Los Angeles is ground zero in a war raging over exclusionary and monopolistic project labor agreements, commonly called PLAs. Since these “agreements” started popping up 15 years ago, Los Angeles has had more implemented than any other city in America. The almost canine affection elected officials in this region have for doing the bidding of those who put them into power (Big Labor special interests) is quite striking and unmatched anywhere we have been fighting PLAs.
What is rarely mentioned in public-policy discussions about PLAs, however, are the moral implications of using the government as an agent to prod contractors and their employees into union agreements. Is it right for a government to require contractors to make employee fringe benefit payments to union-managed trust funds and obtain their workers from a union hiring hall? What kind of thinking leads a representative of the people to require workers to pay initiation fees and dues to a union as a condition of working on a public project? What kind of community leader wants to build four taxpayer-funded schools for the cost of five in order to curry favor with a special interest group?
Project labor agreements are associated with fiscal irresponsibility and mismanagement, internal corruption and lack of accountability to the people who pay taxes for the government to provide services. Citizens in Los Angeles have abdicated their responsibility to oversee their local governments. As a result, unions fill the resulting political vacuum and attract ambitious people who see unions as a vehicle to attain personal power and position.
Arguments based on reason and common sense have no power in this kind of environment, where only scandals earn public attention. The problem with Los Angeles is that fidelity to Big Labor is so pervasive that the resulting corruption is hard to keep up with. From the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted under the Los Angeles Unified School District and Los Angeles International Airport PLAs to the broken promises of the Port of Los Angeles and the city of Long Beach PLAs, where does one even begin?
Let’s just pick two.
City approval
The city of San Fernando was the first municipality in California to require a PLA for all public works projects. On Sept. 19, 2005, the San Fernando City Council voted 5-0 to require all construction contractors to sign a PLA Agreement with unions for prime contracts worth $150,000 or more, and specialty contracts worth $25,000 or more. These project cost thresholds are unusually low, indicating that representatives of the city made little effort to engage in credible negotiations with union leaders to develop the project labor agreement.
Voting for the PLA in 2005 were council members Julie Ruelas, Nury Martinez, Steven Veres, José Hernández, and Maribel De La Torre. So what happened to them?
San Fernando voters recalled Hernández and Ruelas on Jan. 13, 2009.
Martinez was elected in 2009 to the board of the LAUSD, with endorsements from the Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building & Construction Trades Council and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.
Veres was elected in 2011 to the board of the Los Angeles Community College District, with endorsements from the construction trades council and the county labor federation.
Only De La Torre remains on the San Fernando City Council. At its Nov. 21 meeting, she was entangled in a spectacle that is bizarre, even by California standards, involving her relationship with the mayor.
Meanwhile, the city continues to require its contractors to sign a PLA to work on taxpayer-funded city construction. Business as usual.
Then we have the Los Angeles Community College District, subject of a multipart series in the Los Angeles Times highlighting the waste, fraud and poor quality of work that took place under the district’s multibillion-dollar PLA.
The latest scandal involves an inquiry that targets two contractors who worked extensively under that PLA. “The D.A.’s probe centers on Los Angeles Community College District allegations that the firms submitted fraudulent billings for Mission College work, part of a $5.7 billion construction program,” reported the Times.
Coincidence? Hardly. These instances are all quite predictable for any entity that purses something as immoral as a PLA. Sadly, it is the taxpayers, school children and the average citizen who continue to pay the price for the status quo in this region that places the interests of union bosses over that of everyone else.
In the end, the voters have no one left to blame but themselves for placing such morally illiterate people into office.
Eric Christen is executive director of the Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction, a Poway-based group that promotes fair and open competition in the construction industry.
