The Des Moines Construction Council sees a growing need for signatory contractors, regardless of their trade, to have an outlet to share information and learn more about the challenges of managing not only collective bargaining agreements, but also the many aspects that union contractors face. Though the trades are different, there is a commonality amongst signatory contractors that DMCC hopes to serve.
Upcoming Webinar: Lien Rights
Don’t miss out on your chance to hear from Construction Attorney Ryan Lamb of The Weitz Company at this upcoming month’s Des Moines Construction Council April Webinar series.
Ryan serves as general counsel for The Weitz Company and is the organization’s chief legal officer responsible for guiding all legal matters, including contract development and review, claims management and insurance. He is licensed to practice law in Iowa and Florida. In addition to his work experience in construction, administrative and labor law, Ryan worked as a civil engineer before joining Weitz. He is a licensed professional engineer in Iowa (civil engineering).

This session will cover lien rights as they apply to DMCC members. The session will begin with a brief refresher on a construction or mechanic’s lien, who is eligible to file a mechanic’s lien, how long a party has to file a mechanic’s lien, and various legal matters in Iowa code as they pertain to a contractor’s exercising of a lien. There have been recent changes to Iowa code and this webinar will address those changes and equip you and your firm with important information on lien rights. 

The webinar will be held on April 13 at 10:00AM and is open to all DMCC members in good standing. However, you MUST RSVP in order to receive the link to the webinar.  
  • Workers who quit jobs last year — churning up the U.S. labor market — blame their departures on low pay, no opportunities for advancement and a feeling of disrespect at work, according to Pew Research Center.

  • "Those who quit and are now employed elsewhere are more likely than not to say their current job has better pay, more opportunities for advancement and more work-life balance and flexibility," Pew said in a report. 

  • Nearly one out of every three workers (31%) who left jobs last year said they did so because of disruption from the coronavirus, Pew said. Child care challenges prompted a high percentage of departures by workers with children younger than 18 living at home.

Dive Insight:

CFOs faced an unusually tight labor market in 2021 as workers jumped ship to new employers or remained sidelined by the delta or omicron variants of COVID-19.

The quits rate, or the number of workers who left their jobs as a percent of total employment, hit 3% in November, the highest rate since 2000, before easing to 2.8% in January, the Labor Department said Wednesday.

Job openings last year also hit a record, persisting above 10 million from June through December, according to the Labor Department.

The labor market remains tight this year. There were 11.3 million job openings in January, close to the 11.4 million record set in December.

Also, the jobless rate fell last month to 3.8% from 4% in January, the Labor Department said Friday.

The labor force participation rate, the proportion of workers either employed or seeking jobs, increased to 62.3% last month but is still 1.1 percentage point below the level prior to the onset of COVID-19. Many workers retired early soon after the pandemic struck.

Workers who quit jobs last year cited low pay (63%), no opportunities for advancement (63%) and feeling disrespected at work (57%), with at least a third saying these were major reasons they left, Pew said.

Workers also cited a lack of scheduling flexibility, inadequate benefits and a desire to move to a different area, Pew said.

"Workers who quit a job last year and are now employed somewhere else see their current work situation as an improvement over their most recent job," according to Pew.

Pew surveyed 6,627 non-retired U.S. adults between Feb. 7 and Feb. 13, including 965 who say they left a job by choice last year.
Union leaders for workers at a Davenport defense contractor supplier say a labor strike that began last month has ended.

A representative of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District Lodge 6 tells the Quad-City Times that more than 400 union members employed at the Eaton Mission Systems Division of Davenport will return to work after a contract agreement was reached Tuesday.

DeLane Adams said in a statement that the new contract included improved wages and other items, but the terms of the contract were not disclosed.

The strike began February 18th after 98% of union members voted to reject a tentative agreement that included what union officials said were sub-standard wages and cuts to health care and retirement benefits.
  • Warehouse and store employees seeking union membership feel they have no seat at the table.
  • They’re looking for better pay and working conditions, and they want a say with management in day-to-day operations. 
  • “I think young people are breaking away from the expectation of previous generations that this is the way it is,” said one 22-year-old union member.

