On Feb. 4, President Biden issued an executive order mandating project labor agreements “to improve timeliness, lower costs and increase quality on federal construction projects” greater than $35 million. How ironic. The truth is that PLA schemes increase costs to taxpayers, reduce opportunities for qualified Alabama contractors and skilled tradespeople and exacerbate the construction industry’s worker shortage.

Government-mandated PLAs steer taxpayer-funded public works contracts to union-signatory contractors, granting unions a monopoly to build these projects. Studies show that PLAs can increase the cost of public works projects by 12% to 20%, in part because of reduced competition. Discriminatory PLAs effectively exclude 87.4% of the construction workforce from working on these jobs because they are not unionized.

Taxpayers would be best served by the administration adopting inclusive, win-win policies that welcome all of America’s construction industry to realize the potential of the recently passed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. We cannot effectively rebuild our nation’s crumbling infrastructure, increase accountability and reduce waste with anti-competitive and costly union-only PLAs. Come election time, voters will remember.

Learn why government-mandated PLAs are not the answer to building long-lasting federal construction projects safely, on time and on budget by visiting buildamericalocal.com.

Deepa Bhate, the CEO of Birmingham-based Building & Earth Sciences, currently serves as the chair of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Alabama.