January 20, 2000
Three pro-airport supervisors - Charles Smith, Jim Silva and Cynthia Coad - deserved the harshly worded criticism they received on Monday from their Republican Party peers. The Orange County Republican Party's Central Committee voted overwhelmingly to rebuke the board majority for its approval of a union labor agreement that creates a government-mandated union monopoly for about 85 percent of the county's public works projects for the next five years.
It remains to be seen whether the three supervisors will pay a political price for their decision, but it does raise the question about why the three Republican supervisors were so willing to endorse a type of pact that is more typical of what Democratic Party leaders try to push through.
The obvious answer is El Toro. Although the supervisors claim the agreement will help them avert work stoppages in the coming years, there is no reasonable way of viewing the matter outside the context of the proposed commercial airport at the former Marines Corps air station in south county.
Local observers and anti-airport activists argue that there is no pressing reason for such a labor agreement at this time, unless it is part of some sort of quid pro quo with organized labor - either to get labor to take a hands-on approach to oppose the anti-airport Measure F initiative, or to use their clout in Sacramento and Washington to move along slow-going regulatory approvals.
"I was told by a top Orange County labor union official that there was a quid pro quo with this," Meg Waters told us; she represents the group of south county cities that have been opposing the airport.
"And the quid pro quo was the county would enter into this agreement with the understanding that Orange County labor would call the AFL-CIO in Washington, which is across the street from the White House, and they would cross the street and tell the president to make sure this airport would happen."
Supervisor Smith told us "it may help with some of the political people at the White House," but that the reason for his support of the pact was to help avert work stoppages and keep contractors from bringing in out-of-town labor. He called the GOP's vote a "knee-jerk reaction" and accused party activists of just being against labor.
That puts him on the same page as Mike Potts, the union organizer who helped negotiate the agreement.
Mr. Potts told us that there is a "super far-right bent in the GOP" that isn't concerned about working families.
We don't see what is "super far right" about the idea that the government shouldn't use its coercive power to insist that workers join a union, or to force them to pay dues to an organization that supports candidates and causes that may be anathema to the beliefs of the individual workers.
The Central Committee's resolution simply accuses the supervisors of supporting an agreement that "betrays most Orange County employees by preventing them from working on most Orange County construction projects." It said that "this PLA will reduce competition, hurt small business and increase costs on Orange County projects" and that the PLA "contradicts fundamental principles of freedom upon which our nation and our Republican Party are founded."
"The party is very, very anti-resolution," Mark Bucher told us; he is one of the Central Committee members who authored the resolution that passed this week. "The Republican Party is about registering Republicans and getting them out to vote." But this unusual action was needed, he said, because the labor pact was "the biggest thing to happen on a countywide level that I can remember or imagine. It's so incredible. What does it say about our county and what it thinks about small business?"
What it says is one of two things: That three county supervisors either don't believe in those "fundamental principles of freedom" or they are willing to discard them in the service of building an airport.
