Organized Labor

Jurisdictional disputes are the greatest weakness of the union movement in the construction industry. At the same time, they arise from its greatest strength, the time and resources we invest in developing and retaining our skills.

No worker who has spent four or five years of work and study in an apprenticeship and all of his or her journeylevel years in honing a particular set of skills wants to see another trade threaten his or her livelihood by taking on the work to which those skills best apply. While some contractors encourage crossing of jurisdictional boundaries to obtain savings in labor costs, many lament the instability of pricing and of skill levels and the job disruptions it causes. Project owners want no part of jurisdictional disputes. For some owners, the possibility of such disputes is reason or excuse enough not to deal with us at all. They also provide a handy excuse to non-union contractors not to sign with us.  

The Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO has long insisted on use of a procedure entitled the “Plan for the Settlement of Jurisdictional Disputes in the Construction Industry Including Procedural Rules and Regulations” – or, briefly, “the Plan” – for resolution of jurisdictional disputes. The Plan is incorporated in a small green volume, the “Green Book,” with agreements between trades and “decisions of record” on jurisdiction reached between 1903 and 1978.

In preparing for negotiation of our project labor agreement (PLA) with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission for its $4.3 billion Water System Improvement Program (the “Hetch Hetchy” retrofit), representatives of the Department researched frequency of use of the Plan in California. They found that it was little used. Most of its few uses were in Southern California. Its use in our part of the state was truly rare.

It may be possible that jurisdictional disputes are not as common in Northern California as elsewhere, but they are far from rare. The rarity of use of the Plan to resolve them must therefore have had other causes. Certainly business managers of locals and of District and Regional Councils have often preferred to resolve such disputes when possible by working with each other. They have also been reluctant, however, to use a Plan that is administered in Washington, D.C., that depends on decisions and agreements reached decades and thousands of miles away, and that might not then reflect established practice particular to this area.

This problem has been resolved in part through the agreement under which the Laborers International Union of North America reaffiliated recently with the Department. The criteria for resolution of disputes through the Plan now give substantially more importance to area practice, while retaining protections against that practice having been established by undercutting of wages or by “vertical agreements.”
But the distance at which the Plan is administered still presents a hindrance to its frequency of use here. In deciding to use the Plan, a business manager must either rely on representatives of his international union unlikely to be from here to argue his case or go to the expense of traveling and staying three thousand miles away to argue it himself. In either instance, the arbitrator before whom the case will be argued is highly unlikely to have experience of cases from Northern California.

A local plan using the very same procedures and criteria as the Plan but administered in Northern California with Northern California arbitrators would remove this last hindrance. With the possibility of resolution closer at hand, business managers might be more likely to seek it. In addition, if the decision rendered were job-specific and non-precedential – that is, if it didn’t establish a permanent jurisdiction – business managers might fear a possible “bad” decision less.

Shortly before the Hetch Hetchy PLA was negotiated, there was some discussion among union locals in Northern California about a possible local plan for jurisdictional dispute resolution. At that time, the Department and some of its affiliated internationals stepped in and vetoed the idea.

The reason that Department representatives gave at that time for insistence on adherence to the national Plan and against a local plan was that national contractors wanted and deserved consistency of jurisdiction across regions. This reason was always problematic. If a particular set of skills in a particular region resided in a trade that was not recognized by the Plan as having jurisdiction over the work to which those skills applied, then a national contractor coming to that region would in order to man that work under the Plan have either to insist that the resident workforce work outside its trade (and thereby disconnect from its benefit plans and accustomed wages and conditions) or import a workforce from the Plan-approved trade. In either event the resident workforce stood to suffer.

But the much greater importance given to area practice in the Plan revised by agreement with the Laborers obviates this reason altogether. The Plan will give consistency across regions only insofar as area practice is already consistent across regions.
Another, unspoken reason for opposing local plans was no doubt a fear among national union and Department leaders that decisions under local plans might be … well, squirrely, and that they might learn of such “bad” decisions only well after the fact. This fear could be addressed by close periodic Departmental review of the performance of such plans.

And so I make a humble suggestion: Experiment here through PLAs in the use of local plans with the same jurisdictional dispute resolution criteria as in the Plan, and establish periodic Departmental review of their performance. By limiting its application to specific projects, PLAs provide a logical vehicle for such experimentation. Decisions would be non-precedential and necessarily job-specific. If the Department’s review of such a plan showed problems, these could be addressed by revisions worked out jointly with local unions and councils and through a provision in the PLA that permitted these revisions. At the worst, a plan would expire with its associated PLA.

But I believe that it is likelier by far that we would be a long step closer to consistent jurisdictional dispute resolution in Northern California