape.
We see it with the waning interest in California high-speed rail as the delays and permitting impediments make it a punching bag for right-wing politicians. We saw it with our own members, as massive public investments by President Biden simply took too long for the effect to trickle down and be felt in terms of the good union jobs that were guaranteed.
Our main criticism with “the Abundance agenda” isn’t about what it does — in terms of reducing regulations to speed up development to increase supply — but what it fails to do. Streamlining development must be tied to labor and environmental standards so that there is a clear public benefit and not just a giveaway to developers.
We are in an era of unprecedented greed and staggering income inequality. Common sense and history have shown us that neither of those things can be fixed by simply adopting laissez-faire capitalism and calling it progressive.
We have seen firsthand how developers and investors will do anything to increase their profits, without regard to the people who are actually doing the work. That’s why for decades we have developed a schedule of wages, benefits and worker protections to ensure at least a small bit of the profit from building large projects makes it way to those who put in the back-breaking labor to create and maintain it.
If you truly want a society of abundance, you can’t allow abundance for the powerful while denying it to working people. Unions, from the construction industry to the hospitality industry, are the only economic actors that have created labor standards that consistently increase wages, improve job stability, ensure safe workplaces, and enhance basic health care and retirement benefits for the working class. And our standards don’t just benefit union members. A rising tide may lift all boats, but our labor standards are even more direct than that.
Non-union workers on many large projects earn a prevailing wage — the union wage — as a condition of their contractor winning the bid on the contract. Labor standards significantly boost the wealth of working-class families and help create a middle class, not just among union members, but all working people. Simply saying that by building things quickly there will be so much work that we don’t need wage and benefit standards is embracing a supply-side economic outlook that has always proven to be false in America.
That brings us to the California Environmental Quality Act. While we do not agree with all the ways that CEQA has been used to stall and stop projects, and we support reforms to eliminate its misuse, we also realize that today CEQA is the only meaningful tool that is available to the community and workers to have a voice in development in our region. Without CEQA, developers have no need to even think about the environmental and community benefits of their projects.
Organized labor has often supported CEQA exemptions for large projects, specifically when those projects had basic guardrails to ensure environmental standards, community benefits and significant worker protections. Eliminating CEQA without securing any community benefit may spur the construction of some market-rate housing, hotels and other profitable advanced manufacturing projects but does nothing to ensure that the workers constructing that housing, cleaning those hotel rooms and working in those factories will be able to make ends meet.
The central tenet of the labor movement has always been about empowering working people. The natural power imbalances in American capitalism favor large corporations, wealthy developers and economic elites. Unions, through community voice and collective bargaining, are the only meaningful check on that concentrated power. If the abundance agenda — in seeking efficiency and removing “roadblocks” — steamrolls unions and the labor standards, wages and benefits we have won, that brings us back to the natural question. Abundance for whom?
Gonzalez, a former San Diego Assembly member, is president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO.
If you truly want a society of abundance, you can’t allow abundance for the powerful while denying it to working people.
Oh please, spare me the sermon. I’ve seen enough as a working union member to know that the rubber stamp of the union worker is nothing more than a no holes barred exercise of voting for work without the results of the project being examined against the public landscape. This is a area where dems fail. Not all projects are in the public good. Midway Rising is the next example. Backdoor politics, groundswell of local worker/labor support, being fostered without ramification to the general taxpayer despite the special tax district. Somebody needs to see the forest from the trees.
CS – You’ve become very cynical in your overly-broad sweeps of your brush of negativity. You are half right — not all projects are in the public good. Some unions want only to get jobs for their membership, and the public and the environment be damned! But not all unions are like that.
nope, as a former member, just life experience. I’m simply calling out the irresponsibility of unions. Yes, I want accountability to the system I worked at. But you have to admit, the first union mantra is to secure jobs for the base, otherwise they don’t exist. Today, currently, they do it with Toad. When will you differentiate the politics within the system instead of the composite blanket Dem approach?
I’ve been in 4 different unions and worked for one for 2+ years plus have studied unions’ history, the history of the labor movement, the struggles for safe working conditions, for the 8-hour day, the 40-hour work week, for civil rights — my experience.
