Great Scott: Projects Bid With and Without PLA Mandates Show PLAs Increase Costs and Reduce Competition
While researching the use of government-mandated project labor agreements (PLAs) in West Virginia in advance of Wednesday’s deadline for a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) survey about a potential PLA mandate on a large-scale federal project in Harpers Ferry, W.Va., TheTruthAboutPLAs.com went back in time to revisit another real-world example of how discriminatory PLA […]
The Most Infamous PLA Job: Lessons from Boston’s Big Dig
Boston newspaper editorials point out that Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick’s recent use of PLA mandates in exchange for Big Labor’s support during November’s gubernatorial election makes little fiscal sense for Mass. taxpayers and stinks of political favoritism – especially considering the $22 billion Big Dig’s well-documented record of missed deadlines, cost-overruns, construction defects (including a motorist fatility due to a collapsed tunnel ceiling panel), and reports of union workers visting methadone clinics, sleeping and drinking heavily on the job.
Funded by federal and Massachusetts taxpayers, the Big Dig is the most expensive and infamous government-mandated PLA job of all time.
New Jersey Project Labor Agreement Debate Grows
The debate over government-mandated project labor agreements (PLAs) in New Jersey is in the news again. New Jersey’s Asbury Park Press ran a scathing editorial opposed to PLAs (Costly PLAs Must Be Ended, 11/16) that TheTruthAboutPLAs covered here. The paper published an Op-Ed defending PLAs by Phillip E. Cooney, vice president of the New Jersey Carpenter Contractor […]
Union Corporate Campaign for Biotech Project Labor Agreement in Massachusetts
On 5/1 I wrote about how Virginia Building Trades Unions were running a corporate campaign against Dominion Virginia Power for more union jobs and (likely) a PLA. The Massachusetts Building Trades have taken a corporate campaign against companies in Massachusetts’ Biotech industry to a whole new level with this absurd StopBiotechLooting.org website, media campaign and […]