With its membership in recession mode, the Associated Builders and Contractors drew only about 1,100 attendees to its 60th anniversary convention in San Diego earlier this month. But many of them packed a last-day, early-morning session to hear claims the open-shop trade group was managing to stave off new pro-labor moves by the Obama Administration and push supportive candidates in this year’s congressional elections.
The session was closed to nonmembers, but ABC legal counsel Maury Baskin, a Baltimore-based attorney, told ENR that, despite organized labor’s ramped-up attacks on open-shop construction, “the surprise is that we’ve held our own after the administration’s first year in office.”