Freedom Line Blog

Michelle Malkin says that while the million-dollar junkets enjoyed by General Services Administration officials at taxpayer expense deserve outrage, the real scandals are the $25 million+ paydays the GSA gives to Big Labor thanks to a rule implemented by President Barack Obama.

As I’ve reported previously, the linchpin is E.O. 13502, a union-friendly executive order signed by Obama in his first weeks in office. It essentially forces contractors who bid on large-scale public construction projects worth $25 million or more to submit to union representation for its employees. The blunt instrument used to give unions a leg up is the “project labor agreement,” which in theory sets reasonable pre-work terms and conditions. But in practice, it requires contractors to hand over exclusive bargaining control, to pay inflated, above-market wages and benefits, and to fork over dues money and pension funding to corrupt, cash-starved labor organizations.

One analyst told Congress that “the adoption of a PLA amounts, in effect, to a conferral of monopoly power on a select group of construction unions over the supply of construction labor.”

Since 85 percent of construction laborers are non-union, Obama’s GSA-enforced PLA is a financial boon to the shrinking unionized sector.

Echoing Malkin, the GSA administration’s luxuriant trips to Las Vegas and other locales should be prosecuted fully, but let’s not be distracted from the crony capitalism wasting several times those amounts just about every time a new federal building gets constructed.

If there’s going to be oversight – and there should be – let’s hope the bulk of it zeroes in on unwinding President Obama’s disastrous PLA.