Sunday, March 20, 2011

San Francisco to Test Toughest Hiring Law

The new San Francisco hiring law sets out some tough guidelines for contractors and construction companies. For any city funded construction work, a set percentage of hours has to be done by city residents. Also, a set percentage of the hours of the city funded construction work must be done by low income workers. This law is an attempt to bring the unemployment rate in San Francisco down from 9.5 percent. This law will definitely bring down the unemployment within the city but will also cause more unemployment in surrounding counties where it is cheaper to live. The contractors are going to have a hard time trying to find enough skilled workers to fulfill the new law. Because of these apparent obstacles, there is skepticism over whether this law will be successful or not. Do you think the city is putting too much pressure on the contractors and do you think this law will be successful?

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6 comments:

stephen said...

Hmm. Interesting! I like this new idea. It definitely will help the unemployment rate as it gives jobs to low-income workers and potentially unemployed city residents jobs. However, I do believe this city is putting too much pressure on contractors. There may be a lot of people unwilling to do construction-based work because it is tedious and involves many risks. Furthermore, what will happen if contractors don't find enough city residents or low-income workers to do this construction work? I feel like this law will be able to lower some of San Francisco's unemployment rate, but not by much. Although construction seems like it doesn't require a lot of skill or training to get the hang of (correct me if I'm wrong), I just feel that construction work wouldn't pay as much, nor would working outside doing back-breaking work be as luxurious as working in an office crunching numbers. I think this is a great idea, but to lower the employment rate, we'll need a larger fix than just a couple of jobs in construction.

March 20, 2011 at 6:38 PM
Anthony Lu said...

I feel that if anything, the law will decrease the overall amount of city funded construction work being done, which would result in a net increase in unemployment even as it moves some of it out of San Francisco. I don't really get the point of this.

March 20, 2011 at 7:19 PM
Tony Zhang said...

I feel like this law is just moving the problem from one area into another area. Although San Francisco will have less unemployment, the surrounding counties, where over 60% of the construction workers working in San Francisco live, will increase in unemloyment. I am against this law because it doesn't fix the problem, it only shoves it into another corner for someone else to deal with.

March 21, 2011 at 12:19 PM
nichole kwee said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
March 21, 2011 at 8:59 PM
nichole kwee said...

Although this may help with unemployment, I do not think that this law was a good idea. This will probably greatly decrease the quality of work done by these contractors. Already, the laws that require public work projects to be done by the lowest bidder sometimes result in substandard work (like Aragon's science building that had parts that needed to be redone), so imagine what this additional restriction will do.

March 21, 2011 at 9:01 PM
Andrea Nelson said...

I think that I am going to have to agree with Tony on this one. This new law is only going to move the problem over to other cities. There's many construction workers living outside of San Francisco and I don't think its fair that they will loose their jobs just so that city residents could come in and take them. Some people have worked hard to get those jobs and with this new law, that is taking their work away from them. Then how will they provide for their families. They may have to move into another job category to bring money into the home, yet they are the ones who actually want to do the hard, tedious work. Were this new law could just be pushing city residents into the job because it will be easier for them to land the job. I do not think this law will be that effective.

March 22, 2011 at 8:28 PM

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