In R.I., unions still rule

When a proposal to build the first new hotel in Providence in nearly a decade ran into opposition last summer, a few hundred unionized contractors and laborers filled the City Council’s ornate chambers. They squeezed together on the elegant wooden benches, and stood along the back of the room.

Half of them were unemployed during the peak season for construction, Michael Sabitoni, a Rhode Island union leader, told council members. Most union workers live in Providence, and 67 percent of them voted in the last election, he said pointedly.

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“We need to get it rolling with all construction,” he said. “Not just limited or select construction, but all construction.”

Everyone in the audience understood the message. Despite membership numbers that have ebbed in recent years, unionized workers have clout, beyond a single project or issue.

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In Rhode Island, union votes get people elected, and can get them knocked out in primaries, according to professors at several universities who have expertise in organized labor. Unions are politically savvy, and in the digital age have become more sophisticated in using technology to reach their audience and members, according to Scott Molloy, a professor of labor and personnel relations at the University of Rhode Island.

“If you go into a primary election where the turnout is usually very meager, if the labor movement gets all of its folks together … they can make the difference in a very tight race,” Molloy said. “They’ve been doing that for a long time.”

Nationally, union membership is dropping, to just 11 percent of the workforce in 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rhode Island, which remains among the most-unionized states, had 14 percent of its workforce counted as union members, a decrease of 1 percent from 2014.

That still ranks the state 12th nationally for percentage of the workforce that’s unionized – the second-highest in New England.

Rhode Island’s membership rate has held relatively steady over the past decade, though its makeup has shifted, according to George Nee, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, even as the national union rate has fallen.

“We have a very high percentage of the public-sector workforce that is organized,” Nee said. “We’re still having growth in that area.” In just the past year, 500 adjunct faculty at Community College of Rhode Island were organized, he said.

New growth in union membership has also come from the service unions, including at Rhode Island hospitals. In the past 20 years, he said, that movement has grown in force, even as other industries, such as manufacturing, have shed union positions.

“It’s not like people leave the labor movement,” Nee said. “It’s that the companies they worked for leave. There’s always the inference, that there’s less members because people don’t want unions. That’s not the case.”

EYEING REBOUND

One of the union segments that has lost members, but whose leaders say has retained its power, is in organized construction labor.

The number of union workers represented by the Rhode Island Building Trades Association has decreased since the economic recession, from a height of 11,000 pre-recession, to about 8,500 this year. That doesn’t mean the political influence has waned, said Sabitoni, who is president of the organization.

“The numbers are market-driven,” he said. “The fact that we’ve lost membership is the impact that the recession had on the construction industry, which then affected the demand for skilled tradesmen and women in Rhode Island.”

The organization represents 16 labor unions, including carpenters, electrical workers, bricklayers and other construction trades.

When the laborers want to influence policymakers, the organization can turn out large numbers, such as at the Providence council meeting.

“I’ll go there and speak on their behalf,” Sabitoni said, “but it’s always more effective to have someone walk up to a councilman and say: Hi, I live at this address. I’m in your ward. I’m out of work. And I’d appreciate your support and consideration on this so I can get back to work.”

The recession that devastated Rhode Island employment did the same to its construction industry. Although the state’s employment picture has rebounded, to 5.2 percent unemployed in November, an improvement from 6.9 percent at that point in 2014, construction workers remain displaced by the slow return of significant building activity.

For the past four years, construction labor leveled out at about 16,000 jobs annually. In June 2015, it fell back to 15,000 and has added only 300 jobs since, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which tracks economic data.

But 2016 appears to be a more promising year for construction in Rhode Island.

Signs of it are everywhere. More private projects are breaking ground, and the state is encouraging development through incentives that were not available even a year ago.

The unions, which historically have been involved in every major building project in Rhode Island, are positioning themselves to retain that power hold.

The most significant opportunity for long-term, mass-scale construction employment in Rhode Island is literally within steps of the Building Trades headquarters.

The I-195 Redevelopment District of Providence, a corridor of now-vacant land, arranged in parcels, is across the street from the union headquarters in Fox Point.

Across the river, several projects built with union labor, including the new Narragansett Electric Co. power plant, are visible.

Also visible across the river, the largest project now under construction in the state, the $220 million South Street Landing has an organized-labor agreement.

The developer, CV Properties LLC, based in Boston, has used organized labor on projects in Massachusetts for years, and plans to do the same in Rhode Island.

