Posts tagged construction industry
Kentucky Construction Industry Workers File Petitions to Oust Teamsters Local 89 Union from their Workplaces
September 22, 2025 // NLRB statistics for the past 12 months show that over 20% of all decertification cases involved the Teamsters union. Chris Smith, an employee of IMI Kentucky in Scottsville, KY, and Kenneth Moore, an employee of Builders FirstSource in Louisville, KY, each filed petitions seeking to end Teamsters Local 89 union officials’ “representation” at their respective workplaces. IMI workers already secured victory in their effort to remove the Teamsters, while the effort to remove the Teamsters at Builders FirstSource is still ongoing.
Trump’s Labor Department proposes more than 60 rule changes in a push to deregulate workplaces
July 22, 2025 // The U.S. Department of Labor is aiming to rewrite or repeal more than 60 “obsolete” workplace regulations, ranging from minimum wage requirements for home health care workers and people with disabilities to standards governing exposure to harmful substances.
ABC: Victory for Taxpayers and Construction Industry as Court Rules Biden’s Project Labor Agreement Policy Is Illegal
January 21, 2025 // The Biden policy has been widely criticized by the construction industry, taxpayer watchdogs and lawmakers for needlessly inflating construction costs and effectively steering contracts to unionized firms and union labor at the expense of taxpayers and federal laws requiring fair and open competition. “ABC and its federal contractor members are ecstatic that the judicial system has delivered justice for American taxpayers and the 90% of the U.S. construction industry workforce that is nonunion,” said ABC Vice President of Regulatory, Labor and State Affairs Ben Brubeck. “ABC members were harmed by former President Biden’s costly executive overreach, which violates federal laws and rewards special interests at the expense of fair and open competition.
Builders and Contractors of Alabama president Jay Reed: New union secret ballot incentives law ‘critical to free enterprise’
August 23, 2024 // “This law does not prevent workers from joining unions. It gives employees the right to vote privately and be free from pressure campaigns from labor unions or anyone else. Secret ballots are a foundational principle in our nation, and workers deserve the right to make their own decisions freely,” Stadthagen said.
OP-ED: The Billion-Dollar Government Mandate You Probably Haven’t Heard About
July 29, 2024 // All this benefits politically entrenched labor unions by eliminating their competition. But, as decades of data show, prevailing wage laws hurt everyone else. They’re notoriously difficult to implement in the field, forcing contractors to painstakingly track and classify employees’ tasks (for example, paying a general laborer as a “carpenter” if he happens to hammer a nail that day). They hurt employees, particularly entry-level ones, by making it punitively expensive and complicated to hire workers. The brunt of it falls disproportionatelyon minorities, immigrants, younger workers, women, veterans, and small businesses. And they cost taxpayers more by excluding qualified businesses from competing for public-works contracts and driving up costs (not only payrolls, but compliance costs) for those that remain.
New Jersey attorney general sues Iron Workers’ chapter for discrimination
July 8, 2024 // The complaint, filed jointly with the state’s Division of Civil Rights, also alleges that the union maintained a hostile work environment where “male, non-Black co-workers” called a Black woman worker a racial slur, locked her in a bathroom for hours and smacked her buttocks. The suit provides graphic details around claims that another worker found homophobic, pornographic materials taped to his work computer and that a supervisor used a derogatory term to refer to women.
Percentage of Construction Industry Workers in a Union Continues to Decline
April 5, 2024 // According to an Associated Builders and Contractors analysis, the percentage of construction workers who belong to a union dropped to a record low of 10.7 percent in 2023. This is the latest in a generational shift. Over the past 50 years, the percentage of unionized workers has decreased from 39.5 percent to the new low. Non-union construction employers should still be aware of unions and related labor law issues. We provide a few reasons here. First, the law that covers unionized employers in private industry, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), applies with equal force to non-union employers. Non-union workers still have the NLRA’s protections to engage in protected, concerted activity in support of improved working conditions. That includes group activities that have nothing to do with bringing a union into the workplace.
Michigan: Prevailing wage, Right to Work reforms’ effect unclear here
April 10, 2023 // The recent reforms are a net positive for unions in every industry, he said. Indeed, for the construction trades, in particular, prevailing wage requirements help prevent non-union bidders from undercutting union workplaces on public construction projects, Fashbaugh said.
Biden Administration’s Davis-Bacon ‘Reforms’ Are More Pork for Labor Unions
May 17, 2022 // The construction industry currently faces supply chain disruptions, unprecedented materials-cost inflation, declining investment in structures, and a skilled-labor shortage of 650,000 people in 2022. To make matters worse, the Biden administration proposed controversial new regulations in March that will needlessly increase construction costs and discourage small businesses from bidding on taxpayer-funded projects.
Labor Relations Radio, Ep. 20—A Primer On How Union Salts and “Moles” Undermine Companies Like Amazon and Others
May 5, 2022 // While they are commonly known in the construction industry, with the uptick in union organizing activity across the country, union “salting”—or the planting of union “moles”—is becoming more commonplace in companies outside the construction industry—like Amazon’s warehouse in Staten Island.