“They’re lowering standards for all carpenters in the Knoxville area,” he says. “We’d like to see them change their practices.”

Helton charges that Proffitt & Sons doesn’t pay what the union considers a fair wage, doesn’t pay benefits to many of its workers, and is engaged in using an inordinate number of 1099 independent contractors, rather than using full-time employees who are entitled to worker’s compensation and unemployment benefits.

“By law, you can’t use that many independent contractors on your site,” he says. “Somebody has to be an employee.”

http://www.unionreview.com/

http://www.metropulse.com/

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.

http://www.necarpenters.org/

Federal prosecutors allege that Modern Continental lied about the quality of its work on two areas of the tunnel system, including a section where a ceiling collapse killed a woman. If convicted, the Cambridge-based firm faces up to $24.5 million in fines, as well as restitution payments.

The company said the charges are unfounded.

www.bigdig.com

BigDig From Wikipedia 

http://www.necarpenters.org/

(Click Here) Big Dig Contractor Charged with Lying

http://www.spfpalocal7777.org/SAFETYFIRSTATCITYCENTER.html 

Bates has been a member of the union for 11 years, said Marc Furman, who oversees local carpenters unions as the head of the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters.

The carpenter is the 12th construction worker to die in a construction accident on the Las Vegas Strip in the last 18 months.

But he is the first to die at Echelon, a $4.8 billion multi-towered Boyd Gaming project that broke ground one year ago. Marnell Corrao Associates is the general contractor of the Tower and Tishman is the construction manager.

http://www.swcarpenters.org/

http://www.lasvegassun.com/

"This is the type of initiative that would have a disastrous impact on construction, school budgets and virtually every state service," said NERCC Political Director Tom Flynn. "You can't just eliminate a third of state revenues and not feel a real pinch. We will be educating our members and helping educate the public about the very dangerous consequences this repeal would have. If we do that, I think it will be defeated." 

http://www.necarpenters.org/

The scale of the project poses challenges on many levels. While construction workers came running to land good-paying jobs at CityCenter, building trades officials say their knowledge of standard safety practices is inconsistent. Meanwhile, the state's critics argue too few inspectors have roamed the construction site.

Was the Nevada Occupational Safety and Health Administration ill-prepared -- and arguably unwilling -- to levy hard scrutiny at powerful Perini?

Building trades officials have complained for weeks that, even when OSHA found safety violations, the fines were reduced or eliminated altogether. And when it's acceptable to eliminate safety equipment such as those last-chance nets that might have saved the life of one fallen worker, there's something wrong with the system.

Inspections were left "in hands of individuals who paid him bribes."

Delayo signed off on so-called "class C" mobile cranes - machines that are different from the tower cranes that collapsed in Manhattan - more than 20 times. He got several hundred dollars for every fake inspection, sources said.

"We have zero tolerance for any corruption anywhere in city government, and when corruption appears in a public safety agency like the Department of Buildings, it is all the more deplorable," Mayor Bloomberg said.

“We’ll fix it. We’ll fix it.” But nothing ever happens. They’re pushing to get stuff done. They’re more interested in the money, than keeping the job safe.-Fred Medina, a member of Plasterers and Cement Masons Local 797

I was in the middle of writing this up last night, I got a ton of information from Gangbox: Construction Workers News Service, after 11 construction deaths in 18 months, and failure to negotiate a positive safety plan between the unions and Perini, the General Contractor, the Nevada Building and Construction Trades membership walked off the job late Monday night, a general strike, today I noticed at the AFL-CIO Blog that the workers have ended the strike, details below.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/

"Cheaters and unscrupulous employers have created an underground economy as big as $1 trillion. Worse, workers right here in Massachusetts are being taken advantage of and not getting the benefits and protections they deserve," said Kerry. Participating in the hearing with Kerry was US Congressman John Tierney (D-Salem), co-author of the Taxpayer Responsibility, Accountability and Consistency (TRAC) Act, which seeks to discourage employers from misclassifying workers by allowing the IRS to collect the unpaid taxes from the employer.  In addition, the bill would increase fines for misclassifications.

http://www.necarpenters.org/

Video from the scene showed the upper-floor balconies of the apartment building were severely damaged and a hole extended several stories down the side of the building.

Barba said it appeared the entire cab came off the crane; its main arm hit the penthouse of his building, then "took out the northeast corner," he said.

Chaos enveloped the largely residential neighborhood of town houses and apartment high-rises as dozens of emergency vehicles raced to the scene during the morning rush hour.

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