2009 in review: Top Story #4

The #4 Linn County story of 2009 was (and is) project labor agreements.

Cedar Rapids and Linn County will build a lot of new buildings over the next few years, and one of the biggest brewing debates is who will get paid to work on those projects.

Project labor agreements are ground zero in this debate, and the Linn County Supervisors deserve some credit for attacking the issue head on as early as July.

They had two primary goals:

1. Try to help local contractors get local projects.

2. Make sure the workers are paid well.

They figured the best way to do this was a project labor agreement, and whoa! All hell broke loose. Contractor associations lambasted the supervisors, trade unions started pushing from the other direction. Project labor agreements, traditionally seen as a concession to unions that shoulders non-union contractors out of the game, became a hot topic on the Des Moines special interest group circuit, and the supervisors were lampooned in a Master Builders quarterly newsletter, complete with cartoon of the five of them looking silly.

So the supervisors set out toward a compromise, not quite a project labor agreement, but a document that pre-qualified bidders -- ostensibly to make sure they're local. Not "fly-by-night" operations from West Virginia, for example. The supervisors started hammering this out with lawyers from Shuttleworth & Ingersoll, with an eye to withstanding the lawsuit that Master Builders of Iowa threatened to file.

This process moved along quietly, behind the scenes, not too quickly, until Dec. 21, when the supervisors decided to drop their plans for a pre-qualified bidder document, and promised to quickly hammer out a full-on project labor agreement in the mold of a contentious document that governed construction of the Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines. Trade union officials would help negotiate the agreement.

This was a surprise, considering the amount of time invested in the compromise route, and what was even more surprising was Supervisor Brent Oleson's willingness to back down from that route. A lot of politics are at work here, but a couple things worth noting are that a) Brent Oleson is a Republican, b) Ron Corbett is a Republican, c) Ron Corbett has been pushing for a project labor agreement, d) both Corbett and Oleson received significant campaign funding from local trade unions, and e) if Oleson started howling about the push for project labor agreements, attention might be drawn to Corbett's support of them.

Of course nothing has been decided either at the county or city, but it looks like what will happen is each will try a project labor agreement on one project, and see how it works. This is how Ray Dochterman, business manager of the Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 125, wants things to play out, because he thinks the public will be pleased with the results, and no one will feel like project labor agreements were ram-rodded through.

Projects likely to be the test cases are the Options/Linn County building and the new library. The agreement on which the new agreements will be modeled is that Wells Fargo agreement. Master Builders sued Polk County over the agreement in the 1990s, but it was upheld by the Iowa Supreme Court in a 2002 decision. The agreement required contractors, if they wanted to bid on the project, to pay wages and benefits equal to those bargained by construction unions. In exchange, labor leaders agreed to a no-strike clause in the contract.