DC Building Trades: PLAs for thee, but not for me.

The Stacks development at D.C.’s Buzzard Point is a 2.7 million square feet, 6-acre development spanning two city blocks. When complete, the development will feature 1,100 residential units, 80,000 square feet of retail, two hotels, and 15,000 square feet of park and entertainment space.

The Stacks received funding from National Real Estate Advisors, an investment manager that is a subsidiary of the National Electrical Benefit Fund (NEBF). The NEBF is the primary pension fund for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). In other words, The Stacks is being built with money from a union pension fund.

The project’s funders required contractors to sign a Project Labor Agreement (PLA) to work on The Stacks. What was unique about this PLA is that it was being required for a private real estate development project. Typically, PLAs are only imposed on taxpayer funded projects by politicians eager to reward unions that supported their political campaigns. Thus, The Stacks PLA was an extreme rarity.

A funny thing happened to the PLA at The Stacks. It turns out that the unions and their pension funds found their own, self-imposed PLA to be pointless and unworkable - to the surprise of no one in the construction industry. And so on October 20, 2021, the D.C. Building Trades cancelled their own PLA!

Think about that the next time you hear that PLAs are “necessary” for construction projects built with YOUR tax dollars.

Letter cancelling the Project Labor Agreement on The Stacks development.

October 20, 2021