The Covid pandemic pushed Americans to reconsider how and where they work, resulting in a tight labor market, rising wages and what’s been dubbed the Great Resignation. It also spurred workers, many of them younger, at big companies such as Amazon and Starbucks to flex their newfound leverage with union movements.

Warehouse and store employees seeking union membership feel they have no seat at the table. They’re looking for better pay and working conditions, and they want a say with management in day-to-day operations. 

“Employees are feeling powerless, and this solidarity gives them some power,” said Catherine Creighton, director of Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations branch in Buffalo, New York.

Emma Kate Harris, a 22-year-old retail sales specialist at the newly unionized REI Co-Op in Manhattan, has been with the company for three years, and she wants to see more understanding from her bosses.

“Our managers and higher management throughout the rest of the co-op don’t necessarily understand what it is to actually be on the floor for 8½ hours a day for 32 or 40 hours a week,” said Harris. Workers at the recreation and camping goods store organized with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, or RWDSU.

REI told CNBC in a statement it is “committed to sitting down in good faith to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement.”

Then again, this isn’t your grandparents’ organized labor push. Young workers like Harris taking part are driven by a desire to improve the workplace, even if they might not stick around to see the changes come to fruition like union laborers of the past did. Some have little to no experience with unions prior to getting involved in campaigns, but they recognize their power in the current labor environment.

“I think young people are breaking away from the expectation of previous generations that this is the way it is. And I think that my generation is starting to look more at the way it could be and the way it should be,” Harris said.

While it may seem like unions are surging again, however, the numbers tell a conflicting story about the state of organized labor in America. In 2021, the union membership rate for government and private sector employees fell to 10.3% from 10.8% in 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Private sector union membership fell slightly in 2021 to 6.1% from 6.2% the prior year.

But at the same time, American approval ratings of unions are near an all-time high. Gallup polling from September 2021 shows 68% of Americans approve of labor unions — the highest reading since a 71% approval rating in 1965. They’re particularly popular among the younger members of the workforce. Adults ages 18 to 34 approve of unions at a rate of 77%.

Richard Bensinger, union organizer with Starbucks Workers United and a former organizing director of the AFL-CIO, told CNBC earlier this year the movement was a “generational uprising.” The Starbucks union campaign, which began in Buffalo and has now notched eight wins in three states, has spread quickly to cafes across the country and is led by many workers in their early 20s, he said.

Isaiah Thomas is a warehouse worker in Amazon’s facility in Bessemer, Alabama. The 20-year-old said he joined the company in September 2020 as a way to help pay bills and for his college education at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. But he told CNBC he took a semester off to focus on the campaign, which is also seeking to organize with RWDSU.

“I believe that, in order to bring about the change that I want to see, I have to be really involved in it,” he said. “And when I saw this opportunity come about, and I knew that it would impact my co-workers in my own life very positively, I threw myself in and I’ve been going 100% ever since then.”

The public part of the vote count in Alabama will happen later this week. “We look forward to having our employees’ voices heard. Our focus remains on working directly with our team to continue making Amazon a great place to work,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told CNBC in a statement.


How companies are handling it

Companies, particularly publicly traded firms, must strike a delicate balance when their employees start to organize. Not all shareholders will believe unionizing is good for the bottom line, while others will think employees should be treated more fairly, according to Peter Cappelli, professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School.

“The calculus that a company has to make on this, in this context where you could be more aggressive, and increase the probability of winning the election and damage your brands, how do you think about that, if all you’re thinking about is, let’s say, keeping your shareholders happy?” Cappelli said. “It’s not an easy needle to thread.”

Some companies take it a step further and hire consultants, such as Joe Brock, president of Reliant Labor Consultants. 

Brock was a former union president with a Teamsters local in Philadelphia. He said he became disillusioned with what happens behind the scenes with unions, particularly when contracts are being negotiated. He said companies sometimes call him proactively to make presentations to employees to discourage them from joining a union. Other times, they reach out to him after a campaign has started.

Brock resists the term “union busting” and described his job as something more nuanced.

“The threat of the union is a valid one, I think it causes a lot of workplaces to revisit policies and make some changes; I see it all the time,” Brock said. “I also see where they don’t address it, and they want me to come in and be the union buster, and my firm doesn’t do that. We don’t go in and lie to employees. We tell them that this could work out well for them. But it could also work out very poorly.”