6:00am | At Long Beach Airport since October 3 and at city hall before/during the last two city council meetings, you hear the strident chants:
Everywhere we go
People ask us
Who we are
So we tell them:
“We are the standard
Fighting for the standard
Fighting for justice”
Who they are is the Carpenters Union. But are they fighting for justice, or are they asking for something the City cannot legally give them? Or both?
In the eyes of the Carpenters (as in wood and concrete, not Richard & Karen and “Top of the World”1), justice would be the City’s allowing them to ply their trade on the airport expansion — begun this month — by way of offering them an agreement parallel to the one the City signed with the Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building & Construction Trades Council, an umbrella organization of over 20 unions that the Carpenters don’t want to join.
The City’s current position, though, is that the contract it made last year with the Trades Council legally prevents the City from doing offering the Carpenters such an agreement.
“The existing PLA [Project Labor Agreement] agreement for the airport terminal does not allow for side labor agreements,” says Deputy City Attorney Lind Trang. “[A parallel agreement] can’t be done because it would violate the PLA that’s currently in place and is signed by I think at least 20 unions already.”
But according to Dan Macdonald, a spokesperson for the Carpenters, “There’s other examples of public agencies throughout Southern California where [similar] parallel agreements are in place, and there’s no legal impediments.”
Macdonald offers an alternate explanation for the City’s position: “It’s politics. … “Because the [Trades Council] want to try and leverage us to affiliate with their group, they’re excluding us from work on that airport-expansion project. … [The City] have their finger up in the air to see which way the wind is blowing. ‘If we do this, are we going to upset the [Trades Council]? Is that going to cost us some political capital with them?’ We’ve got some powerful influence ourselves, so — in my estimation — they’re trying to figure out which group to go with.”
According to Macdonald, because the Carpenters are being excluded, the quality of the work being done at the airport may suffer. “[T]he concrete framing [at the airport] is being performed by other trades that aren’t as well trained or qualified to do that work,” he says.
Macdonald says the Carpenters disaffiliated with the Trades Council “eight or nine years ago,” as the Carpenters thought it best to allocate their funds otherwise. “We would rather spend that resource on our own membership … rather than spend it on some bureaucratic organization that doesn’t really accomplish all that it should,” he says.
As to the way forward with the City, Macdonald says, “Our view is that the solution is real simple: sign a parallel agreement equal to what the [Trades Council] has, and allow our carpenters to get to work on [the airport] project.”
But Trang says this is not an option. “What they can do is,” she says, “they are more than welcome to sign the PLA document that the other unions have signed. So they can join in, if they’d like.”
Trang says she has not been involved in negotiations with the Carpenters, and for that side of the story she directed Long Beach Post to Business Relations Manager Erik Sund2.
Sund, however, did not reply to Long Beach Post’s requests for comment.
1 FYI, the band Shonen Knife does the most fabulous version of this song. Super fun.
2 Sund is specifically targeted in Carpenters’ chants: “Long Beach is — UN-FAIR! Shame on — ERIK SUND!”