Searching for Answers: PLAs Increase Inclusion, Protection

The board of trustees for the State Center Community College District met with representatives from across the state to discuss the implications of using a project labor agreement for upcoming construction projects within the district.

Trustee Miguel Arias said the special meeting on March 17 focused on upcoming construction projects at Fresno City College totalling $170 million, including a new parking structure, a new math and science building as well as a new vocational school.

While these construction projects are still a year away, the board must decide what the terms of the contract language would be before contracts are awarded or work can begin.

PLAs would require that SCCCD hire a still undetermined percentage of workers from the area.

The board may look to the first PLA done in Fresno County,  the Transformative Climate Communities Projects.

The tccp, which invests cap-and-trade money into three communities, including Fresno, explicitly outlines the rules by which construction firms have to hire.

The agreement outlines a maximum of five core employees from the bidding construction firm, hired in a staggered order between workers from a union hiring hall and a referral system, according to Section 3.10 of the Fresno City Council’s information packet on the project labor agreement.

“One way a PLA is used is a local hire requirement,” Chuck Riojas, union representative from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 100, said. “For local tax bonds, most school districts want that money to stay local. One way they accomplish that is through a PLA.”

Other large projects in Fresno, such as the high speed rail and the Transformative Climate Communities in Fresno, have used PLAs to define how construction workers do their jobs.

PLAs offer more control over a construction project, Riojas said.

“You don’t want to prevent a contractor from LA or Texas from bidding; you want them to bid,” Riojas said. “The only control is how they hire — whether a local contractor or a contractor from Texas gets it, it’s still five people. It all falls back to the local hire piece.”

At the March board meeting, trustees voted 4-3 to build solar panels on the FCC campus. The contract was awarded to Forefront Power LLC, a company recently acquired by Mitsui & Co. Ltd. which is based in Tokyo. No restrictions were placed on the company regarding the composition of the workforce for that project.

PLAs also control where contractors hire their apprentices in order to provide on-the-job training to younger, inexperienced workers. California labor code, section 1777.5, requires that for every five hours of a journeyman laborer, a contractor must use one hour from an apprentice.

Those apprentices must be recruited from viable apprentice programs and are members of certain demographics, according to Riojas. Many agreements define viable apprenticeships as programs that have graduated at least one person every year for the past five years.

“If you don’t have a history of graduating apprentices, basically these young men and women come into the program thinking there’s an end to it, but they don’t get there,” Riojas said. “The advantage of a viable apprenticeship is you start turning out journeymen who are staunchly in the middle class with a living wage and a pension.”

Additionally, PLAs seek to employ certain demographics who, according to the contract, are deemed as underrepresented in many construction jobs.

According to Riojas, the language of the high speed rail PLA mandated that 30 percent of apprenticeship opportunities go to veterans, single parents, emancipated foster youth, homeless and the chronically underemployed.

In the case of SCCCD, a number of apprenticeship positions could be set aside for those in construction programs.

“Our students should benefit in terms of being able to do the jobs that we are funding,” Arias said.

FCC offers certification programs in heating, ventilation and air conditioning, electrical systems and welding.

“It makes no sense,” Arias said, “for a student to leave Fresno CIty College with $10,000 in debt to get passed up for a job they are qualified to do by someone in San Diego, Los Angeles or San Francisco.”