Local union hits AvalonBay’s CEO
Fliers target developer’s hiring practices
By Christine McConville | Saturday, June 28, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Business & Markets
Organized labor is getting personal.
The New England carpenters union is taking aim at a national real estate investment trust and its $7 million-a-year chief executive, Hingham resident Bryce Blair, in an effort to expose what the union calls “the underground economy.”
While some people debate the impact of undocumented workers on construction sites, unions and government officials are going after the companies that they say pay their workers in cash and, in doing so, commit insurance and tax fraud.
Since May, members of the New England Regional Council of Carpenters have been in Hingham handing out fliers with a photo of AvalonBay Communities’ CEO Blair.
“When you see Bryce Blair around town,” the flier states, “thank him for overbuilding the town, hurting the town by using contractors that practice tax and insurance fraud, and just being an unscrupulous guy.”
Carpenters Local 424 Business Manager Rick Braccia said the group has distributed 1,200 fliers in downtown Hingham and at the job site, Avalon at Hingham Shipyard.
“We wanted to make the public aware that AvalonBay, we have found, is a practitioner of the underground economy,” Braccia said.
Blair, in a June 5 letter to the Hingham Journal, said the union is upset that they didn’t get more of the company’s Hingham work.
“We have engaged both union and non-union subcontractors, which has angered the New England Carpenters Union, which wants to do it all,” he wrote.
He denied that his company is part of the underground economy.
“We require that all of our subcontractors comply with all state and federal laws and regulations, and it is our policy to terminate any subcontractor who we find engaged in any illegal practices,” he wrote.
Braccia disagreed.
“AvalonBay hides behind the fact that they tell their contractors they will not allow illegality, but the reality is, there is no oversight on the job by AvalonBay,” he said.
For example, in December 2006, OSHA reported that Shawnlee Construction, an AvalonBay subcontractor at its Newton and Danvers job sites, exposed employees to fall hazards.
In March 2007, Oscar I. Pintado, a 27-year-old carpenter from Ecuador, was killed when he fell at an AvalonBay project in Woburn. Union officials say he was being paid in cash and was working without workers compensation coverage.
In April, Eric Frumin of Change to Win, a partnership of seven unions, told a congressional committee on workplace safety that AvalonBay sites are unsafe.
The Virginia-based real estate investment trust, formed in 1993, manages 52,167 apartments. In Massachusetts, the company has 5,000 apartments. Most are in multifamily, wood-frame buildings.
In Hingham, AvalonBay is building apartments at the former shipyard.
After union carpenters built a clubhouse and one building on the site, carpenters union organizer Mario Mejia said he met workers from Mexico who were brought to Massachusetts from Virginia. Mejia said the workers are living in Devens and are being transported by their bosses in a van to work every day. They are paid $150 in cash each day, he said.
AvalonBay did not respond to a request for comment on Mejia’s statements.
Meanwhile, on the streets of Hingham, Braccia said public response has been “surprisingly in our favor.
“We do get people who think this is strictly a union issue, and think we aren’t getting the job, so we are angry,” he said.
“We tell them, ‘It doesn’t have to be union, but it does have to be legal.’ ”
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/business/general/view.bg?articleid=1103760
