Labor issues with-drawing from unions

When you withdraw from a union it is best to have a plan on how you are going to survive. If you have multiple sites and withdraw from the union on one site you could survive.

If you are bound to one site you will find it more difficult. When we withdrew from our unions, the contracts only covered us for the local county. The economy in our area had required us to expand earlier beyond Erie county to all the upstate counties in  New York State and the western half of Pennsylvania.

This provided us with 85% of our work outside of the local county and a labor pool that was not tied to Erie County. We had one major project going on in Erie County when we withdrew from the unions.

We had the anticipated pickets arrive almost immediately. It was for a local transit authority and was in the middle of downtown. We were able to keep work going for two weeks before the transit authority decided that they didn’t want to deal with potential image from having their project picketed and terminated our contract.

This was because they withdrew all police protection from our crews and we refused to have our men work without this protection. That prompted a 10 year legal lawsuit that we fought with them over this termination.

What was interesting was that because so many of our competitors had ceased doing business this client continued to hire us to work on other projects for the authority because we were the only people locally with the expertise that could handle their needs.

The projects we did were out of sight or remote. They even paid us on time even though we had competing million dollar claims and counter claims against each other. This was a good thing because when we actually got to trial, our attorney said the client would raise the defense we were incompetent.

When he found out they still hired us he was flabbergasted and said “Well that makes this point of attack against us moat.” It was not an easy path for us to have chosen but we survived it and continued to prosper.

We had other issues, loss of bonding to bid projects, dealing with the NLRB from multiple fronts, NYS Labor Department Audits, Unfunded pension claims from the unions.

Do you have these issues? I can’t help you legally, but I can help with the items Lawyers will not tell you. Next blog I will talk about dealing with the unions and the NLRB.

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