Last week where I live in Penn Hills, Pennsylvania, the school board voted 8-1 to lay down with the dogs. What they voted to do, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is to enter into a project labor agreement covering the $130 million construction project which includes a new high school.
Reports the paper,
<blockquote>The agreement with the Pittsburgh Regional Building and Construction Trades Council stipulates that all construction will have “standardized work practices, hours, holidays, grievance arbitration and jurisdictional dispute resolution processes,” among other requirements.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10245/1084322-56.stm#ixzz0yOJLZzvr
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I am not going to mince words. This is a sop to the local unions in an attempt to keep non-union labor out of the process and out of the contract negotiations. Non union labor, by the way, tends to do just as good of a job as labor unions, if not better, and generally at lower cost. I have seen it and dealt with it and that is just a sad truth. Albeit one that unions would rather you didn’t know.
The effect of “standardizing” these areas across the project will no doubt adhere them to the current local standards of the labor unions forcing non-union shops to conform, cause them to lose their competitive advantage and make the final decision to go with union labor all the more easy.
We have been fighting this problem for years in Pittsburgh where projects are steered towards union labor while trying to drown out any competition that can do the same work cheaper and save the tax payers money.
The Associated Builders and Contractors of Western Pennsylvania, the report notes, panned the plan.
Hey, let’s be honest here. If you want to join a union for whatever reason, go ahead and join the union. But if you do, you should have to compete against those who do not want to join a union and can do just as good of a job based on price and quality. It is pretty simple and only board member Margie Krogh had the cajones to stand up against this plan.
Sounds to me like we need some turn over here in the Pittsburgh suburbs.
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