Robert F. Bukaty/AP Photo
In this September 20, 2013, photo, a lobster boat passes the country’s first floating wind turbine off the coast of Castine, Maine.
Last month, Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) vetoed a bill requiring a project labor agreement (PLA) for Maine offshore wind ports, arguing that the prehire deal would restrict the labor pool narrowly to union construction workers.
After the legislative session dragged on for another month, the building trades are now approaching a compromise on a reworked bill with Mills, a prominent champion of states’ climate action. The bill, which was advanced late Wednesday night by the state legislature’s Appropriations and Financial Affairs Committee, is expected to move to Mills’s desk next week.
Instead of a PLA, it spells out a Community and Workforce Enhancement Agreement (CWEA), a list of labor standards for offshore wind development, including apprenticeship requirements and a ban on the use of independent contractors and temp staffing agencies. Most critically, it would require that all work happen at collectively bargained rates.
In other words, even non-union contractors on Maine’s offshore wind projects would be required to pay the statewide wage rates that unions agree upon with their contractors during collective bargaining.
“We want to be sure this industry is competing over things like technological innovation, as opposed to who can bargain down with workers,” Francis Eanes, director of the Maine Labor Climate Council, a coalition of state unions, told the Prospect.
The new bill combines two earlier pieces of legislation: the vetoed bill on ports, and a second bill on offshore wind energy procurement, which the governor had also threatened to veto due to its use of a PLA.
Construction work, even when it takes a few years, is temporary. It is frequently staffed by day laborers with no long-term career path. Prehire agreements like PLAs are key tools for the building trades, because without them it would be nearly impossible to unionize worksites.
Now that the PLA has been rewritten as a CWEA, Mills is supportive of the new legislation, according to multiple people with knowledge of the negotiations. (Mills’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
Explaining her opposition to a PLA in a letter on the earlier bills, Mills pointed out that the large majority of Maine construction workers are not unionized. (She cited a figure used by contractors that says more than 90 percent of Maine construction workers are non-union; unions dispute that estimate.) A PLA would create a “chilling effect” for nonunion companies, Mills argued, “and could end up favoring out-of-state unions in the region, over Maine-based companies and workers.”
Neither a PLA nor the newly proposed CWEA would prevent non-union contractors from bidding. In Maine, non-union contractors have bid on state contracts under PLA before. But state Sen. Mark Lawrence, who is sponsoring the amendment, said it eased the governor’s worries that non-union contractors would not get a fair shot at the work.
“We dealt with carve-outs for non-union companies, allowing them to work on projects. And dealt with, when they’re increasing their workforce, that they would need to go to labor first to fill those positions. It takes the nuts and bolts of what’s usually in a PLA, and puts it into statute,” Lawrence said.
Across the East Coast, offshore wind developers who signed state contracts before 2020 are now asking for more subsidies or higher rates from their customers. The developers cite long delays between contract signing and breaking ground, and the higher cost of commodities including labor.
Lawrence said that spelling out a PLA’s contents up front could give contractors a “sense of security,” and help improve project delivery time.
Jason Shedlock, president of the Maine Building and Construction Trades Council and an organizer for the Laborers’ International Union (LiUNA), said he does not feel unions lost ground by reframing the deal as a CWEA and making plain that non-union contractors can participate.
“I like our contractors’ chances a lot, especially since this isn’t ‘Johnny’s Screen Door Repair,’” Shedlock told the Prospect. “This is complicated work.”
The bill covers work at ports, where workers would build and assemble offshore wind components, procurement of transmission lines, and a broader set of procurement provisions that include the interests of other labor groups. The Maine Lobstering Union has thrown its support behind the bill, which states that generation facilities must be located outside of a key lobster trapping zone.
Maine’s deep waters require the use of floating offshore wind rather than the fixed-bottom foundations common further down the East Coast. Floating turbines are better for encouraging the use of a local labor force than fixed-structure, Eanes argues, since they require manufacture in a nearby port. By contrast, the foundations for fixed-bottom wind are smaller and can be manufactured elsewhere and transported over longer distances.
Still, unions have been burned before on procurement deals for wind. Like many capital-intensive projects, operating wind energy does not employ many workers to start with. In Scotland, reports suggest investments in offshore wind over the past ten years have generated just one-tenth of the jobs promised by government officials, after the manufacturing of turbines was offshored.
