Growing the Middle Class

Project Labor Agreements help guarantee the quality of the jobs created by public investment. Good middle class jobs are well-paying, safe and provide health insurance.

Wages

Unionized construction workers have access to full family health benefits and career path jobs. Upon completing apprenticeship programs, most unionized construction workers earn between $35,000 and $70,000 a year, enough to allow them to enter the middle class.

Source: California Department of Industrial Relations, Public Works Prevailing Wage Sheets.

Safety

Compliance and worksite safety provide our community with good jobs.

Training, monitoring and education about compliance with OSHA (the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration) standards all play a significant role in reducing workplace injuries and protecting workers’ rights. Apprenticeship programs provide both on-the-job and classroom safety instruction. A study performed in Washington state demonstrated that construction laborers who received safety training reduced workers’ compensation claims by 12%, and for workers under age 25, the reduction was 42%.

Worker representation on the jobsite is another key element of safety and overall compliance with laws and standards. When an issue regarding safety, health or wages and hours arises, a process already exists for resolution. Therefore, a worker placed in an unsafe situation has the training to recognize it and also understands how to resolve it. A study on perceived safety in the construction industry found that construction workers with on-site representation were more likely to be “made aware of dangerous work situations, [to have] received safety instructions when hired, [to] have regular job safety meetings and perceive that taking risks was not part of their job.”

While OSHA is responsible for monitoring over 6 million worksites across the nation, the agency is severely understaffed, employing only 2,000 inspectors. Worker representation can supplement OSHA and other federal, state and local agencies in ensuring worksite safety and training by providing expertise within the on-site workforce.

Furthermore, under a PSA, local agencies are better empowered to protect wage, hour, health and safety standards on the job. By using the PSA as an instrument to set uniform standards on projects, the Los Angeles Department of Public Works (LADPW) has been able to increase its compliance program. For the 2003 – 2006 fiscal years, the LADPW Bureau of Contract Administration made 194 assessments for a total amount of $6.2 million. A substantial majority (84%) of assessments were made against firms without worker representation, and these firms accounted for 93% of total assessments collected. Firms with worker representation had fewer and less severe non-compliance assessments overall.

City of Los Angeles Department of Public Works, Bureau of Contract Administration Labor Compliance Data, 2003 – 2006

Healthcare

PSAs provide healthcare self-sufficiency rather than reliance on taxpayers.

PSAs give all project workers access to healthcare through their workplace. A report by CPI released in March of this year, found that only 35% of construction workers in California received health insurance through their employers in 2005, the height of the building industry boom. Many were left completely uninsured (32%) or were covered by government programs such as Medicaid (13%).

The construction industry accounted for 15% of the state’s chronically uninsured, more than twice its share of the workforce (7.3%). More than a quarter (27%) of construction workers were uninsured for the entire year while more than 40% were uninsured at least part of the year.

There is significant evidence that not having health insurance leads to poorer health, and the construction industry is particularly hazardous. The occupational injury and illness rates of some construction trades are more than double the incidence rate for an average private sector worker. Construction has an incidence rate of 7.1 injuries and illnesses per 100 full-time (or equivalent) workers in construction, compared to 4.7 for all private industries.

A PSA allows project workers to access healthcare coverage through multi-employer trust plans. Employees contribute to the plans based on the type of craft and derive health benefits that stay with them as they move between contractors and projects subject to the PSA, rather than losing benefits with each project move. More than 80% of unionized construction workers have job-based health coverage compared to only 46% in the nonunion sector of the industry.