When public dollars and land are at play, Revive Oakland is there to ensure that Oakland and East Bay residents benefit. It is not enough to merely create jobs: we must expand access to good, family-sustaining careers to revive our regional economy.
EBASE convenes Revive Oakland, a coalition of 30 organizations representing community, faith, and labor, which winning groundbreaking community benefit agreements that establish citywide and regional standards for fair economic development.
Most recently, we won a landmark Good Jobs Policy on the Port of Oakland’s side of the Army Base Redevelopment. This includes living wages for every worker (including subcontractors), local hire and preference for disadvantaged workers, limits on temps, and one of the strongest “Ban the Box” policies in the country. These policies challenge racist hiring norms that discriminate against formerly incarcerated people of color, and open the door for more in our communities to find consistent, sustaining work.
In 2012, we won the landmark Oakland Army Base Redevelopment Good Jobs Policy, which includes similar policies, as well as the nation’s first standard in the warehousing industry limiting the use of temp agencies. This agreement also created the West Oakland Job Resource Center, which has become a national model for creating a pipeline into construction careers.
Since then, Revive Oakland has won a similar jobs agreement with AC Transit on its Bus Rapid Transit project on International Boulevard and has expanded the use of the Job Resource Center to support numerous construction projects throughout Oakland.
A major opportunity on the horizon for EBASE and Revive Oakland lies in the Coliseum redevelopment. This massive project could include up to 4,000 housing units, 415,000 square feet of retail space, and three hotels, mostly on publicly-owned land. Our coalition will ensure that this development serves public good, with good union jobs for local residents.
With development booming in Oakland, EBASE will build off of Revive Oakland’s success to further prove our model of community-driven economic development that brings real job opportunities and meaningful benefits to low-income communities of color.