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The Stockton Record

Plumbing program's foes pipe up
Organized labor has issues with contractors

By Reed Fujii
Record Staff Writer
Published Thursday, April 28, 2005

A contractor-backed plumber-training organization in Sacramento wants to operate statewide, but is drawing fire from organized labor, which claims the apprenticeship program exploits trainees and provides inadequate training.

Those charges are simply false, a program executive said, just a smokescreen for unions trying to maintain a monopoly over state-approved apprenticeships and unfairly limiting access to people seeking to become plumbers.

Members of the California Apprenticeship Council are expected to hear the matter during its quarterly meeting this afternoon in San Jose.

The dispute goes back to 1998, when the apprentice-training program sponsored by the Plumbing, Heating and Cooling Contractors was allowed to expand from its base in Sacramento County and operate statewide, said Trish Black, program administrator.

It did so until 2001, when a labor group challenged the expansion and got it reversed.

Ever since, Black said, "We've been fighting to get that state approval back."

Opposing the contractors, however, is the California State Pipe Trades Council, which graduates more than 3,000 apprentices every year from its own statewide apprenticeship program.

Council officials charge the contractor's program abuses trainees by giving them lower apprenticeship wages and puts them to work without proper training.

Also, it unfairly benefits Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's biggest donors -- builders and developers, said Ted Reed, executive director of the California State Pipe Trades Council.

"When substandard programs cheat apprentice workers out of their training and jeopardize the safety of homes and office buildings, everybody loses -- except the governor's biggest contributors," Reed said.

"Those charges are ridiculous," Black said.

All apprentices, whether enrolled in a union or nonunion program, receive the same wages -- a reduced percentage of prevailing wage scales, she said. And her program wouldn't allow a contractor to hire only apprentices in order to take advantage of the lower pay.

"Contractors are required to have at least one full-scale journeyman plumber working alongside every apprentice on the job," Black said.

"There have been no meritorious complaints filed against us or our contractors," she said.

Still, Jeff Brown of Riverbank, who participated in both union and nonunion apprenticeship programs, said differences between the two were like "night and day."

Brown, who graduated from the Pipe Trades Council's Local 422 apprenticeship program and is now a foreman for Sahargun Plumbing in Stockton, said his experience of the nonunion program in the late 1990s was that it primarily focused on classroom training and provided nearly no hands-on experience.

Oversight in the union apprenticeship was also much more stringent, he said, with an oral board reviewing a trainee's progress.

"That's something that doesn't happen with (the contractor's program)," Brown said.

Black responded that the Plumbing, Heating and Cooling Contractors training is just as good as any offered by a union program.

"Each year we re-evaluate what we do, and each year we get a little better," she said.

What's really at issue is whether the PHCC expansion should be allowed over the objections of other existing apprenticeship programs.

"If you are a new program then all existing programs have the right to make comments on whether or not you should be able to operate," Black said. That's different than from most other industries.

"If you want to open a coffee shop, all the Starbucks don't have to approve," she noted.

So what's driving the opposition?

"Honestly, it's fear of competition," Black said. "The existing programs want a monopoly on training apprentices."

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