construction

Taxpayers Take Another Hit from Obama; Administration Panders Yet Again to Big Labor

by Hans Bader on April 16, 2010 · 2 comments

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere, Zeitgeist

Taxpayers will pay billions more due to an executive order signed by President Obama that effectively restricts federal construction contracts to the minority of construction firms whose workers are unionized.  That will encourage them to jack up their prices, by shielding them from having to compete with lower bids from non-union construction firms.

As the Examiner notes, “President Obama signed Executive Order 13502 directing federal agencies taking bids for government construction projects to accept only those from contractors who agree in advance to a project labor agreement that requires a union work force. Obama’s new order applies to all federal construction projects with price tags of $25 million or more, and it means all such contracts will only be awarded to companies with unionized work forces.”

This will exclude the vast majority of contractors from bidding on government contracts: “Barely 15 percent of all construction-industry workers in the United States are union members, while the remaining 85 percent are nonunion.”

Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package also contains pay-offs for Big Labor, like prevailing wage regulations.  Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” The stimulus package has since destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.  The Obama Administration also pandered to Big Labor by giving ownership of Chrysler to the United Auto Workers Union at the expense of employee pension funds, taxpayers, and banks, in a maneuver that circumvented federal bankruptcy laws.

The High Cost of Project Labor Agreements

by Ivan Osorio on February 1, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Labor, Regulation

At Biggovernment.com, Mandy/Liberty Chick provides a comprehensive overview of project labor agreements (PLAs), which impose onerous conditions on contractors who wish to bid on government projects. They may be required to employ workers from union hiring halls, acquire apprentices from union apprentice programs, and require employees to pay union dues. Clearly, this disadvantages non-union contractors who would otherwise not face those costs. Focusing on California, she notes how unions are using regulatory and legal maneuvers to get public officials to agree to PLAs.

While PLAs were once largely embraced in a marketplace when unions represented a greater majority of workers in the US, today’s PLAs must claim other benefits to be reasonably received by a general public that is no longer largely unionized.  Today’s PLAs purport to extend jobs to non-union workers, when in reality they place new impositions on both employers and workers, such as mandatory union-hall hiring, forcing non-union workers to pay union dues and make contributions to others’ pension funds. With the advent of the strict standards of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), PLAs now typically promise union sanctioned “environmental expertise”, adding another weapon to big labor’s arsenal.  Since most unions receive public funding for environmental training and mitigation, union bosses use it to assert their perceived authority by challenging projects on environmental grounds. They effectively hold a project hostage until the parties agree to a PLA and allow union shops to take control of the project’s labor requirements.  It’s nothing less than blackmail, which is how a new spin on the old term “greenmail”came to be mainstream.

Worse, we are likely to see PLAs on more federal projects.

In February 2009, as one of his first duties in office, President Obama signed an executive order that authorized federal executive agencies to use project labor agreements on federal construction contracts with a total cost of $25 million or more.  The order also revoked President Bush’s prior ban on mandatory PLAs, an action he’d taken after congressional hearings produced evidence that PLAs were discriminatory against open-shops and non-union workers, increased costs on most projects and were too often vehicles for abuse .  When the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was passed only days after Obama’s order, agencies were encouraged to mandate PLAs for all stimulus projects.

Even worse yet, we are likely to see greater costs on public projects as the country struggles out of recession. California’s experience with PLAs is not a good one.

In California, where 18.3% of the overall workforce is covered by a union, much of the recovery opportunities, including PLAs, are focused disproportionately on creating union jobs.  Where does that leave the other 81.7% of non-union workers who are fighting California’s 12.4% unemployment rate?  In construction, California’s union rate is higher than average 23.1%, which makes it even more difficult for private construction to compete. Despite popular belief that the construction industry is overwhelmingly unionized, only about 16% of America’s construction workers belonged to a union in 2009.  That’s a lot of workers left out of the competition when they need the work most.

Mandy also makes the important point that PLAs put minorities at a disadvantage, as most minority contractors are non-union. As National Black Chamber of Commerce President Harry Alford said at a panel I attended last year,“very few people in southeast Washington” worked on the Nationals Park baseball stadium, which was built under a PLA.

For more on project labor agreements, see here.

Obama Administration Hits Brakes on Project Labor Agreement

by Ivan Osorio on November 12, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Labor, Regulation

The Obama administration this week called off bidding on what would have been a union-friendly federal construction project bidding process, in response to a contractor complaint over its inclusion of a project labor agreement (PLA), which would disadvantage nonunion contractors, reports The Washington Times. The bids were for a $35 million contract ot build a Job Corps center in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Under a PLA, an open shop contractor could be required to employ workers from union hiring halls, acquire apprentices from union apprentice programs, and require employees to pay union dues. The Labor Department acknowledged that the complaing over the PLA was the reason it called off bidding.

This is as surprising as it is welcome. From promoting card-check legislation to imposing duties on Chinese tires to stalling on new international trade agreements, the Obama administration has consistently promoted the interests of organized labor, which strongly supports Obama, hoping that he can implement policy changes to help unions stem their decades-long private sector membership decline. Whatever the reason, this should be encouraging to advocates of open competition and flexible labor markets.

