Aboriginal Blacks United (ABU) President James Richards has asked UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann to meet with the community before Nov. 15 about UCSF’s local hiring plan, or halt all work at its Mission Bay Hospital construction site.
Noting that ABU is still waiting for a call regarding a Nov. 2 letter that ABU hand delivered to the Chancellor’s office, requesting a meeting to discuss the lack of community jobs or even a community hiring policy at UCSF’s Mission Bay Hospital project, Richards is asking UCSF to “halt all work at the UCSF construction site until you sit down to sign a community hiring plan, one that guarantees local workers will perform half the work required to build the new Mission Bay Hospital.”
In his Nov. 2 letter to Desmond-Hellmann, Richards stated, “You are spending $1.7 billion on this construction right here in our backyard, but you and UCSF have no policy or plan in place to put San Francisco residents, especially those from neighboring committees such as Bayview-Hunters Point, to work on your project.”
‘Your staff’s excuse is that work has not yet started at the site and they are working on a plan,” Richards added. “This however is an untruth as there are people out there at the construction site as we speak and we have already seen your team’s haphazard attempts to hite a community worker only to fire them within a matter of days.”
“We represent men and women, black, brown, white and everything else, union workers from Bayview Hunters Point and the southeast sector, workers from our community, a community that no one gives a damn about,” Richards continued. “We believe that if the community doesn’t work, no one works and never again will we allow the lost opportunities before us pass us by as we struggle to survive and stay in the City.”
“Many hours have been wasted by many people in many meetings with various staff over the past year and a half, so now we come to meet with you,” Richards concluded.“We ask you to stop all work at the hospital immediately until you have a community hiring plan in place that has consensus approval from the community.”
Richard’s latest missive comes the same day that the Board’s land use and economic development committee is holding an informational hearing at 2 p.m. in Room 263 on San Francisco’s local hiring policy. And comes shortly after Barbara French, UCSF’s vice chancellor for university relations, told the Guardian that UCSF is working to evaluate hiring needs for phase of the project, talking to the unions, and intends to make its findings public in December.
“We have had a voluntary local hiring policy since 1993,” French told the Guardian, confirming that in the past 17 years, the university has reached a 12 percent local hire rate on average. “Sometimes it was 7 percent, sometimes it was 24 percent … Our [goal] is to reach a number that is beyond what we reached before but which is realistic.”
French also recently told community-based organizations that UCSF hadn’t signed a contract with the contractor at its Mission Bay hospital project, didn’t have the permits yet, and that the recent community celebrations didn’t mark the start of active construction at the site. French said general hiring at Mission Bay will begin in December. “We don’t get any city funds at this site, so our commitment is voluntary. But we feel very strongly that we have to reach out.”
To date, Sup. John Avalos, who has introduced legislation to impose phased-in fines on contractors that don’t achieve local hiring goals, has acknowledged that UC is not under San Francisco’s jurisdiction and can’t be compelled to do more local hiring.
“But we know that they are doing a critical amount of building and investing taxpayer dollars, and that this land use impacts the surrounding community,” Avalos told the Guardian. “So it makes sense that we have local hire legislation and access to serious end-use jobs at the hospital.”