It might just be one battle, and the victory for the taxpayers may have come from the flanks, but in the ongoing struggle to get elected officials to act in taxpayers’ best interests, we can at least count a win. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) has a two-fold mission. It brands and promotes Las Vegas, and it fills hotel rooms with conventioneers by owning and operating the country’s largest convention center. In order to compete with other cities for convention business and also to modernize the facility, the LVCVA board voted in May 2007 to proceed with an $890 million, three-year expansion project.
Because it’s important to keep the facility open while the work is going on, local labor unions saw an opportunity to put pressure on the LVCVA. The story is an old one, especially in Las Vegas. Big labor creates a threat to the business viability of an entity, and then proposes a solution to alleviate the threat. The threat is labor unrest, picketing and protesting, and its effect can be magnified if it’s done in front of tourists and conventioneers.
As the planning and design stages of the project got underway, the labor unions proposed their idea for eliminating this threat: a Project Labor Agreement (PLA). A PLA requires all contractors, whether they are unionized or not, to subject themselves and their employees to unionization in order to work on a government-funded construction project. This is done by including a collective bargaining agreement in the project’s bid specifications. In order to receive a contract, a contractor must sign the agreement and subject its employees to union control.
Since the LVCVA is a public agency, it must pay prevailing wage, so wages are not the biggest issue here. The primary issue is jurisdiction. If the LVCVA agrees to pay prevailing wage to have an electrical switchbox installed, who gets paid to install the sheet of wood behind the switchbox: an electrician or a carpenter? This is an issue that has led to posting banners at a jobsite, declaring “Shame on Company X.” Jim Gans, LVCVA’s senior vice president of operations, called the PLA an “insurance policy” to avoid work stoppages or slowdowns in case there was a dispute between two unions on how work would be done or who would do it. In this case, the “insurance premium” would be paid by taxpayers, as union companies would have a stranglehold on the contracts.
The reasoning for LVCVA to sign a PLA was to eliminate discord, yet before the project even started, unions were unable to agree on a single document. At its October 2007 meeting, the LVCVA board was presented with, not one, but two, PLAs. One was with the Southern Nevada Building Trades Council (SNBTC) and their affiliated unions, and the other was with the Carpenters’ and Laborers’ unions.
In order to get the board to agree to these two PLAs, Steve Ross of the SNBTC, Tommy White of the Laborers’ Union and Mark Furman of the Carpenters’ Union all promised the board that there would be no work stoppage during the term of the project if there was a jurisdictional dispute as to who should be doing some aspect of the work, even though the separate documents didn’t require them to coordinate.
After the board approved the two PLAs, the unions started arguing with each other, lessening the likelihood that they would actually coordinate according to the terms spelled out at the meeting. By January 2008, the problem became clear. Even with separate PLA’s, not all of the unions were willing to sign on. The issue came back to the board. This time, the unions presented the idea that maybe a third PLA would solve their problems.
LVCVA Chairman Oscar Goodman reminded the squabbling unions that they had promised to sign the agreements at the October meeting, and the board voted to give them until the end of the week to sign, or there would be no PLA. The deadline came and went without a resolution, with the unions obviously deciding that their jurisdictional issues were more important than an agreement. The expansion project went out to bid without a PLA.
The result? The taxpayers will get the best convention center in the country, built at prevailing wages in a competitive environment. The only deal that could be better than this would be to drop the “prevailing wage” provision and let real competition rule the day. Isn’t that how we built this great country?
