A Report on Jobs with Justice's December Exchange with Tacoma Deputy Mayor Rick Talbert

Over 60 JwJ activists confronted Council-member Talbert at a public event at which he tried to grandstand on “making government more responsive” and improving environmental health. Our exchanges with Mr. Talbert revealed just how far he has lost touch with the working poor of Tacoma who build the downtown luxury developments, make beds in hotels like the Marriott Courtyard, and clean toilets in the Tony Columbia Bank Building. While he acknowledged connections between poverty and environmental health, Mr. Talbert continued to refuse to address the root causes of growing local poverty. See below for more background, or click play in the window below to see video from the action.

Talbert's “Job growth” is Our City's “Poverty growth”

Talbert's “Affordable” Housing is only for the Shrinking Upper Middle Class

Mr. Talbert showed no interest in supporting affordable housing for those who earn less than $40,000 per year (79% of median County income). He boasted how a healthy portion of those upscale downtown condos actually are “affordable” housing when every study shows the opposite. If it's true, Mr. Talbert must be pushing onto low-wage workers subprime loans from which even the Bush Administration is now running. Not only is he out of touch with Tacoma's working stiffs but he's out of touch with Tacoma's largest developer Prium who couldn't sell a single condo at Hanna Heights since opening. The biggest irony is that Mr. Talbert bragged about building affordable housing near Pacific and 38^th St. In fact, this housing results from our members forcing Talbert and others to find alternatives to their first plan: evicting nearly 200 low-income residents into below freezing weather 2 days before Christmas '05 to make way for a 5 star hotel by Prium. This is not new affordable housing. Rather it is replacement housing reluctantly provided by Mr. Talbert and the City Council while serving the needs of Prium.

Talbert Ducks Issue of Generating More Green House Gas and Climate Change

Mr. Talbert had absolutely nothing to say when Laborers Union member Gino Vos raised the question of more commuters generated by his poverty-wage job and luxury condo scheme. As silence fell, the moderator moved to another question. For a public forum on the environmental health topic, this was the height of Mr. Talbert's hypocrisy.

Talbert Defensive on Responsive Government Issue

As parking lot greeters, JwJ activist numbers equaled all others in attendance put together. We had very meaningful exchanges with many attendees outside who expressed an understanding of why and how we plan to make Mr. Talbert accountable. The JwJ activity represented a broad diversity of participants spanning East Tacoma community activists (his district), labor union elected leaders and members, religious leaders and congregants, students, and political party activists. Inside, our questions were framed generically and did not refer to Mr. Talbert's previous behavior. Yet, Mr. Talbert shouted complete denials and details about his previous unresponsive behavior. He made no attempts to arrange the dialogue we have politely attempted for the last 6 months. It is clear he would rather we both escalate our public attacks. While this is the beauty of our free speech democracy, it is humorous for Mr. Talbert to continue pushing hot air about “responsive government” and pretend he has an open-armed approach or care about our issues.

Joint Labor Echoes Our Message to Talbert on Same Day

While publicly exposed at the Wednesday event, Mr. Talbert and the City Council got a message earlier in the day from Alice Phillips, the chair of Joint Labor - a City union coalition of seven locals: Stop under-funding essential city services by subsidizing upscale developers and eroding our tax base. Crying poverty, City management has cut services, real wages, and has shifted healthcare costs to city workers while shoveling hundreds of millions of subsidy and tax break dollars to exclusive luxury property projects and their corporate investors.

In a city which votes to support universal healthcare by over 70%, it is ironic that Mr. Talbert and City Council prioritizes luxury development risky schemes and investor super-profits over setting affordable healthcare standards. As Ms. Phillips stated on behalf of the IBEW Local 483 Tacoma Water Unit in city negotiations:

We can't see how the City will recover these corporate tax breaks for luxury condos that sit empty when the citizens of Tacoma cannot afford to live in them because the city does not prioritize living wage jobs.

Ms. Phillips assures us that Joint Labor feels the same way.

Talbert Still Pushing Social Ills of Poverty into his District

From this exchange with Mr. Talbert, we see he is content to peddle in false claims and has no specific solutions to the growing local poverty-wage job and housing crisis. Rather, his decisions reveal that he prefers to push this crisis into his own district, East Tacoma, as well as South Tacoma, Lakewood, Parkland, and other parts of east and south County where his developer patrons have less interest. No wonder these communities are revolting about spiking drug addiction, homelessness, and crime rates. The question for Talbert should not be where to push the social ills of poverty but how to reduce and end poverty while his scheme attracts elite wealth. The clear way to do this is to link good jobs and housing to all of the government subsidies provided to Mr. Talbert patron developers. If scores of West Coast cities can do this successfully, so can Tacoma.

Background

Corporate Welfare Gone Wild
While Tacoma officials pioneered this poverty-generating development model, it is now a virus overtaking Pierce County and is potentially spreading statewide. In a race to the bottom, Lakewood and Puyallup have recently implemented similar tax breaks. Current government subsidies include:

• 8 and 10 year full tax breaks for new developments
• Low interest loans such as for converting the Winthrop to a five-start hotel and condo complex
• Over $60 million in free environmental clean-up for exclusive Thea Foss waterfront property
• Below-market rate land sales such as the downtown Marriott Courtyard Hotel
• Above-market rate land purchases such as bailing out the ill-fated Crosswater Condominium
• Eminent domain threats such as the "Tombstone" parking complex
• Free infrastructure like underground parking and utilities.

