Monday, Nov. 26, 2007 | 7:13 a.m.
Warren Hardy is digging in for a fight.
Twice within the past two months he has written to local nonunion contractors calling for "all hands on deck" over what he considers an escalating war with organized labor.
Hardy is a conservative Republican state senator who doubles as president of the Las Vegas Chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors, a dues-supported organization dedicated to furthering the cause of open shops in the construction industry.
The ABC has frequently battled the building trades, primarily the fast-growing Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters, during the unprecedented construction boom in Southern Nevada over the past decade.
Depending on the intensity of the fight, the ABC's membership has been as high as 261 local contractors and associated firms. Today, however, as the Carpenters Union - which has more than tripled in size during the past 10 years to 11,000 Las Vegas members - picks up the pace of its organizing efforts, the ABC's membership has slipped to 211 contractors and firms, which might be why Hardy is back on the recruiting trail beating the anti-labor drums.
Hardy, who state records show earns about $210,000 a year in his position at the ABC, insists the organization isn't anti-union.
"We don't spend a single man-hour trying to find ways to harm the unions," he said. "Everything we do involves defending our rights to exist. We believe the decision to join a union ought to be based on facts and not coercion."
What has Hardy rallying the troops this time is what he calls a stepped-up "corporate campaign" by the Carpenters Union to persuade customers of open shop contractors to pressure the contractors into going union. He's looking to raise $250,000 from his membership to battle the Carpenters.
In an opinion piece last summer in the Sun, Hardy offered a critical view of the union campaign, which often includes staging public protests with large banners outside a business, chastising it for dealing with a nonunion contractor.
"The objective of this type of campaign is to inflict as much economic pain and hardship as possible on the contractor's customer in an effort to get them to do the union's bidding," Hardy wrote.
Not surprisingly, the Carpenters Union, which says it has about 450 businesses drawing from its large labor pool, doesn't share Hardy's opinion.
Jim Sala, the Nevada political director of the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters, prefers to call what's taking place an "area standards" campaign.
"If somebody is going to use a contractor who undermines the area standards we've set in this community and pay people half the money or give them no benefits, we think the public has a right to know about that," Sala said.
There currently are about a dozen banners at businesses in town, Sala said.
Such campaigns are not uncommon across the country, said Daniel Mitchell, a professor at UCLA's Anderson Graduate School of Management. In New York City, trade unions, rather than using banners, prefer to inflate large balloons that look like giant rats.
Las Vegas is prime organizing territory for the construction trades.
"You want to go where the jobs are or else there won't be anything to organize," he said.
If it appears that the Carpenters Union has stepped things up a notch, Sala said, it's because of the massive expansion of the Southern Nevada construction market and the influx of new businesses, many from California, that set up shop here with nonunion workers.
"We're not looking for a war," Sala said. "But if somebody decides they want to have a war, I think we have the resources to respond."
Sala said Hardy and the ABC, not the union, have escalated the conflict through Hardy's recruiting letters, public rhetoric and appearances at union demonstrations.
"We've never seen that kind of activity from them before," he said. "I think they may feel that they've become marginalized a little bit."
Hardy clashed last month with the Carpenters and other construction unions during a Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority meeting to discuss project labor agreements with the unions for the authority's planned $890 million overhaul of its convention center.
The ABC has long opposed such public project agreements, which it contends force open shop contractors to hire union workers and pay into union benefit and pension plans in addition to providing benefits to their own employees.
The LVCVA approved its project labor agreement with the unions over Hardy's objections.
Hardy was a lobbyist for the ABC during its last major clash with the building trades, in the late 1990s, when the group conducted "fight back" seminars for its nonunion members to fend off a nationally backed organizing campaign within the construction industry.
By 2001, after Hardy had become the ABC's top executive, the organization won a lengthy legal battle with the Carpenters Union that preserved its right to conduct state-approved apprenticeship programs that competed with the much-larger Carpenters Union programs.
Two years earlier, the ABC had won the support of the Nevada Apprenticeship Council, which is overseen by the state's labor commissioner, for two apprenticeship programs - one to train nonunion carpenters and one to train nonunion painters.
The programs, however, proved to be dismal failures. This month, the Apprenticeship Council decertified both the carpenters' and the painters' programs because of a lack of participants.
According to Lleta Brown, who runs the Apprenticeship Council for the labor commissioner, the two programs have each graduated only five people since 1999, and no one has participated in either program in the past two years.
"In retrospect, we should not have done those two programs," Hardy acknowledged. "We don't want to make the mistake again of getting a program certified that isn't going to work."
The group's remaining electricians apprenticeship program, which has more employees to draw from, has been successful, with 200 current participants, he said.
But even that pales when compared to the Carpenters Union apprenticeship program, which union officials said has a $3 million annual budget, 1,744 current participants and a 64,000-square-foot training facility. More than 150 people have graduated so far this year alone.
"If other groups are going to engage in this, that's great, but they should do it at a level the industry needs and not just on a convenience level," Sala said.
The ABC also is drawing criticism from labor leaders for its use of state funds to conduct craft training seminars perceived as anti-union.
In November 2005, the little-known Nevada Construction Education Commission awarded the ABC a $100,000 grant to help fund dozens of training seminars for its members.
The seven-member commission, established by the Nevada Legislature in 2001 at the request of the Nevada Contractors Board, has handed out more than $1.2 million in grants to union and nonunion organizations since July 2001. It gets its money from fines collected by the Contractors Board and voluntary contributions from the construction industry.
Among the many seminars ABC listed on its application was one designed to help members deal with a "salting" campaign, something regarded within management as an effort to infiltrate or disrupt a company during an organizing campaign. Another seminar listed dealt with how to set up a dual gate system at a construction site hit by a labor action.
Both two-hour seminars, according to records with the Construction Education Commission, were conducted by labor-management lawyer Jim Winkler in spring 2006.
The commission did not object to the seminars when it approved the $100,000 grant on Nov. 29, 2005. But a year later, when the ABC again listed the seminars on an application for new funding, the commission questioned whether it was appropriate to spend state money on courses that appeared to be antiunion.
Hardy at the Nov. 7, 2006, meeting insisted the seminars were not aimed at union busting, but rather were designed to help his members understand the labor law on those subjects.
Commission records show 17 people signed up for the salting seminar and 12 for the dual gate course.
Hardy told the commissioners he would not use state money for the seminars in the future.
In hindsight, "it was not a good idea," he said.
Sala agreed.
"If employers want to get together and talk about how to keep employees from organizing, which is their right ... they should use their own money," Sala said.
Hardy has left himself vulnerable to criticism from those within organized labor because of his dual positions as head of a high-profile special interest group and member of the part-time Legislature.
He was elected to the State Senate in 2002, a year after he took the top job at the ABC, and was reelected in 2006. He is chairman of the Senate Government Affairs Committee and vice chairman of the Commerce and Labor Committee.
"I understand the perception, of course, and that's why I'm careful and generally don't introduce a lot of bills that impact the construction industry," he said.
This year, however, Hardy was instrumental in defeating a provision of a bill that would have put into law the longtime practice followed by the state Contractors Board of publicizing the number of complaints against contractors.
He openly objected to that provision of Senate Bill 279 during a series of legislative hearings. The bill ultimately was passed without that provision and signed into law by Gov. Jim Gibbons.
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