...jobs out there, a lot of megaprojects still going strong. But we knew critical times were going to hit sooner or later. Word started coming up that we were going to try to create some sort of recovery plan and the locals needed to come up with ways they could cut. Everybody had different ideas, so it got complicated pretty quickly.
DAVID PINTER (president, Zwicker Electric, BTEA Executive Committee): Each side had their own agenda. Labor clearly was looking to create job opportunities and contractors were looking to create profit opportunities, but those things didn’t have to be mutually exclusive. It’s really about jobs. If we put people to work, that’ll put contracts back in the black.
COLLETTI: I don’t know that any of us had a vision when we got started talking about this. We were just reacting, drawing plays in the dirt. All we knew is that the real estate community was telling us we had to cut 25%. I don’t think they even knew! But that’s what they were being told by the financial institutions. So that became our target.
PAT A. DI FILLIPPO (executive vice president, Turner Construction, interim chairman, BTEA): At that point it was, “The world is coming to an end. Do we jump out of the ship or do we drown with it?” Everything mattered. We didn’t know where we were going. None of us did.
The process started with Colletti and LaBarbera, who had just replaced longtime BCTC chief Edward Malloy, “locking both sides in a hotel” while they listed core ideas they wanted labor and management to consider. The talks nearly collapsed as quickly as they started.
COLLETTI: At that first meeting we all thought, on the contracting side, that we were talking about this PLA for every market sector. That wasn’t communicated properly and the trades thought we were only talking about residential. So at the end of that first day, we had everyone report back with the agreements they had and you’ve got the contractors talking about all sectors and you’ve got labor saying it’s just residential and the whole thing blew up right there. That was the level of volatility we were dealing with.
LABARBERA: Then you had the interiors contractors saying “What about renovation work?” So we went from having an agreement for just residential, to figuring out an agreement for residential and commercial to having to go back again and putting together an agreement for residential and commercial and renovation work. You can look at it now and see the final agreements, but it took us something like three weeks just to arrive at the scope of the agreement. Then you had people wondering if we were going too far or if we were trying to go too far too fast and we had to get everybody comfortable with the market sectors we were going to be approaching.
COLLETTI: I’ve got 15 or 16 people on my executive committee. Gary’s got the same. Whenever we thought we’d reach an agreement we’d have to reach out to all 30 people on both sides to make sure everyone was on the same page before even thinking about scheduling the next group of meetings. That’s not something you can do over an e-mail.
LABARBERA: I’d get calls from the trades, Lou would talk to his members. So he and I would know when the laborers were meeting or when the plumbers were meeting to take care of their addendum stuff. We’d be waiting with bated breath to see what happened in those meetings. And many times, by the end of the day, the trades would walk out of the meetings, they’d call me and the subcontractors would call Lou and we’d get the play-by-play. “It was bad today, they walked out on each other...” Lou and I would then ask each other, “What issues did your guy have? What did you hear?” So we’d get the issues then we’d go back to our guys and try to get both sides together again.
SPINOLA: I’d have conversations with Lou pretty regularly and get updates on where they were with both sides. He’d go from, “We’re not talking anymore!” to “We had a great meeting yesterday!” Sometimes in the span of 48 hours.
COLLETTI: You know, it can’t be said enough how important both Gary and his predecessor, Ed Malloy, were to this process. Ed retired and Gary was named his replacement right as this was all starting. We could have lost months in the transition alone. But we didn’t.
PINTER: In many ways this was a trial by fire for Gary. I think he certainly took the momentum started by Ed Malloy and came in and finished the job. We’re a pretty fortunate city to have pretty enlightened labor leaders. Gary was really...
