Outsourcing is a word some folks used to describe moving the
functions of the San Benito County Communications Center to Santa
Cruz Regional 9-1-1. Technically, that is correct.
Outsourcing is a word some folks used to describe moving the functions of the San Benito County Communications Center to Santa Cruz Regional 9-1-1. Technically, that is correct. The dictionary definition is neutral – outsourcing is when a company or organization contracts to purchase goods or services from an outside supplier or source. However, that hardly covers the negative connotations invoked by common usage – the movement of jobs to areas of cheap labor, especially foreign countries.
Emotional reactions are handy political weapons, so it’s natural that those with self-interests would try to expand the negative inferences of outsourcing to include any commerce or job shift outside the county. That may be good politics, but it’s terrible public policy especially for San Benito County, which is so economically dependent on its surroundings for survival. If there is a county in Northern California that would be severely damaged by an isolationist economic policy and a drummed-up, local-only, turf-war, we are it.Â
A large number of our residents commute to employers in other counties where jobs are more plentiful and where they receive higher wages. If a Bay Area local-hire policy eliminated the majority of those private-sector jobs and the wages the commuters bring home, San Benito County would be destitute. That’s never going to happen because the economic engines of those areas are net labor importers. They do not have the population to support their massive labor needs; commuters are their lifeblood.
The labor situation is not as clear for public employment; most neighboring counties have sufficient populations to institute local-hire public employment policies if they wanted to. That decision would also be very bad for San Benito County because we have many residents who are public employees elsewhere. There have been local-hire policies for some construction projects, and it seems to me that a carefully drafted local-hire policy supported by the state Legislature just might be legal. If that came about many of our residents would find it difficult to get new public service employment following a layoff; over time, that entire employment segment – out of county public employees – would disappear completely.
Regardless of the legal issues, that’s also very unlikely to happen. For one thing, widespread public employee local-hire policies would effectively kill tactics such as “Operation Domino.” Operation Domino, as recently described in a lengthy New York Times article, was a California union strategy to “persuade one city to increase salaries and pensions for workers, and then approach neighboring municipalities and argue that if the increases weren’t matched, the city’s police, firefighters or other employees might quit, in large numbers, and go elsewhere.” You can’t do that unless employees can easily sell their services elsewhere, so real local-hire policies for public employees would be self-defeating. Yet the same groups who ran that operation often encourage local-hire policies when it suits them.
Unfortunately, no one representing the Hollister City Council’s four-vote majority came to the county debate to explain the city’s point-of-view and that’s one reason the city needs an at-large mayor. Only Councilmember Scattini, who opposed the plan, spoke.
I don’t know if the idea of outsourcing influenced Supervisors Jaime De La Cruz or Robert Rivas, the two who voted against the consolidation proposal; it certainly should not have, but neither stated a good reason for their opposition other than to champion some form of long delay. By opposing this well-justified plan to try to reduce the city’s crippling structural deficit they signaled there is little hope they will support any future reform because most of those decisions will be many times more difficult than this one. Â
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident.
