SACRAMENTO, CA -- Just when you thought that unions were coming to grips with the realities of a competitive marketplace, one hears about the building trade unions trying to slip through a monopolistic deal to secure billions of dollars worth of new school construction contracts in Los Angeles exclusively for unionized workers. And, of course, they are conspiring to do this with the approval of key school district officials.

Some background. In April, voters in Los Angeles approved Proposition BB, a massive $2.4 billion school bond that is supposed to finance the construction of thousands of school facilities projects. Even before Prop. BB was passed, however, trade union leaders were quietly persuading Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) officials to require the vast bulk of the project contracts to be performed solely by union labor. In other words, the unions want a closed shop barring non-union contractors from bidding on the projects.

The unions, for their part, have tried to sweeten the deal for LAUSD by offering to restrict overtime pay and strikes if the school board will agree to the closed shop. The unions argue that their "concessions" will reduce costs. What they don't say is that by eliminating non-union contractors from the competitive bidding process, costs will almost surely end up being higher than any trivial "savings" garnered from the union "concessions." Non-union contractors say that a closed-shop agreement would increase the cost of work by eliminating 80 percent of the potential bidders for the contracts. Elementary economics would tell anyone that the contractors are right: eliminate competition and prices go up. That means that taxpayers will get fewer facilities built for all the bucks they voted to shell out.

Non-union contractors have threatened to sue if LAUSD agrees to the closed-shop deal. William Larry Tyler, a top contractor association leader, has said: "The unions would like to have it so all public agencies end up with a [closed-shop] project labor agreement. We're going to fight all the way. We believe in free enterprise."

The unions try to hide behind the tired old argument that they are the only ones able to offer quality workmanship. An AFL-CIO document states: "These non-union contractors know, however, that they cannot provide the same quality craft work or the same number of trained experienced craft workers." But if that is so, why do the unions fear competition? If they are the best providers of skilled labor, then in any competition they should win out, even without the existence of a closed-shop deal.

Of course, the fact is that non-union labor can deliver the same quality that union labor delivers, and often at lower cost. It is precisely because the unions are increasingly unable to compete successfully in a competitive market that they have stooped to behind-the-scenes dealmaking. Let's hope that LAUSD officials recognize that they are responsible to voting taxpayers - not union monopolists.

--By Lance T. Izumi