Community Benefit Agreements: A Tool for Building Stronger Democracies

The need for America to build quickly and at scale has become a lively debate amongst pundits and policymakers alike, feeding the so-called “abundance” debate argument that decades of regulation and bureaucratic processes have led to unaffordable housing, crumbling infrastructure, and a delayed clean energy transition. The abundance proponents remain laser-focused on government delivery, a laudable and important goal if we are to restore Americans’ faith in government. However, proponents fail to recognize that the current crisis of faith American voters are experiencing is twofold: a loss of faith in the American political and economic order.

The question is not whether we need to build more and build faster. We do. The deeper question abundance leaves unanswered is not how we build more, but for whom and with whom we build.

People no longer believe that our economic and political system will improve their life outcomes. The majority of Americans do not believe their children will be better off than their parents. Confidence in our institutions is at historic lows, with big business, the president, and Congress all at unfavorable ratings in the mid-to-high 40s. A majority think our economic system is unfair, with nearly three-quarters of adults saying it unfairly favors powerful interests. Even Republicans—the traditional pro-business party—have seen a steep decline in confidence in big business since 2018.

The deeper question abundance leaves unanswered is not how we build more, but for whom and with whom we build.

So, how do we move out of this twofold dilemma of needing to both build good things faster and rebuilding trust while doing the work?

For the past three years, Workshop—a national workers rights organization advancing policies to strengthen worker power through partnerships across government, advocacy, and organizing—has supported communities across the country on one promising approach: community benefit agreements (CBAs). CBAs are legally binding agreements negotiated directly between developers or companies and community stakeholders who will be affected by the development. They create enforceable commitments on labor standards, local hiring, and environmental issues, shifting economic development from a zero-sum conflict into a genuine negotiation. Rather than asking communities to simply trust that a faster technocratic process will serve them, CBAs give these community stakeholders a seat at the table and a stake in the outcome. They also reduce roadblocks to building and help companies build projects faster.

CBAs as a Step Towards a New Social Contract

In economic development fights, there is often a deep trust deficit between workers and residents on one side and corporations and government on the other, especially in multi-racial, working-class, and underserved communities. As survey data shows, people think the economy is rigged against them, and they mistrust politicians and corporate leaders alike who claim these projects will create jobs or lower costs for the local community. Their experience tells them that too few jobs pay a family-supporting wage and that working conditions can be unsafe. They have lived with the health impacts of polluted skies and water because corporations can game environmental and land-use permitting processes.

By contrast, a CBA, particularly when paired with a Project Labor Agreement (PLA),^[1] ensures that the project’s support for resident economic security, worker protections, and community wellbeing aren’t vague goals but documented, enforceable commitments.

The organization Jobs to Move America (JMA) has used CBAs to help improve manufacturing jobs in states like Alabama and to create good union jobs. Their CBA with the electric bus manufacturer New Flyer of America led to increases in workers’ wages, healthcare, and work-life balance, and to reduced racial and gender disparities in the workplace. The broader community engagement campaign also led the company and its suppliers to be neutral in worker organizing drives, resulting in five of eight plants unionizing.

In our work with local community benefits advocates, we have seen these campaigns restore people’s faith in government and in a market economy that works for them. In Utah, we worked with Norman Lameman, a contractor who is a member of the Navajo Nation. Norman noted that “riches are continuously transferred out of our communities, but few benefits, such as good jobs, come back to our communities.” He saw his work with labor unions on a state-policy campaign to require specific community benefits for state-funded projects as a way to change that dynamic.

During a CBA campaign, community members are trained and mobilized, creating an engaged and empowered citizenry, even when a full CBA is not achieved.

In an era of low trust in government and corporations, CBA campaigns have become an important new civic engagement tactic, literally rebuilding the social contract in local communities. Even if they start as oppositional campaigns, as they move towards “getting to yes,” people move away from a zero-sum mentality—of corporations versus the people—toward a shared-value mindset: how can we all find a win-win? Community members want access to good jobs, education, training opportunities, and healthier communities. Business leaders get a chance to show that they are part of solving those problems through the commitments their companies make in a CBA. Local elected officials show they govern in a way that supports people and corporations, not people or corporations. This moves us away from the all-too-familiar economic development doom loop, in which corporations receive significant taxpayer-funded handouts—with few strings attached or no public accountability—while communities are starved of basic services, such as healthcare or clean water.

CBAs also advance the search for a new social contract in another way. They build civic engagement muscle and help rebuild community infrastructure. Large development projects create opportunities to organize in rural and urban areas alike, strengthening organizing capacity beyond major cities and the coasts. CBA campaigns help democratize access to often-opaque government decision-making processes and build community trust by mobilizing residents to submit regulatory comment letters and attend public hearings. We saw this firsthand in Augusta, GA, where a community-labor-environment coalition educated and organized its members to speak out at an air quality hearing to demand greater transparency regarding a multinational corporation’s expansion plans.

CBA campaigns also create trusted messengers for a project who can serve as a counterweight to widespread misinformation and rising authoritarianism. Too often, civic engagement groups focus only on elections instead of training residents on how to engage their elected leaders outside of elections. During a CBA campaign, community members are trained and mobilized, creating an engaged and empowered citizenry, even when a full CBA is not achieved. As Tennessee labor leader Vonda McDaniel told us, “The light you see in people when they start advocating for themselves is powerful.” She saw that up close herself when the community leaders she worked with failed to win a CBA with Ford Motor Company but took the skills they learned from their CBA campaign and used them to protest the re-opening of an ICE facility in their community.

