PORT ANGELES — Organized labor is raising its collective voice against the management of the Elwha River Restoration project just as the National Park Service prepares to celebrate the long-awaited removal of the stream’s two dams.
The Washington Building and Construction Trades Council on Friday endorsed a resolution requesting that elected representatives not attend the celebratory events Sept. 14-18 over concerns that the federal government and contractors have neglected the local workforce.
The Washington State Labor Council will consider a similar resolution at its conference this week, said Lee Whetham, the Olympic Peninsula Building and Construction Trades Council president who is spearheading the boycott effort.
Whetham said the $324 million dam removals project — the largest in the nation’s history — should not be celebrated because the Park Service didn’t create a project labor agreement, a U.S. Department of Labor report found 19 workers were underpaid at one job site and the use of out-of-state workers by at least one contractor.
“Something needs to be done,” he said. “There’s too many people getting our work that local people should be performing.”
Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Belfair, said in a written statement that he will “work with Sens. [Patty] Murray and [Maria] Cantwell to understand the council’s concerns.
“This project has already created a significant number of good jobs and is now poised for additional hiring as the demolition phase is beginning.”
Virgil Hamilton, Washington Building and Construction Trades Council, said the vote Friday wasn’t unanimous and referred all additional comments to Whetham.
Olympic National Park spokeswoman Barb Maynes, a media contact for the dam removals project, said she didn’t have figures on how many workers have been hired from the Peninsula.
Whetham also said he couldn’t quantify how many local workers have been employed but pointed the finger at one contractor, Watts Constructors, which he accuses of not hiring enough Peninsula workers.
He said Watts, which had to pay $32,721 in back wages to workers building a water treatment plant for the project, brought in workers from as far away as Guam to do work that could have been done by the local labor force.
Denny Watts, president of the Hawaii-based company, during a phone interview referred to Whetham’s allegations as a “tempest in a teapot.”
Watts employed 182 people on two water treatment projects and partnered with Port Angeles-based company DelHur Industries Inc. to build one of the plants.
Five workers came from outside Washington state, including two from Guam, according to Watts, while about half came from either Port Angeles or Sequim.
“I think we hired just about everybody that came along” from the Peninsula, Watts said. “As with any organization, we have the ability to move some of our own people around.”
Watts has an office in Guam, a U.S. territory.
The company was a prime contractor on five Elwha restoration projects, including the construction of two water treatment plants.
Together, the plants cost $106.6 million, a third of the project’s budget.
Whetham said he was skeptical of the company’s employment numbers. So was former employee Noel Bullock.
Bullock, a welder from Port Angeles who was one of the workers that Watts underpaid by misclassifying their job titles, said he saw between 10 and 15 people from Guam working on the project.
He also said two of the four welders he worked with came from out of state.
“There are lots of good-quality people in this town that could be doing this job,” said Bullock, who was laid off after working five months.
Watts agreed to compensate the misclassified workers in June 2010.
The company’s president said he didn’t think the company made an error but noted that the classifications are complicated.
“There’s hundreds of opportunities for those things to be how they’re classified,” Watts said. “What you do is the best you can and make what adjustments you can.”
Whetham said he thinks the federal government let down the local workforce by not creating a project labor agreement, which would have set terms and conditions for employment.
“It could have resulted in 100 percent local hiring,” he said.
Whetham and other building and construction trades representatives began to push for a project-wide agreement in 2008.
The Park Service signed a similar agreement with the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe for projects on its reservation.
George Behan, Dicks’ chief of staff, said the congressman supported a PLA, and his office helped get union representatives a meeting with the U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the Park Service.
But in the end, he said, the department did not support such a move.
Behan said he didn’t recall the reason.
Whetham said he did not get a clear answer as to why a PLA wasn’t adopted.
“It was a bunch of political talk, no real hard reason given to us at that time,” Whetham said.
“It was more, ‘Sorry it didn’t work out.’ There really wasn’t a firm reason given.”
________
Reporter Tom Callis can be reached at 360-417-3532 or at tom.callis@peninsuladailynews.com.
