NO ONE WOULD tolerate a law that bans union labor from public construction. So why is it OK to shut out non-union workers?

The House of Representatives has voted to do just that. A trained and licensed construction worker could be excluded from public construction for choosing not to join organized labor, under the House’s economic development bill.

The measure would legalize the use of project labor agreements on public construction at the discretion of the awarding authority. PLAs basically mandate the use of only union labor in exchange for a no-strike provision.

Merit shop, or non-union, contractors have full-time tradespeople who earn competitive pay and benefits. Under a PLA, a merit shop would be expected to lay off its loyal employees and replace them with unknown, temporary union workers.

Imagine a state agency contracting with Amazon Web Services to build a database, but demanding it use temporary workers instead of its full-time, regular employees. It sounds insane because it is.

The Senate will take up its own version of the economic development bill, and its leaders should reject systemic discrimination and maintain the state’s competitive bidding statutes. Every qualified contractor and their employees, who contribute to public construction via their tax dollars, should have an equal opportunity to bid and work on a fair and level basis.

In 1990, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled PLAs are “anticompetitive,” violate the state’s competitive bidding statutes, and as such, are not permitted in most circumstances. However, the SJC left the door open for PLAs by creating a narrow exception for large, complicated projects.

Twisting the SJC ruling to fit its agenda, organized labor routinely pushes for public entities to go union-only. They sell PLAs with lip service to diversity, workforce development, local hiring, apprenticeships, quality, cost, and so on. They are red herrings.

PLAs exclude, not include. PLAs block merit shops who hire locally, train apprentices, employ a diverse workforce, and are more likely minority- and women-owned than is a union contractor.  PLAs lock out workers who opt not to join organized labor. In 2023, 82 percent of the state’s construction workforce was non-union, according to unionstats.com

Merit shops are responsible employers who pay competitive wages and benefits, adhere to the laws and regulations on public construction, and are highly experienced and capable of high-quality work. Many are certified to perform state work by the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance.

PLAs are certainly no guarantee of cost or quality. Numerous studies and actual projects show PLAs increase project costs. “With more bidders, you tend to get a better price,” said a former Fall River mayor after union-only bids sunk his school building budget.

Under a PLA, The Big Dig suffered from “shoddy work,” concluded then-State Auditor Joseph DeNucci. In the new, union-built dorms at UMass-Boston, “water shot out of one toilet when you flushed another” and “dorm elevators abruptly fell several floors with students inside,” reported Boston magazine.

In recent decisions, state courts have sided with merit shops and ordered the removal of PLAs from municipal projects for violating the competitive bidding statutes. In May, the Hampden Superior Court ordered the Springfield Water and Sewer Commission to remove a PLA on the construction of a water treatment plant.

Neither the water operations staff nor the engineering consultants had advocated for the PLA, which they estimated to add $15.44 million to the project cost. Rather, two of the three commissioners – mayoral appointees – voted to impose it under intense political pressure from state and federal legislators.

In his scathing order, Judge Michaell Callan wrote, “Notwithstanding the lip service the PLA pays to being open to all bidders, it most assuredly is not. The evidence before the court is that the PLA poses such a significant disadvantage to open shops as to render a competitive bid impossible.”

In 2021, a Norfolk Superior Court order reached the same conclusion: “The disadvantages imposed on the [merit shop] contractor Plaintiffs by Braintree’s use of the PLA effectively render those Plaintiffs unable to compete for work on the South Middle School project.”

Frustrated, organized labor has literally marched on the State House and demanded PLAs be legalized – even though they are illegal in 25 other states.

“Political influence, not professional performance, is the prime criterion in doing business with the state,” concluded the Ward Commission in its 1980 report on corruption in public construction.

The House has embraced a return to political influence over professional performance. The Senate should not.

Jason Kauppi is president of the Merit Construction Alliance of Massachusetts, a trade association dedicated to fair and open competition in the construction marketplace.