Jobless fill union halls as Wu feuds with developers | Anonymous text attacks roil Republican gubernatorial primary | Boston plays pretend game of "Big City" as nation chuckles, Onion says |
News tips? Story ideas? Email us at sbvanvoorhis@contrarianboston.com, or sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com
Spin job: Boston is shedding jobs as Michelle Wu ignores stalled projects and feuds with developers, but don’t tell that to the Globe, which uses deceptive stats to claim the mayor’s progressive policies are working
Danny McWilliams recently posted a Boston Globe column on his office wall at Ironworkers Local 7 in South Boston.
And McWilliams, a business agent for a union that represents thousands of ironworkers across Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire, didn’t mean it as a positive.
“For Wu, growing Boston’s economy starts with people, not cranes,” the Globe declares with a headline that looks like it came straight from the mayor’s press office.
That initial headline was later changed to one that lays bare even more clearly the Globe’s cheerleading for Wu and the supposed success of her anti-big development approach to stoking the city’s economy.
Michelle Wu is a different kind of Boston mayor than her predecessors, or so the Globe’s Shirley Leung claims. A mayor who measures success not by “the number of construction cranes in the sky,” but rather “the number of residents with good-paying jobs.”
Since it was published in December, the headline and the column have stuck in McWilliams’s craw, and it’s not hard to see why.
Boston’s once epic building boom has gone bust, taking with it bustling construction sites, countless well-paying jobs, and a whole lot of tax revenue.
The ironworkers of Local 7, who a few years ago were busy working on any number of new towers taking shape on Boston’s skyline, have been hit hard.
Out of Local 7’s 2,800 members, roughly 1,000 are out of work, up from practically nil just three or four years ago as the building boom of the Walsh administration years was entering its final phase, McWilliams tells Contrarian Boston.
By contrast, Wu has dismissed the role that construction and development – real estate – plays in fueling Boston’s economy, as the Globe headline suggests.
And by doing so, Wu ignores the fact that it is actual people who build the new buildings, and that in Boston, most are highly skilled, well-paid union members.
“The headline says it all,” an incredulous McWilliams told Contrarian Boston over coffee one morning earlier this week at a Dunkin near Watertown Square.
“This is the most unemployment we have had in a long time,” McWilliams said, comparing current conditions to the Great Recession nearly two decades ago.
Local 7 ironworkers are taking part-time jobs at Target and hitting the road to work on projects as far afield as SpaceX’s big expansion of its Texas base and a new stadium in Tennessee, he noted.
And it’s not just the ironworkers. Other major building trades unions are faced with similar levels of unemployment right now, one Boston union carpentry contractor told Contrarian Boston, with each major union having as many as 1,000 workers “on the bench.
That includes the IBEW, which represents union electricians and workers in the natural gas industry.
“There are currently over 1K unemployed electricians across Massachusetts, while the vast majority of states across the country are having a difficult time finding enough electricians to complete the work,” IBEW Second District International Vice President Michael Monahan told Contrarian Boston.
“Energy policies in Massachusetts and New England, combined with affordable housing percentages, are putting projects where they can’t get financing,” Monahan added.
Wu isn’t to blame for the interest rate surge that forced bankers to rethink their support for development projects across the country.
But the Boston mayor’s insistence on barreling ahead with expensive new green energy and affordable housing mandates made a bad situation far worse, say local developers and union building trades leaders like McWilliams.
Some of the big names in local development, like Joe Fallon, who built out the Seaport, have left Boston in frustration to pursue major projects in fast-growing Sunbelt cities and states.
“You have to try to listen to what developers are saying,” McWilliams said. “I know you can’t give away the house, but you have to work with them, and she is not even doing that.”
The Globe column is a prime example of a blue city mayor, faced with a growing disaster that is at least partly of her own making, choosing to respond with brazenly dishonest spin.
And it also demonstrates how the Globe, a major mainstream news organization, is all too willing play along with its favorite progressive mayor.
