No mas!

I’ve seen too much money ****ed away on foolish projects by idiotic school boards and administrators.

PLA stands for Project Labor Agreement. These egregious agreements force contractors to join the union if they want to do a project. There are PLA’s on public and private work. Though public works require every contractor to pay the prevailing wage amount the PLA automatically dismisses %80 of the bidders from the bidding process and therefor drives the price up an additional 15%. The $336 million dollar Measure C wasted over $50 million dollars by signing a PLA. The National University just concluded a study proving the waste caused by the PLA. This study was validated by USC. Our politicians are stilling giving away our money to gain union support. Josh, there are plenty of examples in Contra Costa of the unions use of the PLA and subsequent “Green Mail” to transfer tax dollars into thier coffers. I think this deserves to be reported.

Usually stipulates that client will pay prevailing wages (union scale) and pay into trust funds for pensions, health care, apprenticeship etc. which pretty much guarantees that the work will only go to union contractors.

The other side of the coin is that client gets a qualified work force and the agreement stipulates that there will be no strikes, jurisdictional disputes or work stoppages for any reason

Also, to Publius’s point, several cities around here use only union members for all their contracts. I think these are called PLA’s. (Unsure what that stands for, but the L is for Labor). This means they are not competitive in that only union contractors can bid on contracts. Not only does this raise the costs to the cities, but it is unfair.

#19 See above on the many ways organized labor forces people to join voluntarily. As for wages. Public teachers make more than private teachers. Construction union members make more than non-union members. You cannot compare cops, fire fighters and prison gaurd wages to non-union wages because they have to be union. Your data is wrong. Did you know that on any government funded job the tax payers pay approximately 30% more than what the private sector would pay. The main reason for this disparity is the Davis-Bacon act requiring prevailing wage rates to be paid that are based on union salaries.

No one “forces” anyone to take a job w/a given shop/employer just as no one is “forced” to purchase a given stock issue. Further, this broad generalization of high priced union labor is seriously out of touch with realities.

As a group, only the two safety unions exhibit data that could be considered anywhere near “over market”.

Private sector unionized employees are becoming increasingly rare as employers migrate to various alternatives to regular full-time employment and, where they do still exist, total comp incomes of all private sector employees, unionized or otherwise, have been eroded on a consistant basis for many, many years now.

Teachers are, for the most part, at the bottom of the earnings heap.

Why JUST unions ?

If we scrutinized the rest, we can find all kinds of misuses and injustices as well; the main problem is their overbearing influence of our political system – right ???? So, let’s get rid of ALL of them. Anything less is just more political divisiveness.

“ecrasez l’infame”

Voltaire