Persistence Pays Off For Organizers Pursuing Pavers

Installing unit pavers – whether brick, stone, or concrete – is core BAC work. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that every contractor installing pavers does the work under a BAC contract. And sometimes, even when a job requires that masons get paid prevailing wages, a paver contractor will try to undercut BAC by assigning the work to another trade. 

Thanks to years of political work by BAC and other unions, most public works projects in California not only require prevailing wages, but are covered by project labor agreements, or PLAs. Even if a non-union contractor wins a bid on a PLA project, the contractor must abide by union wages, benefits, and rules on that job. But when Alpha and Omega Pavers – a non-union company in Southern California – started winning PLA jobs nearly a decade ago, it didn’t assign paver installation to BAC. Instead, it gave that work to another, lower-paid trade – until BAC Local 4 California and the IU Organizing Department fought back. 

“We started tracking Alpha and Omega about seven or eight years ago, when they began taking prevailing rate, public works, paver jobs on PLAs from our signatory contractors,” recalled Emmanuel De La Rosa, an IU organizer and Local 4 member. “And we found that the company was often paying the masons who were laying the pavers like they were tenders, not masons. So we stayed on top of them for years, doing compliance work.” 

“Compliance work” is the process of ensuring that contractors working on public projects that require the payment of prevailing wages are abiding by the law. De La Rosa, along with Local 4 organizer Refugio Pinedo, would obtain the certified payrolls submitted to the government by Alpha and Omega, and then ensure that the company’s employees were being paid the right wages. In many cases, they weren’t. 

“We would see guys getting reported as tenders, but we’d go out to the job and watch them, and they were obviously doing bricklayers’ work.  So we’d go to the state and get the masons backpay, and as time went on, we showed the masons that the union was looking out for them – and we also showed Alpha and Omega that we were paying attention,” said De La Rosa. 

Despite years of tenacious compliance work, Alpha and Omega didn’t budge – that is, until Local 4 and the IU scored a breakthrough last summer with one of the company’s other non-union competitors. “A major turning point in the Alpha Omega campaign came when we got their competitor, Bulldog Paving, removed from the market,” recounted De La Rosa. De La Rosa and Pinedo developed relationships with some of Bulldog’s masons who were working on a big prevailing wage project in Orange County, and learned that Bulldog was forcing workers to “kick back” some of their wages. The organizers, working with one of the Bulldog crew (who now is a BAC member), were able to obtain recordings and documents proving the kickback scheme.  

“Once we submitted our evidence to the District Attorney’s office, they raided Bulldog and arrested the owner, and the company lost the job. That sent a clear message to Alpha and Omega that BAC defends all masons, protects the market, and keeps our signatory contractors safe. And that got the company talking to us – we showed them we weren’t picking on them, but just trying to keep everyone who plays by the rules on a level playing field,” said De La Rosa.  

The conversations with the company got serious, and in December, Alpha and Omega signed a contract with Local 4, bringing five new members into the union. “It goes to show that organizing doesn’t always succeed overnight. Sometimes we’ve just got to be persistent, and keep doing the right thing – and eventually, we’ll get the big win,” concluded De La Rosa.