Civic Group Says That Concessions Are Needed From the Construction Unions

 

A prominent civic group has joined builders and real estate executives in calling for major concessions from the unions that dominate the construction industry, saying cuts are needed to allow major projects to move forward.

The group, the Regional Plan Association, is supported by corporations, including some connected to real estate, and by planning groups in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. It is a respected organization known more for advocacy on transportation issues and large public works than for taking sides in labor matters.

But the association has quietly circulated a 51-page report saying that the expiration of 30 union contracts in June presents a chance to reform the $25 billion unionized construction industry by eliminating what the report calls obsolete work rules and featherbedding; by adopting a standard eight-hour day for all building trades; and by reducing benefit packages.

Members of the association are scheduled to present the report, “Construction Labor Costs in New York City — A Moment of Opportunity,” to Deputy Mayors Stephen Goldsmith and Robert K. Steel on Monday.

“Given the wrenching changes in the real estate industry since the recession,” said Robert Yaro, the president of the Regional Plan Association, “a growing number of builders have found that they can no longer support high labor costs.”

“This is not about what union workers are paid,” he added. “It’s about work rules and productivity. Those are things that should be changed.”

The labor negotiations come at a critical time for the construction industry, as a growing number of buildings in the city are being constructed with cheaper, nonunion labor.

The Building Trades Employers’ Association, a group that represents contractors, has paid for subway advertisements and a Web site directly appealing to union members to agree to concessions, angering union leadership in the process.

This month, 400 union construction workers held a noisy protest outside the Taj Pierre Hotel as Sam Zell, founder of Equity Residential Properties, arrived for a speaking engagement. Mr. Zell’s company is building an apartment building at 500 West 23rd Street with nonunion labor.

The construction unions dismissed the report, saying its authors were antagonistic to labor unions. They were referring to Julia Vitullo-Martin and Hope Cohen, former associates of the conservative Manhattan Institute who now work at the Regional Plan Association and prepared the report.

“So individuals with longstanding right-wing, anti-worker associations and views want to blame labor for our economic problems,” said Paul Fernandes, a spokesman for Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council, a union umbrella group.

“This draft report is rife with factual errors and omissions that reveal its underlying ideology,” he added.

“The only thing missing from this piece of garbage is the Koch brothers and the governor of Wisconsin.”

The once cordial relationship between Mr. LaBarbera, whose group represents about 100,000 workers, and Louis J. Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers’ Association, has become strained. Mr. LaBarbera “won’t sit in the same room with Coletti,” said a union lawyer who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter.

Real estate and construction executives said they were not trying to create a “Wisconsin,” referring to political efforts in Wisconsin and elsewhere to strip union workers of bargaining rights.

“This is about saving the industry,” Mr. Yaro said. “It is by no means an attack on the unions.”

The Real Estate Board of New York, a powerful lobbying group that represents most of the city’s residential and commercial developers, the contractors’ group and now the Regional Plan Association have conducted a campaign to enlist City Hall, in the hope that the mayor would use his influence on their behalf. But the Bloomberg administration has thus far seemed unwilling to insert itself into the labor dispute.

The association’s report says developers and owners, who absorbed the higher costs of union labor during the real estate boom, are now under pressure to cut costs because of lower rents and stringent financing terms.

But the report also says that leading developers and contractors are attached to union construction work, in part because “the best union labor continues to surpass nonunion in skills and productivity,” and because the jobs provide “a key channel of upward mobility for millions of Americans.”

The report describes as archaic various provisions that unions have succeeded in keeping around, in contracts that were also signed by employers.

These include the required presence of master mechanics and oilers for heavy equipment like cranes, which have become technologically advanced enough that the mechanics and oilers have very little work to do; and rules that say steamfitters, electricians and plumbers must always be around to monitor heat, electricity and water service, which the report likened to an apartment building having a full-time plumber rather than simply calling one when a leak occurs.

The report also called for eight-hour shifts to officially begin when a worker reaches his station, not when he arrives at the ground level, an issue in tall construction sites where many men are using a few hoists to get to the floors where they are working.

“To keep union firms competitive, the ongoing labor contract negotiations — and reformed work rule practices — must bring the union-nonunion differential closer to 10 percent from the current 20-30 percent,” the report says.

“If this does not happen, nonunion labor is likely to gain an ever-increasing share of the market, forcing union developers and contractors to accept open-shop arrangements or leave the construction business.”

 

Shanghai Truckers’ Protest Ebbs With Concessions Won on Fees

It remained unclear whether the concessions would end the demonstrations, which had turned violent on Wednesday when about 2,000 angry truckers blockaded some cargo facilities and tried to overturn police cars.

The city’s Municipal Transport and Port Authority said Saturday that it would repeal a fuel surcharge that had been imposed on trucks serving the port and reduce others, including a 50-renminbi ($7.70) surcharge on shipping containers that was cut to 20 renminbi ($3.08).

The drivers had demanded that that fee be repealed as well, news agencies reported, and negotiations between the two sides on Saturday produced no immediate agreement. But the port, parts of which had been rocked by blockades and protests earlier in the week, was calm.

The truckers’ protest has drawn widespread attention in part because it underscores rising concern among ordinary citizens and their government over inflation and its potential to stir public unrest. The cost-of-living index grew by 5.4 percent in March compared with a year earlier, the sharpest increase in 32 months, and food costs rose at more than twice that rate.

