Tradesman Viewpoint

It's hard to imagine that there could be two rival groups that are farther apart philosophically than the Associated Builders and Contractors and building trades unions.

The anti-union ABC and the building trades agree on virtually nothing. An inside peek at the annual ABC Legislative Conference June 4-5 in Washington D.C. offers a lesson on just how far apart the anti-union contractor group is from and building trades unions.

The ABC's "common theme" of the conference was to elect "a free-enterprise majority" in both chambers of Congress, according to the ABC's web site. "The strength of ABC is free enterprise itself," said ABC National Chairman Ken Adams. "And it will benefit the entire industry if we stand steadfast on our principals, policies and practices."

The Associated Builders and Contractors started in 1950 as a group of seven Baltimore contractors. It is now a national organization devoted exclusively to the open shop philosophy - in other words, they are oriented towards keeping unions and collective bargaining away from their businesses and projects. But the ABC has long been regarded by unions and other observers as more of a marketing and lobbying force than one that is involved in the nuts and bolts of improving construction industry training, quality and safety.

Only in recent years, when construction workers were scarce on many major projects across the country, did the ABC start giving lip-service to the needs of its under-paid workforce. 
"If low pay was a felony, I think most of us would be on death row today," said Franklin J. Yancey, a former senior vice president and now a consultant at Kellogg Brown & Root, Houston, one of the nation's largest nonunion construction employers. "Today, we do not have craftsmen, we do not have apprentices, we have poor people," Yancey said 18 months ago, as quoted in the Engineering News Record.

About the same time, Henry G. Kelly, the national president of the ABC, said recognizing the value of skilled craftworkers would be a priority of the contractors group. "We need to be paying them a competitive wage and we need to offer them a competitive benefit package," he said.

Maybe everyone at the ABC didn't get that memo. At the group's convention earlier this month, leaders and their political allies were still hammering away at the need for repealing prevailing wage laws - which are the single most important laws for sustaining both union - and nonunion - construction workers' wages.

There seemed to be little talk about improving worker training, wages or quality at the ABC conference. What they did talk about, and who did the talking, revealed much about where the ABC stands, and why it pays for construction unions to keep a constant watch on their old nemesis.

*"Elections are coming Nov. 5," Adams said. "And President Bush is doing his part. But his administration faces a roadblock in Washington called the U.S. Senate. ABC's number one goal this year is to elect a Senate that believes in free enterprise and open competition." Currently, the U.S. House is Republican-controlled, while Democrats hold sway in the U.S. Senate by a 51-49 margin.

*Political speakers at the ABC's convention were a who's who of anti-union Republican leaders. The ABC's "Free Enterprise Legislator of the Year" award went to GOP House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, whom Adams called "an immeasurable ally on behalf of ABC issues."
For his part, Delay described a House GOP initiative with an aggressive acronym: STOMP - the Strategic Taskforce to Organize and Mobilize People - which is designed to rally volunteers to focus on "critical areas that will decide the upcoming elections" and keep the slim five-vote Republican majority in the House.

*ABC presented its first Lifetime Achievement award to retiring GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas. "Every (legislative) fight I've been in these past 18 years, I've been in (the trenches) with ABC. I don't think we've missed a beat," he said.

*Addressing issues near and dear to the building trades was Republican Sen. Hutchinson of Arkansas. He said regaining the Senate for Republicans would allow them to set the agenda on items like ergonomics, project labor agreements and health plan legislation. And that agenda would most assuredly not be pro-labor.

Finally, we were once again amused to read about the ABC's stance on training. For all their talk about open competition and free enterprise, the ABC takes a curiously liberal approach to funding for worker training. They have never been shy about approaching the federal government to help fund their craft training program - but at the same time the ABC has had a miserable time of getting their inadequate training programs approved by the federal Department of Labor.

At their legislative conference, the ABC met with a federal education representative "to discuss the importance of federal funding for craft training," said the ABC's web site.

In contrast, building trades unions and their contractors spend millions of dollars on craft training every year, and have developed an industry-standard reputation for quality - without soliciting or spending a single dollar of taxpayer money. Now that's free enterprise.