The Sacramento Union, August 31, 2007

When it was established as a federal holiday in 1882, Labor Day was intended to be a day off in appreciation of the American worker. Today, political candidates looking for votes claim to show their appreciation for workers by courting labor unions, giving them grand concessions at a cost to the American public. This Labor Day, it’s worth taking a step back to examine the disproportionate influence labor unions enjoy despite their relatively low membership.

According to the latest numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly nine out of 10 American workers are not union members. Further, the segment that belongs to a union – currently 12 percent of workers – is steadily decreasing. Some states, like North Carolina and South Carolina, have union membership rates as low as 3.3 percent. And in no single state is union membership above a quarter of the total employed workforce.

As these figures confirm, labor unions can’t legitimately claim a mandate to represent the American workforce. Of course, you’d never guess this by the hefty influence they enjoy in the American political system.

California, where the union membership rate is approximately 16 percent, is no exception to this minority-rule phenomenon. And the effects of such disproportionate power have been detrimental to the state.

In 1931, the federal Davis-Bacon Act was signed into law, requiring prevailing wages – the wage paid in the largest city in the county to a majority of workers in that profession – be paid on federal public works projects. In California, separate state laws require prevailing wages be paid for state-funded construction projects. Both state and federal laws almost always result in “prevailing wages” being union wage rates, which undermine market fundamentals and hurt all Californians.

Labor unions have also relied on forcing developers to sign project labor agreements. PLAs drive up business costs by requiring developers to hire expensive union workers instead of less expensive non-union workers.

Developers often grudgingly accept PLAs in order to avoid endless litigation and red tape challenging compliance with tedious government regulations. In the past few years, labor unions have attempted to block the building of two vital power plants in Southern California whose developers did not submit to signing a PLA. Had unions been successful, Californians would have paid for these exclusive labor contracts through higher monthly energy bills.

This level of influence, with all its consequences for Californians, exists because lawmakers continue to cozy up to labor unions. But establishing a “Right to Work” law in California that would allow employees to decide whether or not they wish to join or financially support a union, and paycheck protection to eliminate the use of compulsory union dues for political purposes, would make known the true legitimate clout of unions in the state.

In the meantime, elimination of harmful prevailing-wage laws and PLA blackmail would allow us all to benefit from cheaper housing and electricity and give us peace of mind during our day off from work.

Hovannes Abramyan is a public policy fellow in business and economic studies at the Pacific Research Institute. He can be contacted at habramyan@pacificresearch.org.

Editor’s Note: This is Hovannes’ last column with The Union. He is off to get his master’s degree at UCLA. We wish him well in his future endeavors.