Challenges to the Watershed Restoration Movement

A few years ago the watershed restoration movement had a wake up call when the Division of Industrial Relations announced that grant funding met the definition of public works, and as such was subject to the State Labor Code, meaning grant funded projects (except for some projects funded by the California Department of Fish and Game) were subject to prevailing wages. This created quite a stir and at a meeting in Eureka with labor representatives, we were told that we could either go along with the State’s classifications or we could organize ourselves and create our own restorationist category, basically a restorationist union, and have some influence over what our wage scale would be and have a collective voice that could advocate for issues important to us. The effort to create such a union never really got off the ground and we all went back to business as usual.

Many of us got our second wake up call last December. We were informed by our grant managers that a stop work order was being imposed on all State bond-funded projects. This caught most of us off guard and left us scrambling to figure out what our options were and how to influence the process to get our invoices paid and our funding restored. Several efforts emerged—ReSeed was formed and the Stop Work Order Impact web site was initiated as a forum for exchanging information. David Simpson and Richard Geinger of the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment (ASJE) called a meeting together with union representatives in Eureka, and enlisted Mark Greenleaf of the Union of Operating Engineers to come to the SRF conference in Santa Cruz to speak at a special session to discuss how to organize ourselves in light of the stop work order. At a followup early morning coffee meeting during the SRF conference, the Association of Conservation and Construction Workers (ACCW) began to take shape.

With the fiscal uncertainty in California we are facing the possibility that we could lose some of the funding that restoration advocates worked so hard to secure. The need to organize ourselves has again emerged, only this time the threat to the future of watershed restoration and salmon recovery is much greater than the prevailing wage issue in 2003. With challenge comes opportunity, and in order to meet the challenge in front of us we need to take advantage of this opportunity to get organized. If (more likely when) this situation repeats itself, we need to be prepared to take concerted action on behalf of a significant group of constituents—significant enough to garner the attention and support of our legislators. As the saying goes, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. So we need to learn the lessons of the recent pass and realize the importance of being organized. The ACCW is the fledgling organization that has taken on the difficult task of getting us organized—I encourage everyone working in watershed restoration and habitat conservation to become a member of and support SRF and ACCW.