California's Silicon Valley, once famed for its cyber-millionaires, has also experienced a boom in low-paid and temporary workers. An accountability group there called Working Partnerships USA negotiated a community-benefits package last year that mandated affordable housing, park space and wage standards as part of a housing and retail development in downtown San Jose. Amy Dean, a former labor leader and founder of Working Partnerships, says that winning in San Jose meant linking up with environmentalists who oppose suburban sprawl in the valley but who can be persuaded to support development that provides decent jobs and services in the urban core, where they are needed. "Many of them share our values and understand that 'smart growth‚' absent equity, is elitist," Dean says.

Another accountability group, the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy (EBASE), won a ballot measure in March 2002 that set wage and other labor standards for jobs generated by the $1.9 billion expansion of the Oakland Port and airport. In San Diego, the Center for Policy Initiatives--at five years old, the youngest of California's accountability organizations--is laying the groundwork to challenge the city's head-snapping pace of subsidy approval.

Three years ago the four organizations formed a statewide alliance, the California Partnership for Working Families, with an eye toward pushing statewide policy initiatives. With four strong groups in key locations, the partnership offers the best hope yet for regional "no raid" agreements that will really stick. That would be groundbreaking. A few regions have attempted them before, Greg LeRoy says, citing one between New York, New Jersey and Connecticut in the early 1990s. "But they never really took," he says. "They had no binding authority--the minute a company would play one off against the other, they'd fall apart."

But each of the four groups in the California Partnership has developed what Amy Dean calls "a deep and rich base," built through scoring local wins. They all integrate research with organizing, which allows them to employ diverse tactics: generating large turnouts to hearings and actions and providing expert testimony based on a nuanced understanding of arcane development mechanisms.

Nationally, economic stress may create new openings for organizers. The current crisis in state budgets, the worst since the Great Depression, was certainly helped along by what LeRoy calls "subsidies enacted during the drunken-sailor binge of the late '90s." But fiscal austerity is also encouraging many state governments to rethink their subsidy policies. New Jersey, the feared raider of New York City jobs, suspended its Business Employment Incentive Program in February because of the state's budget crunch. The former Governor of Alabama, Don Siegelman, once an ardent proponent of corporate incentives, became an anti-subsidy crusader by the end of his term. State tax revenues from corporations in Alabama dropped by nearly half in 2001; 619 companies in the state paid no taxes at all in 2000, the result of past cut-throat incentives negotiations. Siegelman began barnstorming churches and unions, attacking corporate tax dodgers, calling them "Enrons and WorldComs."

An interesting connection. Even if most Americans are not aware that subsidy shakedowns debilitate local budgets, they do know the names of the corporate buccaneers who have wrecked retirement plans and kicked the slats out of an already wobbly economy. An agile accountability movement, able to leverage community benefits from economic development incentives--or block them, as the situation demands--has the potential to take advantage of this political opportunity, bringing a skeptical focus to local development and opening the lens to reveal the bigger picture as well.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.