Stakes were high and the struggle grueling in Ohio three years ago, when an annual tax abatement to AK Steel became the target of a Steelworkers local. The county and city had granted AK Steel in Mansfield a $1.7 million annual tax abatement since 1993; in 1995 the local governments even lowered the hiring requirement from 1,140 workers to 700 and the payroll minimum from $49.3 million to $32.5 million.

So after AK Steel charged its 620 union workers with misconduct and locked them out, "The only way we could generate some economic leverage was to go after their tax abatement," says Tony Montana, a spokesperson for the United Steelworkers of America. The union argued that since the lockout brought AK way below its promised worker and payroll levels, the subsidy was vulnerable.

Unionists first launched a campaign in the summer of 2000 in support of a measure, Issue 7, that got on the ballot due to the signature-collecting work of scores of grassroots activists. The measure wouldn't have directly affected AK Steel's subsidy, but it would have reordered the way Mansfield doled out incentives, setting certain requirements for local hiring, a living wage and disclosure. It was soundly trounced in November after the mayor, the City Council president and the Chamber of Commerce joined forces to raise a $250,000 war chest to fight it. "It's symptomatic of a problem on a national scale," Montana says. "The City Council was more interested in making Mansfield a friendly place for business than making businesses live up to their promises."

Then the union carried the fight to the moribund Tax Incentive Review Council of Richland County, which is charged with overseeing some 200 local subsidies--but which had no regular open meetings and conducted most business by phone. Unionists revived the board, packed meetings of the City Council and county commissions, took their case to the media--and won. They forced the review council to commit to annual public meetings, which now attract great public interest. And in March 2002, the council reviewed AK Steel's performance and cut its subsidy by a third. That December AK Steel ended the lockout.

"It was a long, nasty struggle," Montana says, "and it's still not fully resolved." But, as far as subsidy accountability goes, "if we were able to do it in Mansfield with a bunch of locked-out workers and zero budget, we should be able to do it anywhere."

For grassroots accountability organizing, California is the gold standard. There, a decade-old pathfinder, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), came up with a new accountability concept that has caught national attention in the movement: community benefits agreements. The agreements include job standards and more.

In 2001 LAANE leveraged $29 million in city subsidies to a mixed-use development in a struggling area of North Hollywood to win parks, a youth center and mitigation of problems caused by increased truck traffic. The developer also agreed to pay for fifty spots for low-income children at a planned childcare center and to provide free space for a community health clinic. A new grocery store will be required to sign a card-check neutrality agreement, making it easier for workers to organize, and 75 percent of the development's expected 2,000 retail and office jobs must be living wage. Finally, says Roxana Tynan, LAANE's director of accountable development, "the language around local hiring is the best and clearest that we have anywhere."

In three years, LAANE has negotiated a half-dozen such agreements, whose language is written directly into official city documents. For developers, says Tynan, "we are the pro-growth alternative. If they want to get past the NIMBYs they have to deal with us." Tynan says her hope is to take these individual victories and turn them into city policy.

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