By Mike Hellstrom
I think the poet Maya Angelou said it best: “When people show you who they are, believe them.”
It is in this spirit that I considered what to make of the massive influx to Jersey City of influential real estate developers, captains of finance, investors, general contractors, project owners, brokers, asset managers, and lawyers. Some 1,250 of them are expected to convene Wednesday, May 29, for the Jersey City Summit, a one-day event that its organizers bill as the “Region’s Largest Real Estate Leadership Gatherings.”
I am in real estate leadership, too, except instead of billionaire investors, I represent workers as a member of the general executive board of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. We are the 550,000-member international union that proudly builds many of the buildings and much of the infrastructure that we use each day. Admittedly, I don’t have a Wharton or Harvard Business School degree hanging on my office walls, but I do have a framed newspaper clipping from the time I helped organize the New York City demolition market. Things were bad back then in the late 1990s. Construction workers were being forced to work in terrible conditions for little pay and without regard for their safety, respect or dignity.
Nearly three decades later, I wish I could say things were better for workers, but unfortunately all of the worker exploitation and developer greed that characterized New York City in the ‘90s has simply moved across the Hudson.