NECA Contractor Contributes To NYC Construction Industry's Recovery
On the Thursday before Thanksgiving Day, the Beekman Tower project in Lower Manhattan topped out at the full 76 stories planned by famed architect Frank Gehry. It is destined not only to become New York City's tallest residential building but it will also stand as a shimmering, stainless-steel monument to constructive labor-management relations. A NECA-member contractor performed a major role in this lofty accomplishment.
We previously reported on the landmark NYC agreement for economic recovery between the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York (BCTC) and the Building Trades Employers’ Association (BTEA). It was enacted last Spring to help revitalize New York’s construction industry when both project costs and unemployment were soaring in response to the September 2008 collapse of the financial markets. The major ingredient was a progressive project labor agreement (PLA) in which both sides — the unions and the contractors — agreed to concessions that they hoped would bring projects costs down, encourage banks to begin approving construction loans again, and breathe new life into dozens of stalled projects.
Beekman Tower was the first, and most prominent, project to qualify under the PLA. At the time, Forest City Ratner, the developer, had shut down the project and feared the structure would have to be limited to a paltry 40 stories. Now that the original plans are back on, the 1.1 million sq. ft. skyscraper will stand 900 feet tall and house rental apartments, a pre-K through 8th grade public school, an ambulatory care center for NY Downtown Hospital, retail space, and public plazas when finished.
NECA-member firm Zwicker Electric is the electrical contractor on the Beekman project. The company’s president, David B. Pinter, who serves on the executive committee of the Building Trades Employers Association, was one of the four negotiators on behalf of management who secured the PLA with all the union building trades in the city.
But, it wasn’t easy, he reports in an interview, along with other with major participants in attaining “The Economic Recovery Project Labor Agreement,” which was published in the current issue of New York Construction. (Click here to read the New York Construction article online or download a PDF of the article under “Related Documents” below.)
Pinter says that “Each side had their own agenda” initially. Negotiations were mired for months, with rancorous meetings and outbursts of ill-will halting on-again, off-again progress.
In February the Construction Industry Partnership between BCTC and BTEA retreated to Florida for CIP’s annual conference, with little to show for its efforts. “It had started to get pretty heated [at the conference] a couple times,” Pinter reports. “The turning point there was a midnight meeting between the two executive boards saying, ‘Let’s cut this out!’ With all those people in the room, it’s not going to be productive. We needed cooler heads in a smaller, more casual setting.”
Having each individual trade group concentrate specifically on how it could bring savings to the projects, rather than compare its position to other trades, helped get momentum rolling again. But, “another turning point in Florida came when the contractors gave a presentation outlining what they were prepared to give up. Until then, there had been considerable fear on the labor side that management wasn’t absorbing nearly enough economic pain to justify the union’s concessions,” according to the NYC article.
“Since the PLA was announced in May, 37 projects totaling more than $6 billion have been approved and executed under the deal, creating nearly 20,000 jobs,” the magazine reports. “An additional six projects are approved but have not yet begun construction and six more are in the early application stages.”
As Pinter says, “Labor clearly was looking to create job opportunities and contractors were looking to create profit opportunities, but those things didn’t have to be mutually exclusive. It’s really about jobs. If we put people to work, that’ll put contracts back in the black.”
