The Budget and Finance Committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisor will vote Thursday, November 29, on a measure that would effectively shut out many non-local workers from having their firms bid on construction work. If passed,\u00a0it will come before the full board next week.<\/p>\n
In a 588-word editorial available for free media use as content for publications and websites, or as background material for reporters covering the Board, Ed Noble, a Bay Area resident with 45 years in the electrical business, explains\u00a0what\u2019s really at stake for fair employment and for the San Francisco taxpayer .<\/p>\n
Noble\u00a0can be reached at 916-452-3198 or by email at enoble@helixelectric.com. Further\u00a0information can be obtained from Nicole Goehring, Community and Government\u00a0Relations Director, Associated Builders and Contractors of Northern California,\u00a0925-960-8513,\u00a0nicole@abcnorcal.org<\/p>\n
Will\u00a0City Shut Out Proven Electricians and Local Tradesmen and Tradeswomen?<\/strong> The skill-trained men and women of our company are rightfully proud of their work on San Francisco\u2019s Herbst Theater, War Memorial Auditorium, Laguna Honda Hospital, VA Medical Center, and, most recently, the new home of the city and\u00a0county\u2019s medical examiner.<\/p>\n Why,\u00a0then, is the San Francisco Board of Supervisors considering prohibiting our\u00a0firm and firms like ours from bidding on its future construction needs?<\/p>\n Helix\u00a0Electric was founded on the principle that when people work cooperatively\u00a0toward\u00a0common goals\u00a0with\u00a0integrity and attention to quality and detail, very special things can happen.\u00a0Since 1985, our company has had a team-oriented,\u00a0employee-empowered corporate\u00a0culture.<\/p>\n It has been an unqualified thrill for our employees to contribute their talents to building and repairing parts of one of the world\u2019s great international cities. A thrill that could come to an end if the Board of Supervisors adopts a\u00a0city-wide project labor agreement (PLA) for all its future construction\u00a0projects.<\/p>\n The\u00a0difficulty and concern we face with this PLA are that our hard-working men and\u00a0women won\u2019t be able to work in the city where they live.<\/p>\n Every contractor bases his or her bids for business on the training and experience of his or her crews. Under a PLA, should a non-union company win a contract, it must try to fulfill its obligation by using only workers sent to it by a union hall\u2014workers the company has no previous experience with \u2013 workers whose skills and knowledge have not been honed by years of work in our organizational\u00a0culture.<\/p>\n Furthermore,\u00a0Though PLA proponents claim PLAs ensure the use of local workers, they fail to\u00a0mention that nearly all PLAs require contractors to get most or all their\u00a0workers from union hiring halls, where dispatch rules prioritize\u00a0non-local\u00a0union\u00a0workers ahead of\u00a0local\u00a0nonunion workers.<\/p>\n Should\u00a0there not be enough union workers to do the city\u2019s job, nonunion employees can\u00a0be dispatched from the union hall after they have paid one-time membership dues\u00a0that include benefits they\u2019ll never receive because vesting periods are nearly\u00a0always longer than the life of public-works contracts. Benefits, by the way,\u00a0that all our workers already have through their employment with our company.<\/p>\n Our employees go through rigorous safety training each year that make us 670 percent safer than the industry standard. Can I guarantee the same level of safety when I am required to have skilled workers on projects that have never worked for me? Simply put, no!<\/p>\n The San Francisco taxpayer, too, will be harmed if the Board goes through with its PLA plan. PLAs inflate the cost of every project on average between 12 percent and 18 percent primarily due to a reduction in competition. This, of course, is the primary goal of the unions advocating a city-wide PLA. Examples of this are endless.<\/p>\n Across the Bay, when the Oakland Unified School District sought to rehabilitate and modernize some of its old schools, it received eight bids for the work, the lowest from a merit-shop (nonunion) contractor for $1.8 million. When politicians intervened, the school district decided to re-bid the contracts under a PLA, which dropped the number of bidders to three, with the lowest bid\u00a0coming in at $2.2 million.<\/p>\n Because\u00a0of its official PLA policy, when Watsonville wanted to make improvements on a\u00a0waste receiving station, only one bidder came forward with an offer to do it 63\u00a0percent\u00a0over estimate.<\/p>\n On\u00a0and on these examples could go. Only 14 of California\u2019s nearly 500 cities have\u00a0PLAs. San Francisco should heed the lesson.<\/p>\n ###<\/p>\n Bay\u00a0Area-resident Ed Noble is the director of project development at\u00a0California-based Helix Electric. He has more than 45 years of experience in\u00a0electrical construction management and business development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Budget and Finance Committee of the San Francisco Board of Supervisor will vote Thursday, November 29, on a measure that would effectively shut out many non-local workers from having their firms bid on construction work. If passed,\u00a0it will come before the full board next week. In a 588-word editorial available for free media use […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11447,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[46,36],"tags":[37],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2024-05-04 00:37:40","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcnorcal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcnorcal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcnorcal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcnorcal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcnorcal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abcnorcal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11448,"href":"https:\/\/abcnorcal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2499\/revisions\/11448"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcnorcal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcnorcal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcnorcal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcnorcal.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBy\u00a0Ed Noble<\/p>\n