If ever there were a dispute in which the outcome depended on the details, it is the question of whether a union may legally display banners or inflatable rats or hold mock funerals outside of businesses that use open-shop contractors. Is it free speech or an illegal boycott under the labor law? With one exception, we think the highly politicized National Labor Relations Board got this decision right—the 3-2 vote that supported the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, Local 1506, in Arizona. Photo: AP/Charlie Nye There are at least 10 other cases pending involving the use of
In September, the Ohio Dept. of Transportation will award an estimated $450-million design-build contract to construct the I-90 Innerbelt Bridge in Cleveland. Three design-build teams will be waiting anxiously for the results to come in. For one team, it will be a major coup. The two other teams can console themselves with a sizable stipend for all their work drafting plans. Or maybe not. The Innerbelt Bridge is one of the first major design-build projects undertaken by ODOT. The three short-listed teams are composed of high-profile firms. The Federal Highway Administration estimated the total design costs for the project would
The little-noticed passage by Congress of relief for multi-employer pension plans as well as President Obama’s signature on the bill on June 25 provide much-needed breathing room for these types of union pension funds. The bill, paired with measures related to Medicare benefits, allows the plans to amortize losses sustained in the stock-market downturn of 2008 over 30 years rather than the previous limit of 15 years. By allowing the longer period of amortization, Congress and the President temporarily remove the possibility that multi-employer plan assets will slip further behind their future liabilities and require even more drastic relief measures.
They’ve already started recovering the corpses of oil-poisoned dolphins, sea turtles and birds from the troubled waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Another casualty in this slowly unfolding catastrophe is the reputation of the engineering profession—and not just petroleum and oil-drilling platform engineers, who certainly have much to regret about the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The disaster affects the reputation of all engineers. Photo: AP/Wideworld What’s happening now in the Gulf is another failure for a profession already deeply afflicted with an identity crisis and which questions its role in U.S. society. Part of the problem stems from much-publicized disasters of
Arizona has done the rest of the country a favor by provoking us to try to finish the business of immigration reform that Congress failed to complete in 2007. Whether or not the Arizona law is found to violate civil rights, comprehensive national reform legislation is the only way to resolve most of the immigration issues. Here is a short list of what needs to be done in the best interests of the construction industry and the U.S. Stiffer penalties for employersshould allow for good-faith mistakes, especially when employers mustrely on government-supplied data. 1) Tougher border security is critical. Walls
There’s plenty of irony in the possibility that fly ash, a by-product of coal combustion, now may be classified as a hazardous waste by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It has been successfully recycled for years in what previously had been considered an environmental triumph. Punishing the sound environmental use of fly ash, especially as a substitute for cement in concrete, is the wrong direction. Exempting fly ash from Resource Conservation and Recovery Act provisions has allowed coal-combustion products (CCPs) to develop into a growing business. The use of fly ash in concrete is considered environmentally responsible because it replaces
The romantic myth of the American inventor doesn’t have much substance. A colleague used the term to describe Award of Excellence Winner John Hillman, but there is very little romance in the process of creating an invention for profit. Large amounts of perspiration and legal entanglement are more typical. Hillman’s story involved, as our cover story notes, “endless sketches, headaches and hope,” and he is a good example of what it takes to produce such an invention. His story could serve as a template for others who fear construction has forgotten how to innovate. Related Links: Award of Excellence Winner
Don’t send the stonemasons to carve President Obama’s image on Mount Rushmore until he and the Congress deliver more on healthcare cost control. Congress could have saved the country a lot of stomach acid by reforming health care before a sense of urgency led to mistakes, but there wasn’t sufficient interest to run the political gauntlet. Now that the Democrats have passed the plan—and the President delivered on his top domestic policy promise—the only realistic approach is to make it work and improve it. At its heart, the reform measure consists of taxes and penalties designed to pay for and
Back in November, an eminent construction executive made a presentation at an insurance conference on survival strategies for contractors. Part of his presentation was advice about making layoffs, which was timely. If you look at what U.S. businesses have done in the first phase of the current recession, they have propped up their financial results by cutting personnel. The executive outlined the choices employers face, using a medical term—amputation—for cutting whole departments or units, and a term from 16th-Century warfare—decimation—for cutting a portion of each department. Related Links: Post-Recession Strategy for Firms Is the New Turning Point However, there are
Efforts to prepare for natural disaster in the Caribbean in Haiti, in particular, have been under way for several years. Disaster reduction conferences have resulted in action plans. Model building codes for seismic and wind engineering have been updated and disseminated. But in Haiti, the combined “disasters” of historic poverty and political instability clearly undermined all the good intentions of the reformers, led by the Association of Caribbean States. Photo: BFP Engineers Inc, By Eduardo Fierro Tragedies such as the one in Haiti have played out time and again across the planet. But this one is different in the eyes
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