• Posted: March 11, 2019
• IBEW Local 134

The Illinois, Indiana, Iowa Foundation for Fair Contracting (III FFC) was founded in 1999 and set out to educate nonunion workers on the benefits of prevailing wage and joining a union.

“We would get a list of projects coming up and we’d look through the newspapers and get our guys up to speed on what was going on,” said Marc Poulos, Executive Director and Counsel for the III FFC. “Then we’d head out to the jobs and talk to workers about prevailing wage. Mainly we’d talk with nonunion workers that were out there working on these jobs where the contractor was cheating.”

By cheating, Poulos means under-bidding the work, hiring nonunion employees, and not paying workers their fair share. What the III FFC quickly found out was that once a contractor was confronted for not playing fairly, they would begin to bid jobs more fairly and in line with union contractors.

“In our best year, we’ve turned around $50 million in ‘bad’ contracts back to union,” Poulos explains.

But Poulos was beginning to see that it wasn’t just enough to flip bad jobs to union, they didn’t want a job to go nonunion in the first place. So, after a few years of fighting to reverse jobs, the III FFC began to look at ways of being proactive instead of always reacting to a job. This meant getting more involved in politics and making the organization’s voice heard long before construction began.

“The goal of the organization is to flip projects to union,” said Poulos. “We also want to build a landscape that is more receptive and beneficial to unions in the first place.”

The III FFC’s mission has become even more critical over the years as surrounding states like Wisconsin have implemented right-to-work legislation. Right-to-work laws, like the one in Wisconsin, prohibit union security agreements between companies and labor unions.

Here in Illinois, a recent Supreme Court case, Janus v. AFSCME, ruled that nonunion works cannot be forced to pay fees to public sector unions. This case is seen by some as opening the door for right-to-work legislation in Illinois.

On a more local level, the III FFC sends representatives to Tax Incremental Financing (TIF) hearings to testify on behalf of labor management jointly run industries. TIF funds can pay for public improvements and other economic development incentives using the increased property tax revenue the improvements generate. They are a powerful tool that enables municipalities to self-finance its redevelopment programs.

The group had a presence during the Neighborhood 78 hearings and is actively working to ensure the Lincoln Yards development gets the green light from the city council.

“The more responsible contractors we can get on jobs, the more we can help grow and help them become a bigger, better company,” Poulos says. “This will also mean more work for the union construction industry.”

In the end, both the III FFC and Powering Chicago want to see more work being made available to the unionized construction industry in Illinois.