NYT: Trade Unions in City Confront a Rise in Nonunion Projects

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/19/nyregion/19construction.html?_r=1&partner=EXCITE&ei=5043

By CHARLES V. BAGLI
Published: March 18, 2011

A luxury apartment building is rising at 23rd Street and 10th Avenue, and, across town, one is being created inside an old Salvation Army building overlooking Gramercy Park. Other residential buildings and hotels are going up on 11th Avenue, West 18th Street and East 23rd Street.


Uli Seit for The New York Times
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About 300 union members listened. Contract talks are expected to start soon, and employers are demanding givebacks. Both sides say that unions' share of construction work has declined.


All are signs that New York City’s real estate industry is clawing out of the recession. But they are noteworthy for another reason: they are being constructed without any union labor.

For most of the last century, the city’s construction unions were a symbol of labor strength in a pro-labor town, and their involvement in large projects was almost never in doubt. But just as public employees’ unions across the country are in the fights of their lives, the city’s major building unions are facing their own moment of reckoning.

While they are still a major presence, their share of the city’s $20 billion to $30 billion in annual construction work has dropped significantly in recent years. There are no official statistics; according to unionized construction companies, two out of five construction jobs in the city are now nonunion, though unions put the number at one in four. All agree that for many years, at least 85 percent of building jobs were union ones.

And the companies and unions are about to enter what may be their most tense contract negotiations in years, with the employers demanding large concessions and already angering labor leaders by taking their campaign directly to the workers with a Web site and in small group meetings around the city; subway ads may also be forthcoming.

“There’s enough pressure on everybody,” said Bobby Bonanza, business manager for the Mason Tenders District Council, which represents about 13,000 workers affected by the contracts. “We don’t need another Wisconsin in this town.”

FULL 2 page story at link.

[disndat]

1. Mayor Bloomberg

loves the unions like the Koch Bros. He has done to NYC what The governor in Wisconsin is trying to do with collective bargaining, by by-passing the biding process and enriching the big Wash.D.C. defense contractors with NYC tax payers money.

[Drale]

2. When their buildings start collapsing from

a combination of substandard construction and the lack of inspections, because we all know how much republicans hate that fictional "big government". They will start pointing fingers AGAIN.