The developer and Wexford Science & Technology LLC also signed a purchase and sale agreement Jan. 21 for 5 acres in the Interstate 195 corridor, to build a mixed-use, phased development that will include shared work space for universities and industry. The companies plan to purchase two more properties from private owners, totaling three-fourths of an acre.

The largest projects in the state have been completed with unionized labor, which its leaders say is a product of reputation for performance.

“Every major investment, public or private, ever made in Rhode Island has had building-trade influence to make it happen, whether it is Providence Place mall, the R.I. Convention Center, the Deepwater Wind project, which we’re currently working on now, [or] South Street Landing,” Sabitoni said.

From a practical standpoint, according to Molloy, organized labor is the only feasible solution for large, complicated projects.

Unionized labor will almost certainly dominate construction in the I-195 corridor, he said. “It’s a reflection of the size of the project,” Molloy said. “The larger the project, the bigger the [construction management] company involved, the more complex they are. They have people onboard who can do everything from A to Z.”

That nonunionized labor cannot participate in a union project doesn’t mean these workers aren’t getting any jobs, Molloy said. The residential construction segment is nonunionized, while the larger, more complex commercial projects almost of necessity go to the unions.

“You take some small construction owner who has maybe five or six employees, he can’t build you a 10-story building,” Molloy said.

PROJECT-LABOR AGREEMENTS

For more than 20 years, project-labor agreements have been commonplace on large, complicated projects in Rhode Island, he said. The agreements once were required on public contracts in Providence. Although that is no longer the case, they remain a standard practice.

PLAs, as they are often called, set the terms and conditions for work on a given construction project. As part of the agreements, the involved trade unions agree to procedures that would resolve work problems, and they also agree to not disrupt the project schedule.

The appeal of the PLA to a developer, or owner, is the guarantee of seasoned, trained labor and a predictable outcome, according to Gregory Mancini, executive director and general counsel for BuildRI, a labor-management coalition that promotes the use of unions.

“Time is money,” Mancini said. “When you have a PLA, you have immediate access to people who are highly trained, who have an impeccable safety record.”

Gilbane Building Co., which is using a project-labor agreement on the South Street Landing site, has found the agreements work well on large or very complicated projects, according to John Sinnott, vice president and head of the company’s Rhode Island business unit, in an emailed response.

In addition to South Street Landing, Gilbane used the agreements on the Twin River Casino and at ongoing construction on the new Rhode Island Veterans Home in Bristol.

“They ensure a large, trained, consistent workforce,” Sinnott said. “They also ensure labor harmony and no project disruption, which means no schedule impact due to labor disputes.”

The agreements also contain a provision that ensures a steady channel of new entrants to the unionized building trades.

Every PLA negotiated by the building-trades association includes a 15 percent earmark of on-the-job hours for apprentices to train under the guidance of experienced laborers. This is a recruitment and training program designed to bring a younger group of workers into the construction trades, which is aging, according to union leaders.

Critics say it is an unnecessary and unfair subsidy for union construction, which results in increased cost on projects.

The project-labor agreements themselves are one of the reasons why construction labor, in particular, is among the most powerful of unions, according to Gary N. Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

“They’re strong because they can control who enters into the profession,” he said. “Unions in construction control work. They control who gets jobs. By controlling the jobs, they control the workforce. By controlling the workforce, they gain power.”

Associated Builders and Contractors, a national construction organization that represents independent contractors, argues that agreements requiring union participation escalate the cost, by excluding nonunion workers and reducing competitiveness for bids.

The organization compiled a summary of selected public projects that found costs increased on individual projects, ranging from 4.5 percent to as much as 26 percent.

The prevailing-wage requirement is intended to prevent the recruitment of extremely low-wage labor, but has had the effect of making union labor competitive, according to Molloy.

Project-labor agreements that require use of apprentice workers actually reduce costs, he said, because these people are paid less than the experienced journeymen.

‘THE 800-POUND GORILLA’

How much weight do unions wield in Rhode Island?

Politically, the trade unions are heavily involved in lobbying at the state and local levels. The union is active in elections at both the state and city levels, where policy affects construction.

Every apprentice that has come through the building trades in the past decade has been encouraged to register to vote. “The biggest thing you can do for your membership is the right to vote,” Sabitoni said.