Who Does Rick Talbert really represent?

• At least 3 times, Mr. Talbert was a "no show, no call" at meetings with delegations of labor and community leaders to discuss this topic.
• Rather than explore common ground, Mr. Talbert has campaigned to defend the current tax, job, and housing scheme. In public forums, he has opposed standards such as living wages, union apprenticeships, and local resident access to jobs at these subsidized projects.
• Mr. Talbert publicly claims that the luxury property projects "won’t pencil out" unless developers operate with poverty-wage non-union jobs and are not required to build a single affordable housing unit. This is the same thing developers said in scores of West Coast cities before proven wrong by working sustainable growth policies. Just like earlier bogus claims that these subsidized luxury projects benefit all residents, we want to see the data to support this claim.
• Mr. Talbert has run from informal approaches by old friends on this topic. Instead of chatting, Mr. Talbert indirectly accused one friend in an awkward professional setting of raising inappropriate topics
• Mr. Talbert claims to support urban density to reduce commuting but his scheme has people working far from homes they can afford and living in places far from the jobs that finance this high-end living. His plans are adding thousands more polluting commuters to our already clogged roads.

Job and Housing Crisis in Pierce County
For the last 3 years, Jobs with Justice has helped organize public forums hosted by our region’s elected and community leadership to expose this crisis driven by a new low-wage service economy and property development scheme, local disinvestment and deindustrialization brought on by "free trade" treaties, broken immigration policies, and union-busting. Local governments have produced voluminous studies to identify and address this crisis. Even the pro-developer News Tribune admits to this crisis. As Tacoma Housing Authority Executive Director Michael Mirra says "if our local housing crisis was measured in food terms, we have widespread malnutrition and pockets of starvation." Development industry specialists agree that the local workforce is not paid enough to buy the newly built and soon over-saturated condos. When local workers at Tomlinson Linen, Alan Ritchey Inc, Toray Composites, Pierce County buildings, Marriott Hotels, Columbia Bank Building, and almost all local residential construction sites have to endure the scientific terrorism of the modern union-buster campaign to exercise their rights to organize for a living wage, we wonder how we reverse this crisis without worker-friendly elected leaders.

Time To Take Action
We have worked to build consensus around effective strategies to end this crisis among our region’s elected and community leadership (see below JwJ Workers Rights Board findings and resolution to act). Sometimes we need to reconcile the “consensus to act” with real action. These are the times JwJ mobilizes to hold decision-makers accountable.

The Washington State Jobs with Justice Workers Rights Board makes the following findings based on the hearing testimony on December 9, 2004:

• That living wage jobs and high levels of employment are integral to the health of our communities and economy
• That exporting living wage jobs from our community without an effective strategy to replace those jobs and provide laid off workers transition to future decent living standards is cause for serious concern
• That not enough statistical information has been collected about how much job exporting is happening and how it impacts us
• That we are concerned about whether job exporting actually benefits our community as well as communities, such as India, receiving these exported jobs
• That both government and the private sector should develop local sustainable economy and community strategies to address the impact of job exporting.

Be it resolved that we will work to build a sustainable economy of living wage jobs and stable high employment in our community of Pierce and south King Counties by:

• Identifying and focusing government subsidized development (such as business recruitment and special worker training) in industry clusters (such as biotech and enviro-energy) that provide living wage jobs
• Coupling corporate disclosure of job creation statistics and government audits with direct and indirect government subsidies to companies.
• Cataloguing business reasoning and how we respond to companies that resist disclosure, audits, commitments to quantifiable living wage job creation goals, and other programs that encourage and evaluate job retention and creation initiatives.
• Reforming how government subsidizes the private sector to favor rewarding and growing businesses that have a track record of investing in stable living wage jobs in our community
• Engaging business community leaders who support our resolution to join us in visits with local corporation leaders to discuss balancing values of profit and sustaining our community. We will also educate about an employee involvement model that evaluates and compares alternatives to job exporting on a case-by-case basis.
• Approaching major media outlets to publicize the social impacts of job exporting and solutions put forth in these findings especially the employee involvement model that evaluates and compares alternatives to job exporting on a case-by-case basis.

By: -- Congressperson Adam Smith -- Outgoing Chair of the House Trade & Commerce Committee Velma Veloria -- Pierce County Executive John Ladenburg -- President of Tacoma Ministerial Alliance Rev. Paul Warren -- Vice Chair of the House Financial Institutions Committee Rep. Geoff Simpson -- State Rep. & Business Retention Mgr of Pierce Economic Development Bd. Derek Kilmer -- Executive Director Associated Ministries Rev. David Alger -- Tim Strege Executive Director of William M Factory Small Business Incubator -- Pierce County United Way President* Rick Allen -- Tacoma Mayor Bill Baarsma -- Pierce County Council Member Tim Farrell