Board Ends Pact Giving Unions Most Project Jobs

A pact promising union work on Orange County government projects will expire at the end of next year, the Board of Supervisors agreed Tuesday.

The move came after 32 speakers, most representing building trade unions, protested ending what they said was a successful experiment to save the county money and aggravation on construction projects.

However, some speakers disputed the savings and said the pact unfairly favored the small portion of the work force that is unionized.

Others questioned why the matter was brought up at all Tuesday -- as a routine consent item, four days before Christmas -- when the county had until late September 2005 to notify the unions of its intent to kill the so-called project labor agreement.

“This is more about political philosophy than trying to prove something,” Supervisor Bill Campbell said, responding to repeated requests from speakers that the board first study whether the agreement had saved the county money.

Such a study would be difficult, he said, because there were no side-by-side projects to compare.

“This is more about a way of doing business in the county,” Campbell said. “It’s about preferential treatment for 25% of the tradespeople in Orange County. I don’t understand why the county should force someone working on a county project to pay union dues. We should be about freedom of competition.”

Supervisors voted 4 to 1, with Supervisor Chuck Smith dissenting, to allow the agreement to expire.

The issue was equally controversial in 2000 when it was approved by a 3-2 vote. At the time, critics accused the board majority -- Smith, Jim Silva and then-Supervisor Cynthia Coad -- of kowtowing to unions in exchange for their support of a proposed commercial airport at the closed El Toro Marine base.

The agreement required that union workers make up at least 85% of the work force on most future projects. The workers gave up their right to strike. The airport, which voters killed in March 2002, was to have cost $2.8 billion to build, with most of the money coming from federal aviation grants. It was to have opened in 2005.

Union officials at the time denied a quid pro quo, saying they equally supported an airport and an alternative called the Millennium Plan that included new homes, retail, industrial and other construction.

The labor agreement was unique in two ways: It applied to most projects undertaken by the county, instead of being tailored to a specific project. And it represented a rare victory for organized labor in a county that has never had a large number of union households or much political sympathy for unions.

Patrick D. Kelly, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 952, said Tuesday that the pact brought the county relative labor peace in the last four years. That will end, he said, when workers reclaim their ability to strike.

Ending the agreement means bidders could go back to hiring out-of-county workers and workers without adequate training, longtime union leader Al Ybarra told the supervisors. For the past four years, unions have provided skilled local workers and trained apprentices, he said. “It’s not right. Do we want people to stay in Orange County or bring outsiders in to take the money elsewhere?”

Several shop owners testified Tuesday that they have been precluded since 2000 from bidding on county jobs because they don’t use union help. “This is, at its heart, an issue of fairness,” said Art Pedrosa of Santa Ana, a safety director for a non-union painting contractor.

Project labor agreements have been “unmitigated disasters,” said Eric Christian, government affairs director for the Western Electrical Contractors Assn. “It’s really about [unions] getting back lost market share,” he said, noting that in recent years union workers dropped to filling only 20% of construction jobs.

Smith urged colleagues to study the effectiveness of the agreement before ending it. That brought a retort from Chairman Tom Wilson, who said he too had complained of no study before the pact was approved.