On October 23, 1992, while the Boston Harbor case was still on trial, President George H. W. The decision has led to an increased use of APLs in public construction projects in the United States. [9] [10] Agreements have been used in the United States since the 1930s and were first debated in the 1980s for use in publicly funded projects. In these cases, government agencies have made the signing of LPAs a condition for working on taxpayer-funded projects. This type of PLA, known as a government-mandated PLA, is different from a PLA voluntarily entered into by contractors for public or private works – as permitted by the NLRA – as well as a PLA ordered by a private entity for a privately funded construction project. Executive orders issued since 1992 have impacted the use of state-mandated APLs for federal construction projects, and the most recent executive order issued by President Barack Obama in February 2009 encourages their use by federal agencies. A number of groups oppose the use of LPAs and argue that the agreements discriminate against non-unionized contractors and do not improve efficiency or reduce the cost of construction projects. Studies on LPAs have mixed results, with some studies concluding that LPAs have positive effects, while others conclude that agreements increase costs and can have a negative impact on entrepreneurs and non-unionized workers. At the state level, as of June 2019, the following states have prohibited by statute or order issued by the state governor the requirement that APLs be used for state-funded construction projects: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin. [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] States that have issued executive orders or passed laws that authorize or encourage the use of APL in public projects include California,[48] Connecticut,[49] Hawaii,[50] Illinois,[51] Maryland,[52] New Jersey,[53] New York, and Washington State.
[54] On February 17, 2001, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13202, titled “Preserving Open Competition and Government Neutrality with respect to The Labor Relations of Government Contractors on Federally Funded and Federally Funded Construction Projects,” which prohibits the use of APL for construction projects with federal funds. [21] This order states that construction projects that receive federal funding may not enforce the employment contracts of the projects. [22] In particular, the order stipulated that neither the federal government nor any authority acting with the assistance of the Federation may require or prohibit contractors from signing union agreements as a condition of carrying out work on publicly funded construction projects. [21] The order allowed for the continuation of LPAs that had already been agreed upon and did not affect projects that had not received federal funding. [23] Bush`s order revoked the previous pla executive order, Clinton Order 12836, which repealed the executive order issued by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. [16] President George W. Bush issued an amendment in April 2001 that allowed certain projects to be exempted from this order if a contract had already been awarded under an existing PLA at the time of the order. [24] An independent study conducted in 2011 by the National University System Institute for Policy Research analyzed the impact of APL costs on school construction in California from 1996 to 2008. [119] The study analyzed 551 school construction projects and would be the largest APL study conducted to date. [120] It was found that the use of APL increased construction costs by 13% to 15%, which would mean a cost increase of between $28.90 and $32.49 per square foot after adjusting for inflation.
[121] However, the findings of this study were repeatedly mentioned by Dr. Dale Belman of Michigan State University, a longtime proponent of the use of APLs and whose previous research has been mentioned several times, who claimed that the study distorted its results. He wrote to the authors: “Although your study presents several serious statistical problems, your results in the end are essentially consistent with those presented in my paper on APLs and the costs of building Massachusetts schools. The conclusions of your results can be summarized as follows: If appropriate controls of differences in the characteristics of schools built are included, including school type and location, building specifications, materials used, etc., there is no statistical evidence that pla schools are more expensive than non-PLA schools. The authors of the study point out in the report that they used robust regression methods to account for differences in school building materials/techniques and locations. Robust regression is a statistical technique used in conjunction with predictive models when the data set has no normal distribution or when there are significant outliers that can skew the results of a standard regression test. In a robust regression analysis, the influence of outliers is weighted downwards so that more statistical relationships are displayed in the results. With the February 2009 stimulus package, which allocated about $140 billion to federal, state, and local construction projects,[31][32] struggles over government-mandated LPAs for public works projects from 2009 to 2011 were widespread at the national and local levels. Government officials and lawmakers have clashed over the use of PLA mandates for projects in states such as Iowa,[33] Oregon,[34] Ohio,[35] California,[36] and others. [37] [38] Individual municipalities voted to ban the use of state-mandated APLs in taxpayer-funded construction projects, including voting initiatives in Chula Vista, Oceanside,[39] and San Diego County, California, in 2010, resulting in a ban on officials ordering or prohibiting the use of APLs for government projects. [40] In 2011, contractors submitted tender protests to the Government Accountability Office against government-mandated APLs for construction projects in New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.
These protests led to the withdrawal of the warrants of the Federal People`s Liberation Army from project applications. [41] In 2010, the New Jersey Department of Labor reviewed the impact of state-mandated APLs on the cost of building schools in New Jersey in 2008 and also found that school construction projects that used APL had a higher cost per square foot per student than those without PLA. [122] According to developers, LPAs can be used by owners of public projects such as school authorities or municipal councils to set goals for the creation of local jobs and the achievement of social goals through the construction projects for which they apply. [3] [59] [86] LPAs may contain provisions for targeted recruitment and training quotas. Studies from 2003, 2004, and 2006 that examined the impact of APLs on school construction in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York, respectively, found that where APLs were used, construction costs increased even when project size and school type were controlled. . . .