The Truth About Project Labor Agreements

As the 2013 legislative session of the ethically challenged New York State Legislature is about to come to a close, politicians in the Empire State are poised to approve a plan to authorize casino gambling – as long as the casinos are built with wasteful and discriminatory project labor agreements (PLAs). Here at TheTruthAboutPLAs.com, we [...]

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Last week the New York Bridge Authority suspended work on the “Hamilton Fish” Newburgh-Beacon Bridge following two accidents on the $23 million contract. On June 13, a painter had to be airlifted to a hospital from the jobsite following an accident. A May 21 incident left two painters dangling from safety harnesses under the bridge (see article and image from [...]

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Great news out of South Carolina. Yesterday, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley signed S.438 into law, which will prohibit government entities in the state from requiring contractors to sign a project labor agreement (PLA) or other agreements with labor unions as a condition of performing work on public construction projects. South Carolina is the 17th state [...]

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Western Service Area, issued a survey requesting feedback from the construction industry about including a government-mandated project labor agreement (PLA) in a solicitation for a federal contract to build a new air traffic control tower exceeding $25 million in Tucson, Arizona, where just 2.7 percent of the construction workforce belongs to [...]

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Big Labor’s latest attempt to secure a wasteful and discriminatory project labor agreement (PLA) mandate on a public construction project has opened some old wounds in the Columbus, Ohio, area. The Franklin County Commission instituted a PLA mandate as a condition of performing work on the $45 million Hall of Justice renovation project in downtown [...]

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City officials in Allentown, Pa., are determined to do everything they can to ensure local construction projects are built exclusively by union labor, despite the fact that the vast majority of the construction workforce in the area chooses not to join a union. After being forced in 2011 to repeal a blanket project labor agreement [...]

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The joint venture of Balfour Beatty Construction and Clark Construction on the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) Campus East Headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, epitomizes successful partnering and delivery of a complicated large-scale federal construction project.  These merit shop titans collaborated to build the largest U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) project since the Pentagon and [...]

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At yesterday’s United States House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials field hearing in Madera, California, on the federally assisted California High Speed Rail project, ABC California submitted a statement for the record and issued a press release in opposition to the union-favoring project labor agreement (PLA) required by the California High Speed [...]

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Last week the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) announced the award of a key contract to build the majority of Phase 2 of the controversial Dulles Corridor Metrorail Project, known as the Silver Line. The $1.178 billion design/build Package A contract was awarded May 14 to Capital Rail Constructors, a joint venture consisting of Clark [...]

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