Editorial:
City of Chula Vista
Proposition G
Shall the ordinance prohibiting the City from funding or entering into public works contracts that require agreements with labor organizations or payments on behalf of employees to labor organization benefit plans or other trust funds be adopted?
Proposition G is one of the more contentious ballot measures on the June 8th ballot, primarily because it pits unions against the independent/general contractor organization. The initiative is referred to as the Fair and Open Competition Ordinance.
To call this ordinance fair and open is a misnomer to begin with. The General Contractors have never cared about fairness or openness. We have to only look at the contracting opportunities awarded to minority contractors with the City of San Diego. In 2007 Minority-owned firms won three of the 43 construction contracts totaling $1.8 million of the $45.9 million in work. Minority subcontractors received less than $900,000 of the $11 million handed out. So to think that contracting opportunities for the City of Chula Vista will become fair and open, by this example, is highly unlikely.
We would like to compare the City of Chula Vista’s subcontracting opportunities awarded to minority contracts but the city does not disclose this information.
The other argument for Prop. G has been the example of the failure of the Gaylord bayfont project for which the unions have received their fair share of the blame for the project. What the General Contracts do not share with the voters is that Gaylord had agreed in principal with the Unions and that the Unions were not the cause of the project falling apart, as stated in a letter by Gaylord to the AFL-CIO.
If we leave the competing organizations out of the picture and take a look at the proposition on its own merits it does not stand up on its own.
General Contractors do want the City of Chula Vista to enter into Project Labor Agreements (PLAs). But the proposition as written is extremely confusing, hard to understand and what we do understand would prohibit the City from receiving funding from the State which then would prohibit the Federal government from funding local projects.
PLAs do not prohibit any contractor from bidding on any City project. All state and federal funded projects must pay prevailing wages. The difference would be that PLA projects also include health care, safety standards, workers comp, grievance support, and drug testing.
Basically, PLAs and unions ensure a living wage with benefits, a safe environment, and an opportunity for local workers to be put to work. We have to ask ourselves ‘the problem with this is????’
The benefit of a PLA for the City is a stable workforce, contract language to complete the work on time and on budget, and a no-strike agreement.
Another misnomer is that workers are required to join the union. This is not true. All a worker must do is utilize the hiring hall, where it is against federal law to discriminate against non-union workers in getting a job.
The Fair and Open Ordinance is about the General Contractors and has very little to do about what is in the best interest of the workers.
With a PLA the workers’ interest are front and center. Without a PLA worker’s interest take a back seat to the contractor’s profits. Couple this with the faulty language of this ordinance – We Recommend a No Vote on Prop. G