Congress's deconstruction theory; how Congress is beating the low cost of construction - includes related article

Washington Monthly, Jan, 1990 by Patrick Barry

Power of the AFL-CIO says the unions are fighting back with pilot programs that reduce wages and eliminate some costly work rules. One new program in the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, allows contractors to bid jobs under $2 million with a 20 percent wage reduction for journeymen workers. Another in Washington, D.C., sweeps away some of the restrictive work rules that have made union work so expensive. But Power puts the small changes in perspective by backhandedly describing the type of practices still going on: In Washington, D.C., he says, "they're getting rid of the two guys in the elevator [to operate it]." Why were there two guys in the first place? "In case one has to pee."

The road back for the steel industry, which once again makes some of the best and least expensive steel in the world, has been paved with many such work rule changes. Union workers at IN/Tek, Inland Steel Industries' new joint venture with Nippon Steel Co. of Japan, have thrown out job classifications almost completely (there were once seven classifications just for crane operators). They run the super-efficient mill in Indiana under just two job titles: operators, who run the 2,000-foot-long cold-rolling machine, and equipment controllers, who maintain it. Change and worker initiatives are evident throughout the industry: Weirton Steel's unionized workers took over the whole company, and the 3,900-member union at LTV Steel's Bar Division voted this fall to buy the division and run it themselves. Progress is slower in the auto industry, but the buzz words are becoming familiar: teamwork, worker participation, flexibility.

Kemp cant

While steel and auto workers marched to the brink with the help of torpid upper management, the trade unions are doing it with a different but equally well-meaning ally: Congress. Democrats have become so tightly linked with unions and so dependent on the union vote that Rep. Stenholm's reform amendment has picked up only about 50 Democratic supporters. "Davis-Bacon is a blood oath for the Building Trades Council, and the council has a lot of support in Congress," says Damen Tobias, counsel for Stenholm. Tobias says many congressmen are so used to voting the union line that they aren't paying attention to the substance of either of the current amendments, both of which are billed as "reform" measures.

Equally difficult to understand is the lack of awareness of what Stenholm-type reform of the law could do for the nation's health. It could help the nation address five overlapping crises: the growing federal debt that eats up $173 billion a year in interest; the looming infrastructure crisis, which at some point soon will force hundreds of billions of dollars worth of needed construction; the growing gap between the demand for skilled labor and the large pool of people too unskilled to do it; the shameful need to build or rebuild housing for the poor; and the decline of the nation's unions, which once represented 34 percent of the work force but now claim just 18 percent.