For more on project labor agreements see here.

“Join Your Fellow Pervs for Some Explicit, Twisted Fun” Courtesy of Obama’s Stimulus Package

by Hans Bader on August 11, 2009 · 2 comments

in Economy, Healthcare, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere

“Join your fellow pervs for some explicit, twisted fun,” urged a recipient of more than $25,000 from Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package, which received the money through the National Endowment for the Arts. The stimulus is also being spent on “nude simulated-sex dances, Saturday night ‘pervert’ revues,” and “pornographic horror films.” While providing taxpayer funds for “numerous” sexually perverse projects, and lots of money for welfare, the stimulus package has done little for America’s roads and bridges.

Why? Because feminist leaders complained that rebuilding roads and bridges would employ working-class men, who have borne the brunt of the recession, rather than women or the “sexually diverse.” Unemployment is very high among transportation and construction workers, who are overwhelmingly male. The vast majority of people who have lost their jobs in the current recession are male — 82%. But the stimulus package is not aimed at helping them. In response to demands from feminist leaders, the Obama Administration rewrote the stimulus package to largely exclude them, as Christina Hoff Sommers has chronicled at length.

The Obama Administration purged the stimulus package of most of the investments in roads and bridges originally suggested by economists, and filled it instead with welfare and social spending, out of political correctness, after feminist leaders complained that building and repairing roads and bridges would put unemployed blue-collar men to work, rather than women.

As Christina Hoff Sommers points out, “Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period.”

But when the Administration floated the concept of “an ambitious . . . stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams” as a way of “reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy,” “Women’s groups were appalled,” asking “Where are the New Jobs for Women?” and denouncing what they called “The Macho Stimulus Plan.”

The Obama Administration quickly knuckled under to this pressure, replacing its recovery package with an $800 billion stimulus package that instead “skews job creation somewhat towards women” by spending money instead on social services like welfare that are administered mostly by female employees.

“A recent Associated Press story reports: ‘Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over ‘Shovel-ready’ Projects.’ A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services.” Or, as another AP report put it, “Stimulus Aid Favors Welfare, Not Work, Programs.” Less than 6 percent of it ended up going to transportation.

The stimulus package also repealed welfare reform, as Slate’s Mickey Kaus and the Heritage Foundation have noted. Obama ran campaign ads claiming to support welfare reform, even though he had actually fought against meaningful welfare reform as an Illinois legislator. The stimulus package largely repeals the welfare-reform law passed by Congress in 1996.

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” The stimulus package has since destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.

Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.

The stimulus package also imposes on states racial set-aside requirements and prevailing-wage requirements, which increase the cost to taxpayers of government contracts. The prevailing-wage requirements will inflate the cost of state construction and transportation projects by at least $17 billion. Racial set-asides also are very costly to taxpayers.

Racial quotas, set-asides, and affirmative action are also mandated by Obama’s health-care plan, drawing criticism from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, reports today’s Washington Times. Earlier, the Commission criticized the Obama Administration for turning a blind eye to racist voter intimidation by black panthers, including an Obama poll watcher and Democratic official who used a nightstick and racial epithets to drive white voters away from a Philadelphia polling place.

Obama’s Job-Killing Stimulus Package Replaced Investments With Welfare, Out of Political Correctness

by Hans Bader on June 25, 2009 · 1 comment

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere

Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package was purged of most investments in roads and bridges, and filled instead with welfare and social spending, out of political correctness, after feminist leaders complained that building and repairing roads and bridges would put unemployed blue-collar men to work, rather than women.

Christina Hoff Sommers points out that “of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. . . .Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007. Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same period.”

But when the Administration floated the concept of “an ambitious . . . stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams” as a way of “reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy,” “Women’s groups were appalled,” asking “Where are the New Jobs for Women?” and denouncing what they called “The Macho Stimulus Plan.”

The Obama Administration quickly knuckled under to this pressure, replacing its recovery package with an $800 billion stimulus package that instead “skews job creation somewhat towards women” by spending money instead on social services like welfare that are administered mostly by female employees.

“A recent Associated Press story reports: ‘Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over ‘Shovel-ready’ Projects.’ A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services.” Or, as another AP report put it, “Stimulus Aid Favors Welfare, Not Work, Programs.”

The stimulus package also repealed welfare reform, as Slate’s Mickey Kaus and the Heritage Foundation have noted. Obama ran campaign ads claiming to support welfare reform, even though he had actually fought against meaningful welfare reform as an Illinois legislator. The stimulus package largely repeals the welfare-reform law passed by Congress in 1996.

Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” The stimulus package has since destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.

Recently, Obama fired an inspector general, Gerald Walpin, who uncovered millions of dollars of waste and fraud in the AmeriCorps program, including by a prominent Obama supporter, endangering the Obama supporter’s ability to administer federal stimulus spending in Sacramento.

The stimulus package also imposes on states racial set-aside requirements and prevailing-wage requirements, which increase the cost to taxpayers of government contracts. The prevailing-wage requirements will inflate the cost of state construction and transportation projects by at least $17 billion. Racial set-asides also are very costly to taxpayers.