Robert F. Bukaty/AP Photo
Maine Gov. Janet Mills speaks at a news conference, January 17, 2023, in Augusta, Maine.
Maine Gov. Janet Mills is threatening to veto legislation governing how the state builds and operates offshore wind projects, citing concerns over pro-union labor provisions.
The Democratic governor championed an earlier version of the bill, but said this past week that she opposes a commitment to use project labor agreements (PLAs), prehire deals that set a floor for wages and can help build union power.
Mills argued that mandating a PLA would create a “chilling effect” for non-union companies, discouraging them from bidding on construction.
Supporters of the PLA provision say that is a far-fetched objection, since the agreements do not ban non-union contractors from vying for jobs. (In fact, that’s one reason some more radical unionists say PLAs do too little to advance labor’s cause.)
On Friday, state lawmakers wrote to Mills with a proposed compromise, suggesting new bill text to meet her concerns about potential workforce shortages.
With Maine’s legislative session ending on Monday, the fight comes at a crucial moment. The federal government is midway through a two-year process to develop commercial offshore leases. Last month, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management started an environmental assessment of the first utility-scale floating wind farm in the U.S., off the coast of Maine.
At stake is whether the offshore wind industry will offer decent work—particularly compared with the industrial-scale solar sector, which promised good-paying careers but has delivered unpredictable temp jobs. In nearly every state, similar fights are playing out as business groups try to beat back labor provisions attached to new federal spending.
IN 2019, KIM TOBIAS LEFT HER JOB at a call center. The pay was lousy, the lifelong Mainer told the Prospect. Jobs were being shipped overseas, and she was tired of being yelled at all day.
She became an apprentice electrician with IBEW Local 1253. Over the last four years, Tobias has worked in paper mills, a school, and in a county jail—a cross section of the state’s economy. But she has been disappointed by solar jobs, which are short, erratically managed, and often far away. She has a young son, and has commuted as far as 90 miles to a solar job site.
It can also be tough to hone a valuable skill set on solar jobs, since much of solar installation involves a few repetitive tasks, so workers are paid little and remain easily dispensable.
Labor groups in Maine are hoping the arrival of wind energy will go differently. The state boasts strong and consistent winds, and unions want a plan that would include everything from manufacturing turbines to maritime operation, maintenance, and decommissioning.
“It would be a huge learning experience,” Tobias said. “I’ve never gotten to work on a new industrial facility.”
A coalition including steelworkers, electricians, and operating engineers originally backed a bill attaching labor standards to port development. That bill was combined in the state Senate with a narrower ports bill proposed by Mills, which would create a new visual impact standard to assess a structure’s impact on the “scenic character” of its surroundings. Mills said the bill was intended to create “streamlined but thorough permitting review.”
Now, Mills is objecting to requiring project labor agreements at the port. The governor wrote that she took issue with using PLAs “not only for the construction of an offshore wind port, but for the construction and fabrication of offshore wind projects, such as the turbines, broadly.”
The split between strong labor standards applied to construction or manufacturing—whether unions are used only to build a new factory, or also used inside the walls—is a deepening fault line in the design of federal industrial policy, which has mostly offered protections at the construction stage, where the building trades dominate.
At stake is whether the offshore wind industry will offer decent work—particularly compared with the industrial-scale solar sector, which promised good-paying careers but has delivered unpredictable temp jobs.
Labor groups across clean energy are hoping to capture not just installation but manufacturing jobs. Because operations management for offshore wind uses relatively little manpower, retaining the manufacturing is critical. In Scotland, recent reports suggest that heavy investment in offshore wind over the past decade has generated just one-tenth of the jobs promised by government officials, partly because the manufacturing of turbines has been offshored.
Domestic turbine production has been shrinking in recent years, though it is experiencing a comeback due to subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. For now, however, the domestic supply chain is in its infancy. The vast majority of component parts—blades, nacelles, towers, cables—are manufactured in parts of the world with more mature supply chains.
Maine’s offshore wind industry is also unlike current developments on the East Coast. Given its deep waters, Maine is planning floating offshore wind—and many of the jobs for floating projects are tied to ports.
On fixed-bottom offshore wind projects, most of the construction happens out at sea. But at the moment, it’s just not possible to build 15,000-ton hulls—the floating, football-field-sized foundations that hold up the wind tower and turbine—anywhere on the East Coast. The Maine Labor Climate Council hopes that if it can overcome local objections, it can build a port that would fabricate key parts of the project.
BUSINESS GROUPS ROUTINELY THREATEN to reject subsidies with PLA provisions attached—yet they typically apply for the money anyway.
Two years ago, Maine lawmakers awarded $20 million to the state housing authority for affordable housing, in a bill that required the use of PLAs. At the time, developers protested that they would never bid on the project. Yet the funding was quickly oversubscribed; the housing authority received requests for more than twice the available funds, including from non-union contractors.
Some major wind developers, including the Danish multinational Ørsted, have already committed to using project labor agreements in the U.S.
Mills has also warned that under a PLA, there could be a shortage of Maine workers to do the job. “I do not believe any of us want to see out-of-state workers being bussed up to coastal Maine to build our offshore wind port while Maine workers are sidelined,” she wrote.
“Right now what we see is the opposite. People leave the state every day to go to other states in New England, to earn family-sustaining wages,” said Jason Shedlock, president of the Maine Building and Construction Trades Council and an organizer for the Laborers’ International Union (LiUNA). Maine’s Building Trades include more than 6,000 workers who routinely struggle to find work nearby.
The construction industry has always involved travel. But Shedlock says part of the case for a PLA is that it will grow Maine’s skilled apprentices and eventually its union halls. If non-union contractors win bids on jobs, he said, they will look to the building trades’ apprentice programs for staff.
In their Friday letter, which was shared with the Prospect, lawmakers offered a compromise with Mills in which they would introduce “Maine Resident Priority Language” to encourage contractors to first seek qualified workers within the state.
Tobias hopes the bill will still pass, allowing her to secure more predictable work in the wind industry—and a regular routine for her son’s day care. “I go to my third solar site in a month on Monday,” she said. “When you have a bunch of short-term jobs, you’re just bouncing around, things aren’t consistent. Knowing that you’re going to have something long-term like that in this type of industry is huge.”
Meanwhile, Shedlock said, labor groups like LiUNA continue to support “all of the above” energy technologies, including other promising clean-energy sources like small modular nuclear reactors. But, he said, the solar industry is a cautionary tale on how not to do the energy transition.
“As we speak, there are temp workers from all across the country building our solar arrays here,” Shedlock said. “Fool us once when it comes to one industry. Fool us again, and we’re gonna be doomed.”
