Project Labor Agreements and Competitive Bidding Statutes

Abstract

In this comment, I will examine the nature of project labor agreements and the situations where developers, particularly public developers, seek to require adherence to a project labor agreement.Since the Supreme Court held, in the landmark Boston Harbor case, 1 that federal law does not preempt project labor agreements, I will constrain my analysis to the state law issue of whether these project labor agreements violate state competitive bidding laws.I will first explain what a project labor agreement is, when it is desirable, and why such an agreement can be valuable.Next, I will analyze the broad, general and more express, narrow statutory purposes behind various state competitive bidding statutes.I will also highlight why project labor agreements are seen as being pro-labor union.In the second section, I will review several cases in which state courts have spoken on the legality of project labor agreements.Through this review, I will demonstrate the current state of the law.In addition, I will highlight the issues on which the courts are split.Finally, in the third section, I will analyze the different approaches in the law today.I will show that project labor agreements are not only valid under competitive bidding statutes, but are often desirable because of the t B.A. 1998, University of Pennsylvania; J.D. Candidate 2001, University of Pennsylvania Law School.I would like to thank Donald J. Siegel, a family friend, for helping me formulate a topic for this paper.I would also like to thank my parents

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