Construction Contractors Get New Ally.

• Author: GUDDE, LEVI
• Position: Brief Article

Fred Lind is owner of Consolidated Enterprises Inc., a general contractor in Anchorage. He is also Alaska chapter president of Associated Builders and Contractors for the year 2000, an organization that represents general contractors, subcontractors, specialty contractors, material suppliers and peripheral support industries.

The organization--with its more than 22,000 members in more than 80 chapters throughout the U.S.--was founded in 1950 in Baltimore, Md., by a group of contractors who believed that projects should be awarded to the lowest responsible bidder. ABC was recently named by Fortune magazine as one of the top 50 most influential trade associations in the nation.

"Our organization is dedicated to the belief that projects should be awarded based on merit, regardless of union affiliation," Lind says. "While this idea may occasionally put ABC and labor on opposite sides of some legal and legislative issues, it would be inaccurate to say that ABC is anti-union. Many of the subcontractors we work with are union-shop operations. In fact, merit-shop is more accurately described as union and non-union crafts people working together."

While that philosophy is as American as mom and apple pie, it does cause problems with unions on some issues, according to Eden Larson, ABC's executive director in Alaska. One such issue is union-only Project Labor Agreements-an issue much on the minds of contractors in Alaska these days.

"Construction unions have recently been aggressively attempting to negotiate Project Labor Agreements with owners to require that all workers on a project must join a union as a condition of employment," says Larson.

"First, let me correct a perception regarding the construction industry. Many perceive that if the general contractor on a project is non-union, then all trades will be non-union as well. That's simply not true. In practice, non-union general contractors use union subcontractors all the time. So, too, union general contractors regularly use non-union subcontractors. Frequently, the same trade may be represented on a job by both union and non-union craftsmen."

Larson says that unions argue that a Project Labor Agreement is required to promote labor harmony and eliminate jurisdictional disputes between crafts, thereby assuring timely, cost-effective completion. "Recent experience at the Lathrop High School project (a union job) in Fairbanks tells a different story," she says. "That project had overruns in time...