Posts Tagged ‘Union Pension’
Investor Worries Over Card Check Money Pit
Is “card check” just a boogeyman the “big scary” businesses want everyone to worry about? Not by a long shot. The latest evidence comes from a man (who happens to have the pretty cool last name of Ferrari) who tells the Wall Street Journal that the looming threat of the Employee Free Choice Act, among other things, keeps him spooked about the prospects of his retirement future:
Despite the business being on more stable footing, Ferrari says he isn’t convinced that his business or investors at large are out of the woods. “Here we are well over a year after this huge once-in-a-one-hundred-year event and we still don’t know what the rules are,” he says. “What is my tax rate going to be for me and my business? Will card check legislation go through? Will cap and trade regulations affect utilities prices?” he asks. Because of this uncertainty, Ferrari has decided to push off closing up shop. “At the start of retirement, I want to have full peace of mind,” he says.
Wow. That says a lot.
It also begs one big question: what would card check do to the assets in already-troubled union pension funds? While EFCA would help get new members to add dollars, the assets those dollars would buy would face a shaky future.
For more on pension problems, visit our page dedicated to the subject.
EFCA Hurts Union Contractors and Workers
In spite of the pro-EFCA propaganda machine that has attempted to discredit ABC’s opposition to EFCA by painting ABC as an anti-union anti-worker trade association, it is important to note that ABC membership includes contractors and subcontractors who are signatory to building trade unions.
Union signatory ABC contractors employ members of local building trade unions, dispatched from local union hiring halls, to build construction projects. These union employees often work side-by-side with non-union craft professionals and together deliver quality projects on-time and on-budget. This is the true spirit of the merit shop construction philosophy, which encourages open competition and a free-enterprise approach that awards contracts based solely on merit, regardless of labor affiliation.
It is important for the public and ABC member union signatory contractors and their union workforce to know that EFCA, and any attempt at an EFCA compromise inclusive of binding arbitration language, will have a specific negative impact on union contractors and their union workforce.
FACT: EFCA’s Binding Arbitration is Bad for Collective Bargaining
Today, union contractors and craft unions agree to uniform wages and benefits through the collective bargaining process which produces local collective bargaining agreements that all signatory contractors in a local area must abide by when interacting with their union workforce.
As the Op-Ed in Wednesday’s Washington Examiner by Associated General Contractors (AGC) CEO Steve Sandherr points out, binding arbitration provisions in EFCA could disturb the fundamental nature of collective bargaining in the construction industry:
Newly unionized employers forced into arbitration are likely to have wages and benefits different than those in the area agreement. If those are less than what is in the area agreement, the ability to seamlessly move from one employer to the next will be undermined. Union workers will instead be forced to choose between staying with a single company even when there is no work or reduced wages and disrupted benefits contributions.
And lead to jurisdictional disputes between single craft and multi-craft unions:
The bill may encourage unions that are successful in organizing workers to claim work on a multi-craft basis. This will inevitably lead to multiple unions at a single job site claiming that particular work, and the pension contributions that come from it, belong to them.
These kinds of disputes traditionally lead to work stoppages that idle union workers and threaten the long term viability of any manner of projects.
Sandherr also makes an interesting point about union pensions and EFCA (a topic I hope to write about more in this space soon) before he concludes that:
Backers of Card Check, or the inevitable “compromise,” should be careful of what they ask for. The price for a quick boost to national union enrollment is simply too high for construction workers.
Sandherr is right, backers of EFCA and EFCA compromise just don’t care or perhaps don’t understand the impact of binding arbitration on union contractors and construction workers. It is yet another Truth About EFCA that needs to be told.
