Editor’s Note: It is difficult to find a better example of how California’s labor movement fails ordinary workers than their support for high speed rail. Because that project, using foreign sourced materials and yielding virtually no benefits – economic, environmental, or societal – that justify the cost, is at the expense of projects that are...
“Alright, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” – John Cleese, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, 1979 Any discussion of California’s neglected infrastructure has to recognize the three factors most responsible, libertarians, environmentalists, and...
Current policy solutions enacted to address California’s water crisis provide an object lesson in how corruption masquerading as virtue is impoverishing the general population to enrich a handful of elites. Instead of building freeways, expanding ports, restoring bridges and aqueducts, and constructing dams, desalination plants, and power stations, California’s taxpayers are pouring tens of billions...
Over the past 15 years, local elected officials in California have frequently claimed publicly and privately that union Project Labor Agreement mandates for taxpayer-funded construction contracts are the most intense, time-consuming, and divisive issues they’ve ever considered. When Project Labor Agreements are placed on local government meeting agendas, modern records are often broken for the...
Out of nowhere comes a new, well-funded champion of Mother Earth. A group called “Monterey County Residents for Responsible Development” has submitted two sets of letters and exhibits to Monterey County alleging serious deficiencies in its environmental review for the county’s first large solar photovoltaic power plant, the 280 megawatt California Flats. Obviously the Monterey...
About 95% of the public policy studies and reports circulating among California state and local governments reject a free market approach to societal challenges. Instead, these studies and reports advocate more government spending, more government programs, and more government intrusion into commerce and personal behavior. Obviously “Progressive” intellectual thought in California gets a disproportionate share of funding....
The Rancho Santiago Community College District in Orange County (California) declared in a December 8, 2014 letter that it “unconditionally commits that it will cease, desist from, and not repeat the challenged past action…” That action involves secret dealings with unions. A construction trade association was willing to threaten litigation to make this happen. And to emphasize...
It was unlikely that a few isolated and marginalized critics would discourage California voters from approving a statewide ballot measure (Proposition 1) authorizing the state to borrow more than $7 billion for water projects. As Proposition 1 stated, “California has been experiencing more frequent and severe droughts and is currently enduring the worst drought in...
Fairly or not, news media has recently brought negative public attention to the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, a $2.2 billion thermal solar power plant built under a union Project Labor Agreement in California’s Mojave Desert. Owners of Ivanpah (BrightSource Energy, NRG Energy, and Google) have applied for a $539 million tax credit to help...
California’s quest to end global climate change is inspiring many obscure, complicated, and costly regulations. And when state executive branch agencies propose new regulations to save the planet, unions are there with their own agendas. California Can’t Let Just Anyone Check Your Dimmer Switches The 2013 revisions to California’s Building Energy Efficiency Standards (in the...
When it comes to organized labor, California is a friendly state. We long ago eschewed right-to-work status. Labor unions enjoy a web of laws that ease organizing workers, like farmworkers,refinery employees, teachers, and state and local government workers. Other laws give union contracts special status unavailable to nonunion employees, such as the ability to work longer days without triggering overtime and avoid the new sick...
A leading intellectual advocate for government policies that favor and benefit construction trade unions is on sabbatical from his home university and spending several months in proximity to one of California’s union-oriented labor institutes, the Institute for Labor and Employment (an affiliate of the Miguel Contreras Labor Program) based at the University of California, Berkeley....
Union dealing and scheming over state legislation in California occurs behind closed doors. The sudden and unexplained recent flip of the union position on a state plastic bag ban is a typical example. Rarely is the true story ever revealed to the public, who ends up paying for those secret deals. A rare exception has emerged with Assembly...
Tonight (August 26, 2014) the Watsonville (California) City Council voted 6-1 to require construction contractors to sign a Project Labor Agreement with unions in the Monterey/Santa Cruz Counties Building and Construction Trades Council for city projects with a cost exceeding $600,000. The (unsigned) Project Labor Agreement was provided to the city council at the meeting. The...