Real Change News | Stimulus jobs at minimum wage? State uses loophole

May 12, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 20

News

Stimulus jobs at minimum wage? State uses loophole

by: Cydney Gillis , Staff Reporter

Trainee can’t find green work that pays

Yirim Seck took union training last year in hopes of landing a $21-an-hour stimulus job in home weatherization, only to discover the state pays Americorps volunteers $8.55 to do the work.

Photo by: Alonzo Mosley , None

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Yirim Seck’s grandfather sold firewood from a corner lot that he ran for 25 years in Seattle’s Central District. Between granddad and another relative or two who might have had work at any given time, the family got by when Seck was a kid, but just barely.

He’s 29 now and recalls his mother telling him that pursuing a career in hip-hop would lead to poverty, but, of course, he had to find out for himself. In his late teens, he booked his shows and worked two jobs cooking and hefting freight, and still couldn’t afford a place to live. He spent two years sleeping on friends’ couches or under the trees of Capitol Hill’s Cal Anderson Park.

Seck hasn’t given up on his dream, but everything is different now, he says: He has a partner, a three-year-old daughter, rent, child care – and little to show for years of scouting for a steady, decent-paying job. So when he came across a program a year ago that promised to put him in one of the “green jobs” funded by President Obama’s federal stimulus package, he said count me in.

Last October, Seck took two weeks of Laborers’ Union training and earned a certificate in how to insulate and weatherize homes. The training was paid by Got Green, a small Seattle nonprofit with a big plan to help Seck and other minority youth get one of the high-wage, career-path jobs promised by the $5 billion in stimulus funds that went last year to the federal Weatherization Assistance Program for low-income homes.

Across the nation, the money is slowly starting to be spent, but Seck and nine other Got Green trainees who are still waiting for work were shocked to learn what some of the $5 billion is going to in Washington state: to pay 15 workers minimum wage for work that, under the prevailing-wage stipulations of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), should be paying upward of $21 an hour.

The workers, who are also disadvantaged youth, are participants in a year-long work-training program called the Energy Corps, an Americorps-type service program that the state Department of Ecology founded in December with $300,000 in stimulus funds and a $120,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The state dispatches the workers – described by the Energy Corps as volunteers – to low-income housing agencies to do low-skill weatherization work such as screwing in compact fluorescent light bulbs, installing low-flow faucets and showerheads and putting insulation blankets on hot-water tanks.

Got Green founder Michael Woo, the former director of LELO, South Seattle’s worker rights organization, says the state should be paying the Energy Corps workers prevailing wage. In an emotional protest on April 21, he and 20 Got Greeners showed up at a King County Housing Authority board meeting to demand the agency stop using the Energy Corps and find a way to employ Got Green’s trainees. But the housing authority says it is not responsible: it doesn’t employ the Energy Corps workers, the state provides them for free.

“We want to remind folks that there was a time in this country where free labor was called slavery. It wasn’t right then and it ain’t right now,” Woo told the housing authority board on April 21. “Our issue is that those workers should be paid properly or discontinue using them.”

“This is a blatant slap in the face to see that these Americorps workers are getting $8.55 an hour, which is way below what I feel like they should be making [for] a living wage,” Seck told board members. “There’s no reason I shouldn’t be working. I’ve got skills that are definitely marketable and nobody’s biting. Why?”

The answer is that the jobs touted by author Van Jones, President Obama’s former “green jobs” chief and Woo’s inspiration for two-year-old Got Green, haven’t materialized the way they were supposed to – in part, because stimulus grants for weatherization were on hold last year while the U.S. Department of Labor tried to establish what the prevailing wage should be for “weatherization workers.”

The King County Housing Authority was awarded a separate $5.1 million in stimulus funds to weatherize its low-income units. The organization has contracts with a number of companies to do higher-skilled weatherization work at prevailing wage, KCHA spokesperson Rhonda Rosenberg says. But like Americorps at the federal level, those who serve in the Energy Corps, she and managers at the Department of Ecology say, don’t have to be paid prevailing wage under a state law – RCW 43.220 – that exempts the Energy Corps’ parent organization, the Washington Conservation Corps.

Under the law, the specific list of Conservation Corps work that’s exempted includes stream rehabilitation and irrigation ditch clearing, not changing light bulbs or faucets. But “Who’s to say replacing a showerhead or faucet isn’t plumbing work? Who makes the decision it’s just incidental?” asks Dave Johnson, executive secretary of the Washington State Building & Construction Trades Council. “People hire plumbers to replace showerheads and faucets all the time.”

A bill introduced this past legislative session by Rep. Scott White (D-Seattle) would have specifically amended the state’s prevailing wage law to exempt the Conservation Corps work, making it questionable, Johnson says, whether RCW 43.220 does exempt the Energy Corps. Unlike union training, which can put participants on track for an apprenticeship, the Energy Corps, he says, offers no career path.

Rosenberg says it would serve no purpose, however, to stop using the workers because their labor lessens the workload on the housing authority’s own weatherization contractors. That saves more low-income residents money – around $200 a year in utilities – and makes it possible to employ the higher-paid contractors longer.

“To the extent that [the Energy Corps] work is done at no cost to the housing authority, we are able to use 100 percent of our ARRA funds to do more units – you get more work done,” Rosenberg says. “If we stopped using the Energy Corps today, we wouldn’t add a single job and, in fact, what we would wind up doing is just getting less weatherization work done.”

Abdirizak Abdi, a 19-year-old Energy Corps participant, says he doesn’t know what to make of the controversy. A refugee from Somalia who lives at the Seattle Housing Authority’s Yesler Terrace community, Abdi says he was just an inner-city kid who knew nothing about global warming until the Conservation Corps recruited him and put him to work – originally, clearing blackberries and scotch broom on the Eastside and, now, doing weatherization.

When he’s finished with the program, Abdi is looking forward to the $4,700 he will get from Americorps to start college. Seck, on the other hand, is still waiting for a stimulus job.“That stimulus money was put together for a specific reason: to pay people a sustainable income, a living wage, so they can feed their families,” Seck says, “and that’s not happening.”

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