The political operation of unions, in general, is much more sophisticated than it was in years past, said Nee, in part through technology that allows union officials to analyze voting history and voter registration patterns.

“Part of it is having a better understanding of what issues are important to people,” he said. “We do more polling than we used to. We’ve spent a fair amount of money, nationally and locally, determining what messages resonate with people.”

Nationally, unions are losing influence, but they still have political clout in states, such as Rhode Island, with Democratic legislatures and governors, according to Chaison.

“The unions in Rhode Island have power beyond their number,” he said. “They are able to do this because they have friends in the legislature. People in the legislature don’t want to start trouble with the labor movement. The labor movement [provides] the ground troops of the Democratic Party. They can turn out the vote, well beyond their numbers.”

Mike Stenhouse, president and CEO of the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity, which advocates for reduced taxes and government regulations, as well as open markets, said the influence locally is ubiquitous.

The state spends too much on construction and union-related projects, including through tax supports to private projects, he argued. “It makes it difficult to ease the tax burden, because all the money is being spent over there, by contract.

“No one wants to talk about the 800-pound gorilla that’s sitting in the room that’s squashing economic development, which is … the expense and regulation that go along with a pro-union state like ours,” he said.

The organization advocates for Rhode Island to become a right-to-work state, which would remove a requirement for employees to pay dues to the unions representing them in collective bargaining.

Nationally, participation in unions is dwindling. Even in former union strongholds, such as Michigan and Indiana, states are enacting laws that are chipping away at labor rights. Michigan in 2013 became a “right-to-work” state.

In Rhode Island, it realistically doesn’t have a chance, Stenhouse said. But 20 years ago, no one would have predicted Michigan, the base of automotive unions, would adopt an anti-union policy, he said.

John Tassoni Jr., a former state senator and current board member of the AFL-CIO, said unions often get a bad rap, particularly from the media. He created his own newspaper, Common Ground, in 2009, followed by the Common Ground radio program on WPRV-AM 790, to bring attention to the good work of unions.

Every Monday afternoon, starting at 4 p.m., Tassoni talks with guests or callers about labor issues and broader topics of interest to laborers.

In politics, union representatives and the construction trades have effective lobbying techniques, including turning out members on issues, and shouldn’t be penalized for that, he said. “There [are] negative perceptions about training. There [are] negative perceptions about what unions do,” he said. “They get a bad rap for doing a good job.”

Last summer, for a few months, the interests of two union groups collided over the new Providence extended-stay hotel sought by the Procaccianti Group.

Unite Here Local 217 at the time was organizing a vote for unionization at the Renaissance Providence Hotel, also owned by the Cranston-based company, and wanted the council to consider the wages paid to employees working at the hotel, not just the construction jobs the project would create.

The council eventually approved the new hotel construction as the project union workers packed the council chamber in support of it, after state political and business leaders, including the new state commerce secretary, advocated for the hotel.

It is unusual for a project to divide union groups, according to Sabitoni. “They went to an election, and won, which we support,” Sabitoni said, of the Unite Here Local 217 campaign. “I’m happy for them. But as far as holding up a project, [for] some future workers that are not identified? The council finally felt the necessity for the economic development of that area.”

In 2016, the construction trades will be advocating for RhodeWorks, the $500 million proposal the General Assembly will consider to rebuild Rhode Island bridges and overpasses, which represents significant construction opportunities for six or seven different trades, according to Sabitoni.

And the trades association recently intervened in the application of Invenergy Thermal Development LLC, which wants to build a natural gas-fired power plant in Burrillville.

The project is under review by the R.I. Energy Facility Siting Board, among others. Most groups requesting intervenor status, including the Conservation Law Foundation, are challenging approval for the plant.

The construction trades, said Sabitoni, view it as economic opportunity.

“This is a long-term, mega-construction project that comes around once in a while, that will employ hundreds of tradespeople and pump millions of dollars into the local economy,” he said. “There’s only one group that has intervened to support it. You’re looking at it.” •

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1 COMMENT

  1. In R.I., unions still rule – And that is why we are in such awful shape and trial most every other state in economic growth. The nepotism that exists between unions and the puppet legislature is what is killing this state. Ever wonder why we are consistently at the bottom of every business poll – because the legislature can’t get out of its’ own way. It’s time to face the music, and realize that these guys have pulled all the chairs away – bankruptcy or bust should be their new calling card.