Union Officials' 'Power Grab' Goes On

by Reed Larson

FOR RELEASE: March 2, 2001

After playing a central, but largely unrecognized role in creating the ongoing California energy crisis, building-trades union officials are now on the verge of exploiting it to seize even more power over the Golden State's economy.

A measure (S.B.33) supported by Gov. Gray Davis that now appears poised to pass the union boss-friendly state Senate would turn California's privately-owned power grid and some 32,000 miles of power lines into state government property.

As critics charge, this hare-brained scheme would do nothing to solve the crisis. It wouldn't add to supply or reduce demand.

But S.B.33 would make building-trades union officials happy since, in California, taxpayer-funded construction is virtually always Big Labor-controlled.

S.B.33 would reward some of the very people who helped produce the crisis.

More than a decade ago, San Mateo union lawyer Thomas Adams and plumbers and pipefitters' union officer Thomas Hunter developed a novel strategy to force California power producers to discriminate against nonunion contractors and their employees.

As San Francisco labor attorney Mark Thierman reported in the January 29 Engineering News-Record (for the entire column, visit www.enr.com), Mr. Adams and Mr. Hunter began to file environmental protests on power projects as a means of securing union-only construction deals.

Under these discriminatory "project labor agreements," or PLA's, nonunion firms must agree to force their employees to adhere to union work rules and fill open positions through union hiring halls in order to submit a bid on a contract.

PLA's, of course, set the stage for Big Labor to force independent workers to pay union dues as a job condition.

The group California Unions for Responsible Energy (CURE) -- formed in 1997 for the purpose of filing environmental protests -- bluntly tells project owners it will withdraw the protests in exchange for the "socioeconomic impact mitigation" of a PLA.

You might suppose it would be illegal for union officers to abuse environmental law in this way for extortionate purposes.

But union-influenced government bureaucrats disagree. The state Energy Commission rejected a challenge to CURE's extortion in 1997.

Since then, it's been all but impossible to get permission to construct or upgrade a power plant in California without a PLA.

According to Mr. Thierman, this has led to an average 20% hike in construction costs due to the exclusion of competitive nonunion bids, Big Labor featherbedding, and strikes called in violation of contract clauses.

Denied the ability to make a profit, in recent years contractors have almost ceased building power plants in California.

Consequently, today California suffers from a massive power supply deficit that can result either in major price hikes -- possibly imposed both on power customers and taxpayers -- or government rationing.

While economists of various political stripes agree that any short-term solution to the California crisis will involve allowing the price of energy to reflect its actual cost, most Californians know they also need to increase the supply.

For this purpose, the California Legislature obviously needs to overturn the irrational four-year-old bureaucratic ruling that entitles union officials to halt plant construction through blackmail disguised as an "environmental complaint."

To state the obvious, if an environmental complaint has merit, it should be resolved. If not, it should be tossed out.

But no public interest is served when Big Labor gets an environmental complaint, worthy or unworthy, dismissed because a contractor has acquiesced to discrimination against employees on the basis of union status.

Unfortunately, instead of moving to change this flagrantly absurd state policy, the union-label politicians who run the California Legislature are now seeking to ram through S.B.33, Gov. Davis's proposed state takeover of the power industry.

That would further increase building-trades union officials' power to corral unwilling workers into unions while burdening taxpayers with a new, multi-billion-dollar, money-losing "investment."

I urge freedom-loving Californians to contact their state senators through the California Senate, 916-445-4311, to urge them to oppose S.B.33 on all votes and to support legislation that bars the dismissal of environmental complaints as a quid pro quo for discrimination against nonunion employees.

Reed Larson is president of the Springfield, Va.-based National Right to Work Committee®.