Think of this when we look at the street level bureaucracy and the tendency to occasionally farms these out to private organizations.
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Before the ink was even dry on President Joe Biden’s executive order on the use of project labor agreements for large federally funded infrastructure projects, some interest groups started crying foul and filing lawsuits.
While courts will ultimately adjudicate the legal merits of these claims, the bigger and more important question is what real-world data tells us about project labor agreements. How do PLAs impact projects out in the country, their workers and the construction industry as a whole? New research suggests that they have a positive effect, bringing more cost-saving efficiencies to projects for businesses and the taxpayers who foot the bills while strengthening and diversifying our infrastructure workforce.
PLAs, often regarded as “de-risking” mechanisms, function as construction management tools. They are pre-hire agreements between construction companies and labor organizations that establish the terms of employment, coordinate workflow among different crafts, promote investment in apprenticeship programs that train next-generation construction workers, and ban strikes, lockouts and other costly labor disruptions.
They’ve been in use since at least the 1930s, including on the Grand Coulee Dam project in Washington state. The Tennessee Valley Authority has used a master PLA since 1991. Today, PLAs are employed on many large projects, including NFL stadiums. Yet there is a lot of mythology out there about PLAs, largely due to the dearth of comparative research that can isolate their impact on specific project outcomes.
It is for this reason that a recent study conducted by our organization, the nonpartisan Illinois Economic Policy Institute, along with the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is especially timely and instructive.
. . . The results were telling. PLA-covered projects had an average of 16 percent more bidders than non-PLA projects and were more likely to be awarded at a cost below the original project engineering estimate. Moreover, projects covered by PLAs employed more apprentices training for construction careers, particularly from the historically underrepresented demographics of women and people of color that the industry sees as critical to meeting its long-term workforce-supply goals.
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Wikipedia: Project Labor Agreements.
A Project Labor Agreement (PLA), also known as a Community Workforce Agreement, is a pre-hire collective bargaining agreement with one or more labor unions that establishes the terms and conditions of employment for a specific construction project. Before any workers are hired on the project, construction unions have bargaining rights to determine the wage rates and benefits of all employees working on the particular project and to agree to the provisions of the agreement. The terms of the agreement apply to all contractors and subcontractors who successfully bid on the project, and supersedes any existing collective bargaining agreements. PLAs are used on both public and private projects, and their specific provisions may be tailored by the signatory parties to meet the needs of a particular project. The agreement may include provisions to prevent any strikes, lockouts, or other work stoppages for the length of the project. PLAs typically require that employees hired for the project are referred through union hiring halls, that nonunion workers pay union dues for the length of the project, and that the contractor follow union rules on pensions, work conditions and dispute resolution.
PLAs are authorized under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), 29 U.S.C. §§ 151–169. Sections 8(e) and (f) of the NLRA, 29 U.S.C. §§ 158(e) and (f) make special exceptions from other requirements of the NLRA in order to permit employers to enter into pre-hire agreements with labor unions in the construction industry.
