Stadium Project Falling Short Of City's Ambitious Hiring Goals

Workers build a restaurant and bar at Nationals Park. Contractors have not used as many D.C. journeymen as a project labor agreement envisioned. (By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)
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"They weren't high or unexpected," said Bobb, who is now D.C. State Board of Education president. "It's how much do you want something?"

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What many of the city's movers and shakers wanted was professional baseball. Williams worked hard to bring a team to Washington, which had been without one since the Senators left in 1971. But that required a new ballpark and figuring out how to pay for it.

The D.C. Council debated for months about how far the city should go in financing the project, initially estimated to cost $535 million and now about $100 million more than that. For a while, despite the efforts of the Williams administration, the deal's future was shaky.

Union leaders provided political support, but they also pushed hard for a project labor agreement. Such contracts, known as PLAs, outline wages, working conditions and labor grievance procedures. In return, they typically contain clauses barring strikes -- an important factor in this case, since the construction schedule was one of the tightest ever proposed for a major league stadium.

Throughout 2005 and early 2006, city officials and the trade unions had extensive, closed-door discussions about the terms of the labor agreement. The D.C. Council approved the baseball financing package in February 2006, and the labor agreement was signed the next month. Construction began several weeks after that.

The agreement does not require union workers. But it does demand that all workers be paid union rates and that they pay union dues while on the project -- a major plus for organized labor. For the city, the pact held out the prize of good jobs for District residents.

"The building trades are highly important as a political entity," Williams said in an interview last week. And in dealing with them, the former mayor said, he wanted to set "aspirational" hiring goals for residents.

Although the unions and city came away with potential benefits, the agreement drew the ire of nonunion contractors, who unsuccessfully tried to get Congress to intervene and block it.

"It excludes us from the workplace," said John Magnolia, who owns Joseph J. Magnolia Inc., a nonunion plumbing contractor with 400 employees that has been based in the District since the 1950s.

Supporters of the agreement, including union leaders, said there is nothing to prevent nonunion contractors from working on the ballpark. Many smaller subcontractors do not have union employees.

But Magnolia said that he opposes forcing his employees to pay union dues in order for them to work on the ballpark. If those requirements were not there, he said it would have been much easier to reach the hiring goals for employing more city residents.