Opinion

Party’s still going for GSA union pals

Big-spending Democrats are finally up in arms over a federal boondoggle. Details of the General Services Administration bacchanalia get worse by the day.

But the scandal is still small potatoes compared to the potential billions GSA is pouring down the Big Labor drain.

Whistleblowers and an independent inspector-general probe estimate that the GSA’s Sin City conference cost taxpayers about $1 million in 2010. Washington bureaucrats squandered another $234,000 on p.r. damage control.

The arrogance of these civil servants is jaw-dropping. But it’s just a sliver of the permanent waste that constitutes the bread-and-butter business of the behemoth agency, which runs on a $45 billion annual budget — including $5.5 billion in federal stimulus money to oversee capital-building projects.

Thanks to President Obama, the federal government is steering that money toward Big Labor patrons with a track record of cost overruns, construction delays and corruption.

The linchpin is an executive order signed by Obama in his first weeks in office that 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 bargaining control, to pay inflated wages and benefits, and to fork over dues money and pension funding to labor organizations.

These anti-competitive agreements undermine a fair bidding process on projects that nonunion laborers are funding with their tax dollars. And PLAs benefit the few at the expense of the majority: In the construction industry, 85 percent of the workforce is nonunion by choice.

The total price tag for GSA projects built with PLAs remains unknown. But here’s one example: The Washington Examiner reported in 2010 that the GSA paid the federal Lafayette Building’s general contractor another $3.3 million above the initial $52 million contract to ensure that the project was built with a union payback PLA. The Obama administration had tried to slip a PLA mandate into a $35 million jobs-center construction project in New Hampshire, but retreated when state contractors challenged the provision as an unfair restriction on competition. According to The Washington Times, just 8.7 percent of construction workers are unionized in New Hampshire.

Among the GSA administrators fired over Vegas-palooza was Robert A. Peck, chief of the agency’s Public Buildings Service. That’s the same office overseeing the $5.5 billion in stimulus contracts for such capital projects as the Lafayette Building. But neither Peck nor any other GSA official has been held accountable for job-killing union favoritism in the GSA’s everyday contracting practices.

As the watchdog Web site The Truth About Project Labor Agreements points out: “Numerous [GSA] projects have been awarded to contractors submitting PLA bids at the expense of qualified firms opposed to PLA mandates. Full and open competition has been curtailed in violation of the federal Competition in Contracting Act. Taxpayer dollars have been wasted. Skilled nonunion craftspeople and their qualified employers have been denied jobs and opportunity.”

For Obama’s union donors and their GSA fixers, the party’s still on.