But the protests are also notable because they have unfolded amid what many call the toughest crackdown on public criticism of the government in years, if not decades. The Shanghai truckers’ demonstration was suppressed by an overwhelming turnout of police officers after Wednesday’s violence, but the authorities have permitted more limited protests.

Until Saturday, the entire episode had gone unreported in China’s state-controlled news media, probably because the authorities feared that word of an inflation-related demonstration might inspire copycat protests elsewhere.

On Saturday, the government’s Xinhua news agency reported that fees had been lowered or abolished to address truckers’ concerns about rising fuel costs and transport fees.

The Shanghai port authority issued a statement saying that the fee changes were directed at “easing rising inflation and cost pressures on transport companies.” It made no mention of the protests.

 

Lobbyists Won Key Concessions in Budget Deal

Even delivered in shorthand, the call’s meaning was clear to Mr. Wyden: a health care plan he had succeeded in getting passed months earlier despite furious lobbying by big business and labor had been pulled out of the blue and killed as part of the broader budget deal struck between the White House and Congress. What was most perplexing was that it had little to do with budgets or government shutdowns.

“I was flabbergasted, just flabbergasted,” Mr. Wyden, of Oregon, said Tuesday in an interview, describing the demise of a plan that would have allowed some 300,000 workers to pick their own insurance coverage through employer-financed vouchers.

With $38 billion in cuts on the line in a $3.5 trillion budget, the clash over federal spending played out in numbers so big that most standard calculators had trouble tracking all the zeros. But in the end, a handful of relatively small-bore line items affecting particular industries attracted some of the most aggressive lobbying behind the scenes, as business interests, health care providers and others fought to hold on to, or kill, proposals that affected their bottom line.

Much public attention focused on the social issues that appeared in the spending bill in the final weeks as social conservatives tried to use it to advance their causes, particularly the unsuccessful effort by abortion opponents to cut the financing of Planned Parenthood. In the end, the budget agreement reached late Friday night banned the District of Columbia from using its own money to provide abortions for low-income women in the city — a measure with a bigger social impact than fiscal.

But there was also intense but ultimately unsuccessful lobbying by General Electric and other military contractors to revive financing for an alternate engine for a costly jet fighter project. Proponents of tougher regulations for the politically influential and beleaguered commercial college industry succeeded, for now, in beating back an effort to block restrictions on how the schools get federal aid.

An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office found that the Wyden proposal had no short-term impact on federal spending and could actually save money over the next four years.

The plan to allow some employees to “opt out” of their employer-sponsored plans and choose their own coverage drew opposition from an unusual alliance of unions and businesses. Supporters said the vouchers would give employees more options and spur competition in the marketplace. Critics contended that younger, healthier employees would leave the plans and make insurance costlier for older, less healthy workers.

The American Benefits Council — a group that represents employers and insurers and spent nearly $1 million on federal lobbying last year — wrote its members that the Wyden proposal would have a “destabilizing” impact on employer insurance plans. The A.F.L.-C.I.O., which employs a formidable Washington lobbying force, warned that the proposal would create a “death spiral” of higher costs.

But the measure also had strong supporters. Charles Kolb, president of the Committee for Economic Development, said Tuesday that Mr. Wyden, in taking a different tack to managing health care costs, “was trying to introduce the type of structural reform that the system is crying out for.”

The measure did make it into the final health care plan signed by President Obama last year — only to be cut at the eleventh hour in Friday night’s budget agreement. “This is a lost opportunity,” Mr. Kolb said.

So who axed the program?

“I wish I knew,” Mr. Wyden said. “Everyone at the table says that someone else brought it up. They all say, ‘It wasn’t me.’?”

Democrats and administration officials insisted Tuesday in interviews that Republican leaders had moved to get rid of the Wyden plan. They acknowledge privately that were not in a position to fight it that aggressively, given that it was opposed by business and labor, and that agreeing to kill the plan was seen as a way of staving off other possible cuts in health care financing.

“There’s no question that eliminating this provision wouldn’t have been our first choice,” said an Obama administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in discussing private negotiations. “But these were tough, tough negotiations, and obviously no one got everything they wanted.”

Michael Steel, a spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner, said “the program was eliminated because it costs jobs — and jobs are the American people’s top priority.”

Mr. Wyden said that regardless of who brought it up in the White House-Congressional negotiations, he suspects that the group driving the elimination of his plan was the Business Roundtable, a powerful lobbying force made up of chief executives from the country’s biggest companies. The Roundtable, which spent more than $8.2 million lobbying on a range of health care and financial issues last year, had come out strongly against the idea of letting employees pick their own insurance plans.

“This is a textbook case of the special interests prevailing — Exhibit A,” Mr. Wyden said of the demise of his health care voucher plan. “Everyone knows the Business Roundtable wanted this killed, and now they can go back with a trophy to say they protected business as usual.”

Executives from the Roundtable did not respond to voicemails or e-mails on Tuesday inquiring about the issue.

But even as Mr. Wyden was looking for ways on Tuesday to revive his voucher plan, the Business Roundtable was announcing a separate agreement with the Obama administration to sign on to a “Partnership for Patients Pledge” intended to show commitment to health care.

“We applaud the administration,” said former Gov. John Engler of Michigan, president of the Business Roundtable, “for taking this proactive step to bring together a diverse group of stakeholders — all of us committed to, and invested in, America’s health care system — to measurably improve health care quality.”