The Playground That Explains the Costs of Schools' Labor Pact
Posted: Thursday, October 28, 2010 4:40 pm | Updated: 4:57 pm, Thu Oct 28, 2010.
Posted on October 28, 2010
To understand the endless debate over project labor agreements, come with us to the Jefferson Elementary School playground.
There, an engineer estimated that expanding the playground would cost $3.1 million. San Diego Unified told construction companies bidding on it that it would cost somewhere between $1 million to $5 million. Ultimately, the lowest — and winning — bid came in at $2.7 million.
The school district cheers because the bid was 11 percent under the original estimate of $3.1 million. But opponents of the labor pacts jeer, saying that the playground cost 170 percent more. How? They used the lowest end of the bidders' price range, $1 million, as its baseline.
Those opponents, led by the Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction, used the numbers this week to point out that school construction projects like that playground have been more expensive and gotten fewer bidders since the district signed a labor pact on its $2.1 billion construction initiative.
But the school district uses different numbers to judge how it's doing. And while San Diego Unified agrees that costs have gone up, it disagrees with the coalition on whether the labor pact is to blame.
Under project labor agreements, employers must provide healthcare largely through union plans and use union hiring halls to find most of their workers. In exchange, unions promise not to strike or stall work. The school board signed a project labor agreement last year for most work on the construction bond.
The Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction did its own analysis and concluded that 13 projects done under the labor agreement cost 32 percent more than the low end of the price
Posted on October 28, 2010
To understand the endless debate over project labor agreements, come with us to the Jefferson Elementary School playground.
There, an engineer estimated that expanding the playground would cost $3.1 million. San Diego Unified told construction companies bidding on it that it would cost somewhere between $1 million to $5 million. Ultimately, the lowest — and winning — bid came in at $2.7 million.
The school district cheers because the bid was 11 percent under the original estimate of $3.1 million. But opponents of the labor pacts jeer, saying that the playground cost 170 percent more. How? They used the lowest end of the bidders' price range, $1 million, as its baseline.
Those opponents, led by the Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction, used the numbers this week to point out that school construction projects like that playground have been more expensive and gotten fewer bidders since the district signed a labor pact on its $2.1 billion construction initiative.
But the school district uses different numbers to judge how it's doing. And while San Diego Unified agrees that costs have gone up, it disagrees with the coalition on whether the labor pact is to blame.
Under project labor agreements, employers must provide healthcare largely through union plans and use union hiring halls to find most of their workers. In exchange, unions promise not to strike or stall work. The school board signed a project labor agreement last year for most work on the construction bond.
The Coalition for Fair Employment in Construction did its own analysis and concluded that 13 projects done under the labor agreement cost 32 percent more than the low end of the price
