A new website, the California Municipal Labor Project, is proving a valuable tool to proactively advocate for Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) and educate the public about their benefits to local communities, schools, and cities and counties.

The website is a joint labor-management effort to counteract the attempts of extreme right-wing groups like the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC), who are attacking PLAs across the country and throughout California, in hopes of profiting from public works projects without guarantees of quality or of decent pay and benefits for workers.

A PLA is a pre-hire agreement designed to facilitate construction projects. Each PLA is negotiated and designed individually – tailored to meet the needs of a specific project owner/manager, or community. By governing and establishing work rules, pay rates, and dispute resolution processes for every worker on the project, PLAs maximize project stability, efficiency and productivity.

PLAs ensure that workers receive decent pay and benefits, that projects are completed on or ahead of time, on or under budget, with no work stoppages, and with work of the highest quality. That is why PLAs are widely used by private sector businesses and the federal government, and more recently by state and local governments and school districts, to build everything from schools to courthouses to reservoirs to sports stadiums.

In spite of the wide success of PLAs, extremist groups like ABC have managed to convince some local governments to ban them, and emboldened by those successes, are planning more anti-PLA campaigns.

They can succeed if the businesses, local officials, unions and workers who support PLAs don’t fight them. That’s why we have responded with the California Municipal Labor Project website at www.calmunilabor.com.

If you support PLAs we encourage you to visit this site, and if you like what you see, to click the “like” button. Then, add a link to the California Municipal Labor Project to your own website. This helps in multiple ways. It gets information about the benefits of PLAs to more recipients; and by increasing the number of hits, it raises the website’s profile on search engines, leading to still more and better exposure.

We are under all-out attack from anti-worker extremists, and we believe that supporting and spreading the word about this website is a vitally important step to redefine the PLA discussion in ways that benefit working people and their communities.

You can help win this battle by visiting www.calmunilabor.com, “liking” us on Facebook, linking to the site, and telling your friends and colleagues!