CBAs can also be a step towards not just organizing but also power-building in the very communities that feel left out of our democracy and economy. Through power-building, residents actively shape the systems and policies that impact them and can hold those in power accountable. This is especially true in locations where labor unions adopt community benefits campaigns as a coalition-building strategy. Workshop has supported unions in the South and Southwest as they experiment with CBAs as a mechanism for building labor and community coalitions in low-union-density states. This builds on the successful model pioneered by groups like Working Partnerships USA, whose campaigns have increased worker wages, improved access to affordable healthcare, and helped create a more inclusive economy in Silicon Valley, and PowerSwitch Action, which has helped nurture similar community/labor CBA coalitions nationwide.

Unions play an underappreciated role in preserving our democracy and serving as a bulwark against authoritarianism. They can also be a consistent civic engagement funder in a locality, reducing reliance on scarce philanthropic funding. As unions try to increase their density and reinvest in organizing, CBAs have become a tool for deepening their relationships in the communities where their members live and work. In the process, unions are transferring their knowledge on organizing and campaigning to local residents, spreading democratic education.

CBAs Help Build Projects Fast and Fair

CBAs do not add a new layer of red tape that delays a project’s implementation. Instead, they increase the business’s social license to operate, which is the largest driver of delays and cancellations in business surveys. Companies face a complex mix of public relations, permitting, and workforce challenges that can delay or derail development, and have used CBAs to overcome local opposition and speed up regulatory approvals.

Stillwater Mining Company’s CBA in rural Montana is a perfect example. They created a specific type of CBA—a Good Neighbor Agreement—with stakeholders in a rural Montana mining town two decades ago. As a result, they found that “[p]ermitting has really been simplified by the time it gets to the agencies, because we’ve worked out issues that would otherwise be objected to.” For the community, the deal helped secure cleaner water, creating community oversight of water pollution levels and corporate reclamation plans that exceeded the state and federal standards. The benefits a community may want to negotiate for vary. That is why CBAs have been used nationwide, from California to Tennessee to Pennsylvania, and in both urban and rural communities: because they build public support for projects by delivering benefits that residents care about.

In recent years, elected leaders have become interested in developing policies to mandate or encourage community benefits agreements. The Biden administration, for example, required companies to develop community benefits plans (CBPs) as a condition for receiving clean energy loans or grants, and encouraged applicants to sign enforceable CBAs with local stakeholders. They recognized that CBAs—and the relationships companies build with local stakeholders to develop them—helped de-risk project delivery, tamping down local opposition and building trusted local champions who can overcome NIMBY voices. These policy developments didn’t emerge in a vacuum. They followed years of grassroots campaigns in which community coalitions—often led by labor, environmental, and racial justice organizations—organized against projects that promised prosperity but delivered pollution, poverty wages, and broken commitments. Through that organizing, they arrived at CBAs as a solution: not just a way to oppose bad deals, but a way to negotiate better ones.

Now, policymakers in state and local governments have taken a renewed interest in adding community benefit policies to economic development projects. For example, Minnesota passed a data center bill in 2024 that conditioned tax incentives on sustainability and labor standards. Michigan’s 2023 bill to expedite clean energy siting required developers to provide a specific set of community benefits to host communities, including environmental remediation and quality jobs. Cities like Memphis have created community benefit ordinances, which provide funding for neighborhoods impacted by data centers. Lawmakers can pair community benefit policies with regulatory relief or tax incentives to incentivize high-road business practices. This is of course a delicate balancing act. Care must be taken so that these policies support meaningful community participation to achieve a pro-development, pro-democracy outcome.

CBAs can also build strong, lasting coalitions that bring people together, help forge a new social contract among labor, community, and business, strengthen local institutions, and deliver meaningful benefits for workers and communities both now and in the future.

At Workshop, we received queries from over 55 groups across more than 15 states interested in developing a local CBA campaign in 2025. Their targets included EV manufacturing, data centers, mining, renewable energy, and affordable housing. Some campaigns focused on creating new policy, others on shaping specific projects. National organizations and regional coalitions stand ready to assist these campaigns. This includes Jobs to Move America, Jobs with Justice, PowerSwitch Action, Reimagine Appalachia, and the BlueGreen Alliance, which have the capacity to work with place-based coalitions on campaign development. Labor unions—both at the international and state levels—provide research and organizing support to CBA campaigns. Finally, a network of universities and think tanks, such as UC Berkeley’s Labor Center, the High Road Strategy Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, MIT’s Renewable Energy Clinic, the World Resources Institute, and Data For Progress, provides research support to coalitions and policymakers alike.

A People-Centered Approach

We sit at an anxious moment in American history, as affordability concerns and political dysfunction feed distrust in our democracy and in our economic system. The abundance advocates have helped center the importance of government delivering on its commitments, an important step towards restoring faith in democracy. But that alone will not rebuild trust in government among those disaffected by the current system. Nor will running roughshod over the building standards—be they health, safety, environmental, or labor—that people literally died fighting for. A middle ground is needed between legacy systems for legacy’s sake and throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Community benefit agreements help thread this needle because they’re a people-centered approach. CBAs can facilitate building faster, at scale, and on budget by leaning into common-sense processes that protect and build agency for workers and communities, while also rebuilding trust in both government and business. CBAs can also build strong, lasting coalitions that bring people together, help forge a new social contract among labor, community, and business, strengthen local institutions, and deliver meaningful benefits for workers and communities both now and in the future.

Notes

1. A Project Labor Agreement (PLA) is a pre-hire collective bargaining agreement between a labor union and a developer/business. They set labor standards for the project and are used during the construction phase.