Employee Free Choice Act Would Compound Lost Construction Jobs
Thursday, October 1st, 2009 by adminThe Economics blog over at the Wall Street Journal has an important post today on the severe unemployment afflicting the construction industry and asks, “Without Construction, What of Blue-Collar Men?” Good question.
Consider this:
“There’s no question this is the most severe recession we have had in this industry in at least the last 25 years,” said Lee Smither, managing director of consulting at FMI Corp., a Raleigh, N.C.-based construction research company and investment bank. “We don’t expect the industry to start coming back until 2011.”
And this …
The million-dollar question now is where — and how soon — this group of workers will be able to find work, in an economy that increasingly values brains over brawn. It’s little surprise now that one-third of the nation’s 15 million unemployed have been so for 27 weeks or more — a postwar record.
And now ask yourself, why in the heck would legislators and the president support the Employee Free Choice Act, which is expected to cost another 600,000 to 5 million jobs in our economy, with a hefty chunk coming from the construction industry?
To hit the breaks on job losses for blue-collar construction workers, the sure sign is to yield on EFCA.
Tags: Jobs
October 1st, 2009 at 1:07 pm
LaborUnionReport.com says:For the union-free construction industry, under EFCA, 1+1=0 (jobs)
More than any other industry, the construction industry will be the starkest example of how quickly jobs will be lost under the hallucino-genically-named Employee Free Choice Act.
As a non-union contractor can bid on jobs based on price and reputation, if he is unionized under EFCA, for as long as negotiations take (be it EFCA’s 120 days or longer), he will be unable to bid the work which will result in near immediate job losses.
As/if there is binding arbitration, nearly all trade unions have area-wide agreements which forbid individual contracts with more favorable terms. This means that unions will have to rely on arbitrator decisions to place newly-unionized contractors into the area wide agreement or abandon the employees of the newly unionized employer.
If the former is the case, the immediate jump in costs will put the newly unionized employer in a severly uncompetitive position if he can no longer bid the work (which means his employees go onto the union bench with all other unemployed construction workers).
Or, if the latter is the case and the union abandons the workers but the damage has already been done to the contractors bidding capabilities, there will be unemployment on that end as well.
In all cases, for construction workers, EFCA is a lose/lose proposition.