The Merit Construction Alliance of Massachusetts, Inc., today issued the following statement in response to Executive Order No. 641.
“The only real purpose for a project labor agreement is to create a monopoly for organized labor. The Healey-Driscoll Administration is signaling that nonunion workers and contractors – including most women- and minority-owned firms – need not apply because political influence matters most in doing business with the state,” said Jason Kauppi, President of the Merit Construction Alliance, a statewide trade association representing merit shops.
PLAs are proven to reduce competition, increase project costs and deny construction workers, who are paying for the projects with their tax dollars, the opportunity to even fairly compete.
Background:
The state’s public bidding laws, without PLAs, have for decades ensured fair and open competition to achieve the lowest price among prequalified responsible bidders. This system has resulted in the best value for the taxpayers.
The state’s Prevailing Wage Law, and not PLAs, set the hourly rate to be paid to workers on public construction, regardless of union affiliation.
In order to perform state work, contractors must be certified by the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance. Most minority- and women-owned firms that are DCAMM certified are merit shops, i.e. nonunion.
PLAs exclude the vast majority of the state’s construction workers. In 2024, 83.4 percent of the state’s construction workers were nonunion, according to unionstats.com.
PLAs require contractors to recognize the union as the sole and exclusive bargaining representative of the trades and to use workers assigned by the local union. Merit shops do not bid on PLA projects, which require them to use temporary union workers rather than their full-time, regular employees. A PLA further requires project contractors to pay contributions to the established union employee benefits funds. Open shop contractors already provide their employees with such benefits, so a PLA artificially drives up the open shop contractor’s costs of performance.
PLAs reduce competition and significantly increase costs, cites the Pioneer Institute in its opposition to PLAs “A 2021 RAND Corporation report on the effects of PLAs on affordable housing production in Los Angeles found a 14.5 percent increase in construction costs and an 8 percent rise in overall per-unit costs for projects subject to the PLA. RAND also found that in the absence of the PLA, approximately 800 additional units of housing could have been produced with the same funding, an increase of approximately 11 percent.” Similarly, a study of Connecticut school construction found PLAs raised the final costs by 19.84 percent. (The Effects of Project Labor Agreements on School Construction in Connecticut, by Burke and Tuerk, January 2020.)
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