by Warner Todd Huston
BigGovernment.com
In a victory for free labor, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has canceled its solicitation for bids to build a new Jobs Corps Center in the state of New Hampshire. Why is it a victory? Because initial plans to receive bids would have discriminated against non-union construction companies per President Obama’s orders. Over 80% of all construction companies are non-union.
Executive Order 13502, signed early in Obama’s term, was applied to the New Hampshire construction project and instituted what is known as a Project Labor Agreement (PLA). A PLA is a way to force all companies working on a construction project to agree to union rules, dues, pensions and payments whether they are union shops and their employees are union members or not.
In effect, a PLA turns every employee and company working on a PLA enforced project into a unionized force. Naturally, this drives up costs, lengthens deadlines, and forces employees to fork over dues money even if they don’t belong to a union.
A PLA ruling either outright excludes non-union companies (often as much as 80% of the workforce in any particular state) or forces them to be hobbled under union rules, but PLAs are nothing less than a government payoff to unions. In essence a PLA is a direct transfer of government money to union coffers and that is precisely why President Obama decreed via Executive Order that henceforth all government construction projects would be forced to proceed under PLAs.
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