It has always been supremely puzzling to me why this blog has taken such a strident and shrill anti-union attitude. The shining example is the smear campaign against project labor agreements (PLAs) and Phase Two of the Silver Line of Metro to Dulles airport. The attacks extend to attempts to liquidate personally Dennis L. Martire, a union leader and member of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, whose crimes against the people I cannot understand.
This McCarthy-esque anti-union campaign has become dogma among the harder right Republicans in Virginia. It’s as if we’re standing up and saying there are 50 Communists in the State Department, but no one bothers to ask that the list of names be read because there aren’t any. Ditto the supposed vulnerability of the state’s anti-union Right to Work law, which has been around for decades and is in no serious jeopardy whatsoever.
So, after paddling through all the Bacons Rebellion blather regarding the MWAA and the PLA, I find it refreshing to have a moment of clarity. It comes in today’s Post in a column written by Steve Pearlstein, whose hard-nosed sensibility has caught my eyes before.
Pearstein zeroes in on the all-Republican Loudoun County Board of Supervisors who are throwing big wrenches into long-standing plans to bring public rail transit to Dulles and bring the official airport of the nation’s capital into the 21st century. Gee, I even lived in the DC area when Dulles was opened in the early 1960s and it still doesn’t have the transit links that most of the major airports of the world have.
Here are some points from Pearlstein’s piece:
- Loudoun’s new board is suddenly sticking its nose into something that county officials generally don’t. That is a $5 billion project managed by a regional agency representing three states and dozens of local jurisdictions.
- Previous Loudoun boards have long ago committed to Dulles Rail. Only 4.8 percent of the Silver extension and half of the cost of the Loudoun stations and track work are being financed by Loudoun taxpayers.
- The point of the PLA is not to kiss Big Labor’s butt, but to get enough skilled workers to do the job. The first PLA on Phase One involved a no-strike pledge and flexibility on work rules, Pearlstein says.
- Despite this background in which a functional process was set up and put to work, Associated Builders and Contractors mostly non-union firms, saw some daylight to quash unions as hard right Republicans and Tea Potters can’t strength.
- A new deal was hatched. No PLA of sorts, but bidders would get extra points in the bidding competition if they had one. Gov. Robert McDonnell and his Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton seemed OK with this but later went back on it. There’s even a new state law outlawing PLAs in the Dulles project.
- Someone hit the “send” button on a new propaganda campaigning about the project’s supposedly exorbitant costs with organized labor somehow responsible. PLAs were alleged to come with a 10 to 15 percent cost markup. In Phase One is was actually about 3 percent for labor and non-labor units, in effect, a wash. Little problems with the facts there.
- Despite opponents claims that no one will use the last link of the Silver Line to Dulles, new studies show that residents within a few miles of the stations will likely start using them for their commutes to downtown DC. The added convenience of rail access should be a bump, although limited, to some housing prices.
The vicious anti-union campaign has always left me a bit dumbfounded. It would be one thing is there had been a major and crippling strike in the DC area or anywhere in Virginia, for that matter. The only big strikes that I can remember involved Verizon workers about 12 years ago, Steelworkers at the Newport News Shipyard decades ago and the United Mine Workers of America strike in the mid-1980s. There really hasn’t been anything confrontational in years.
So, why the big attack on labor and Martire and the like? The reason seems to be that the hard right (which may be damning the Romney campaign to the dustbins) has decided that collective bargaining is one the devils it must destroy. We are reeling from barrage after barrage of the evil of labor unions even though Americans have a constitutional right to organize. Unions, which fought for and won better living standards for workers years ago, have been in decline for decades.
Why are they the target? It is somewhat like undocumented aliens. They are an easy target.