Las Vegas is building a performing arts center. Whiting-Turner, a highly-respected, experienced and successful contractor, is overseeing construction of the quarter-billion dollar project. But according to a Las Vegas Sun story on Saturday, only “one of every five subcontracting dollars is going to companies with non-union labor.”
That’s unfortunate. Non-union subcontractors can often do the work at a fraction of the cost of contractors stuck with artificially inflated union wages and pampered-prince non-work rules.
Yet despite the fact that only 20 percent of the project’s dollars are going to non-union companies, the Sun reports that local construction unions are having a conniption. “One local union boss, Carlos Aquin, president of Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers Local 13, said he is outraged that Whiting-Turner is not going strictly union.”
It’s the taxpayers who should be outraged. Why isn’t 100 percent of the project being done by skilled, hard-working, NON-union workers instead of paying millions of dollars in higher costs for over-priced union labor?
