Democrat's Apathy For Unions Is Suicide

[haele]

97. Must be a regional issue. Here, it's the opposite.

Even though we aren't a right to work state. See, the unions often have to compete with undocumented labor, which can be of very high quality for low cost if you're a developer with an emergency repair job over the weekend and has a friend knows a friend who can get a bunch of reliable "friends" to do some day labor for you; or, as our complex plumber Mario says - "you go down to Lowes or Home Depot and find the Amigo who has all his tools ready".
I've worked on site construction in the past as an electrician, and know people who still do the work. Most union carpenters, plumbers, electricians, HVAC, masons, etc are dedicated and do very good work up to the California Code, or they lose their licenses, and union protections - especially the safety protections that the unions here require on site.
Now, there are open shop sites where there are only one or two union members as leads and site QA, and a crap-load of day labor to save money, and I've noticed that those developments tend to have a little more delta in the level of quality, depending on the day or the stage. They may work more quickly than a union shop (only by a little - perhaps weeks; certainly no more than a month), but there's usually a lot more injury and a lot more safety violations, also.

But don't get me started on what I saw going on in Florida when I was sent down there to work for a bit. Didn't matter if the worker was union or not, they were uniformly beat down and pretty near all of them started work looking at the clock. And the injuries and potential for fatalities- whoever said police have a dangerous job never worked construction.

I'm glad you pay your guys good pay for their work. However, in my experience, that's very rare in a non-union construction company; most of the owners of the smaller companies run them like a personal ATM and always seem to be "too short" to even pay union scale after a while and use a lot of day labor to make up for the lack of skilled workforce, and the larger guys like to pretend they're construction moguls and run their companies like small kingdoms.
And when I needed riggers, support welders, additional electricians, or other light construction work, I always found the union workers to be a better value overall, more knowledgeable about the work environment itself, and needed less supervision than the cheaper day labor workers.
Of course, pretty much all my work has been with government contracts, so again, YMMV.

Haele