Press Room - Press Release

LAUSD Fails Students and Taxpayer While Favoring Union Bosses

Construction Unions, LAUSD and Project Labor Agreements:

 Welcome to a $600 Million Lesson in Urban Corruption.

By Eric Christen

On August 24, 1999, the Los Angeles Unified School District's Board of Education approved, behind closed doors, a Project Labor Agreement that guaranteed almost all of the $2.4 billion Proposition BB school-repair and construction work to union members only.  This sweetheart deal was signed between the LAUSD and two major labor construction groups, the Los Angeles County Building and Construction Trades Council and the Southern California-Nevada Regional Council of Carpenters.  By requiring all workers to have to join a union in order to work on the job this agreement effectively shut out the 80% of the construction industry that chooses to be union-free, all but guaranteeing increased costs, cronyism and a lack of accountability.  Last week the school district released the bill for this 2 1/2 year journey into construction and fiscal madness: $600 MILLION.

So how did this happen and why didn't the board of education listen to those that predicted this disaster?  The answer is simple: Urban corruption.

When Prop. BB passed in 1997 the citizens of Los Angeles in essence handed LAUSD a $2.4 billion check to be used for badly needed school modernization and construction.  Like the proverbial child walking into a candy store, area construction unions saw Prop BB. as an opportunity to lock up all the work for themselves without having to compete for it.  The vehicle they brought forward to achieve this end is what is known as a Project Labor Agreement (PLA).  A PLA is a pre-hire agreement that unions have begun to use with increasing frequency the past 6 years, an agreement that covers all the work to take place on a particular project.  The LAUSD PLA, like all other PLAs, contains within it provisions that implicitly discriminate against merit-shop contractors, contractors who comprise almost 80% of the construction industry in California.  These provisions include: Forcing all workers to pay union dues, pay into union health, welfare and pension plans, to go through union hiring-halls and through a union dominated arbitration process should any work related problems occur.  By placing such provisions within a PLA union bosses are attempting to exclude competition on the one hand (thereby slowing a 30-year decline in their market share) and boost their own bank accounts on the other hand by keeping the contributions made into these accounts by any merit-shop employee who may unwittingly sign onto the PLA.

With the money sitting there and the means in hand to get it all for themselves, union bosses, led by LACBCTC Executive Secretary Richard Slawson, approached

LAUSD boardmembers and staff with a proposal too good to pass up.  Among the various selling points put forward (with a straight face) by PLA proponents are promises of an on-time, on-budget project that will have no strikes or slowdowns and that will be manned by "quality contractors" (as Boardmember Victoria Castro put it then).  What they fail to mention is that this will discriminate against the overwhelming majority of the industry that is union-free, especially women and minority owned firms, and that the record of PLAs is just the opposite of what is promised with regards to strikes and cost overruns.  The board, and the "Oversight Committee" (laughably mandated by a provision within Prop. BB to watch over how the funds were spent) were warned about the reality of PLAs, however, by various industry groups who predicted the obvious.  The obvious of course was that with reduced competition all you were going to get was a lack of accountability and increased costs, something any six year old could have told them. 

Thanks to this effort there was a token (and first of its kind) provision placed within the PLA that required a one-year review at which time the board could throw out the PLA should it be demonstrated that the PLA was not living up to its promises.  Unfortunately the fix was in on the review as much as it was in on the PLA itself, the fix being that no matter what happened the board and oversight committee were not going to be confused by any facts that would force them to confront the politically powerful unions. 

At the time of the PLA's consideration, LAUSD Boardmembers Barbara Boudreaux, Victoria Castro, Jeff Horton, Valerie Fields, David Tokofsky, Julie Korenstein and George Kiriyama heard our warnings and ignored them.  At the time of its review one year later boardmembers Tokofsky, Fields, Korenstein and Castro, along with new "Reform" members Caprice Young, Mike Lansing and Genethia Hayes heard our cries once again, and once again we were ignored. 

Someday the public will finally say enough and hold these elected officials accountable for their mismanagement, active discrimination and utter incompetence.  Until that day the urban corruption continues unabated with the workers, taxpayers and, of course, the children paying the ultimate price tag.