And I’ve lived 30+ years in a union. So what.
Okay bro. You’ve had your say.
Like I asked, When will you differentiate the politics within the system instead of the composite blanket Dem approach?
I disagree with your question. And I don’t care to argue with you. Why don’t you address issues raised by this post? That’s what the comments are for.
You’re all pissed off cuz I called you on your cynicism and negativity.
I’m finding myself agreeing with you, Chris. My whole career was in construction here in San Diego, with twelve of those years as a member of the International Union of Operating Engineers. You said “voting for work without the results of the project being examined against the public landscape.” You are correct, the mindset was always jobs for workers and profits for contractors. What was being built, the consequences of that construction, were not even considered, did not matter.
The construction trade unions are some of the most un-considerate unions and most short-sighted ones around. I can see where your experiences in those trades didn’t provide more enlightened experiences. Plus, not to mention that San Diego historically has been one of the most anti-union towns in California.
Just to clarify, as a union member, there’s no interest as to the project being of a public worth or benefit. You are a worker, to secure a job, to earn a wage, to support your family. Plain and simple.
You see the membership backing Toad in this regard.
Your union doesn’t care if the project is responsible. They want the work for members. That is why members just vote the party Dem line to secure work. As a retiree in the system, I get that, but remain outspoken to doing the right thing. Not every work is right.
Not always true; certain unions are extremely considerate and conscientious in what projects their members work on. Unions are not these simple rubber-stamp groups.
OK bro, when SDSU gets a rubber stamp for 4500 more beds that Swinerton is doing despite the fire issues to the 300+ homes/ ADU’s to the west, and limited evacuation routes, the unions are not doing a disservice?
Okay bro.
Can you give us a for instance of unions that showed consideration?
Yes, those unions that supported Martin Luther King in the civil rights struggles and those unions that opposed the Vietnam war. And as I stated earlier, unions brought us the 8-hour day and the 40-hour work week. Unions were a large contingent in FDR’s wave of progressivism. I could go on — books have been written about all of this, so I’ll decline to enumerate. (Start with wikipedia?)
Sometimes we have it right, sometimes we need to be corrected, sometimes we’ll to find consensus and common ground, and sometimes we will agree to disagree, but the reason San Diegans come to the OB Rag is engraved on our own County Administration Building built by union workers and funded by the New Deal, that was furnished by the people of San Diego.
“Good Government Demands the Intelligent Interest of Every Citizen.”
Frank, your above mentioned victories are: the 40 hour work week established by the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1940, FDR died in 1945, The Civil Rights movement was over 60+ years ago, it took over 11 years for you to, by the sound of it apparently, personally end the occupation of Vietnam 50+ years ago.
By your own metrics then, gauging history; The Democratic Party, which was the heavily racist party of Dixie, would still control the party then right? And so the because the unions have a history of benevolence, so must the party?
No, obviously.
The political dynamic has so dramatically changed because the Democratic Party took no action to legislate any solution to “Citizen’s United” decision so that the Democratic Party could continue to profit from the windfall year after year year, now some 15 years later to the tune of what is it now $20-30+ billion or more?
Frank, seriously, with all due respect. Chris Shultz comments are anything but anti-union. You have been becoming increasingly hypocritical, far too condescending and heavy handed with your self authorizing censorship.
Stanford Prison experiment much?
For Christ’s sake Frank, please tone it down. You are an intelligent man, more than capable of vigorous debate. Yet, you gaslight almost every single person that is critical of the antithetical California Democratic Party policies running roughshod over all Californians including yourself.
Many times you yourself violate the OB Rag’s own standards of conduct for comments. You lob more and more personal attacks against commenters than anyone else by a factor of 3.
Even more maddening you call people out publicly in the Rag, by name, and then petulantly censor their responses simply because you have the authority too. Even when they are well within the OB Rag’s standard of conduct; yet you, by your own standards, are not.
This is the “comment” section, of a blog, not an Editorial Opinion section.
Question authority, not accountability.
Let the people speak.
Frank, I know you’ll deny and delete my response; but as someone who has had a lot of respect for you; you’re beginning to sour your own credibility and taking the OB Rag down with you. You only have one reputation.
Let the people speak, freely.