Talking Politics, part 2

To be fair, the power-plant deal occurred long before Cheney took the reins of Halliburton. But did he take steps to change the company? Van Hoy and other labor leaders say he didn't: "Dick Cheney didn't change anything. That company is still [labor's] enemy and will smash us and fight us if it can."

Take the company's involvement in the building of Enron Field. In 1997, Brown & Root procured the contract to build Houston's $180 million baseball park by promising to complete the job for a maximum of $229.5 million -- a bid that Brown & Root's union competitors could not match. Still, labor officials expected to forge a project agreement with Brown & Root at union wages because the labor lobby had backed the stadium referendum that authorized the building of the park. The Harris County AFL-CIO Council hoped to get Brown & Root to hire apprentices and train a new generation of workers on the project. In addition, labor officials in Houston wanted Brown & Root to pay the prevailing wage -- a uniform wage set by labor -- for work on the new stadium. But Brown & Root rebuffed the unions and opted to use both union and non-union workers. The unions threatened to picket the project.

"They ended up dictating what the prevailing wage should be and they rejected our call on that," says Richard Shaw, the labor group's secretary-treasurer. In the end, 85 percent of the contractors and laborers hired to build Enron Field were union workers. But the 15 percent who weren't did not receive full benefits. And unions objected to the way the project was managed on the grounds that the company used an "open shop" with non-union workers.

"To me it's unconscionable to oppose training people on public-works projects," says Shaw. "If you're going to use public dollars, [the public] ought to get something out of it."

Labor officials argue that the public interest is better served when a multimillion-dollar public initiative, such as a baseball stadium, is built with union workers. At least with union workers, Shaw and others say, safety standards are maintained and new workers receive training. Van Hoy maintains that if union workers had been in place throughout the entire project, the quality of work would have been better (the stadium's retractable roof, for instance, occasionally fails to keep rain out), several hundred more union workers would have done the job (at union wages), and more people would have gotten trained.

"This says that Cheney has absolutely no respect for working people, their right to organize, their right to be represented," says Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic strategist. "This is a throwback to the worst kind of labor conditions, which is what you expect in Texas -- a right-to-work state."

More disturbing than the company's tangled history with labor, however, is Halliburton's use of mandatory individual-worker agreements that preclude employees from bringing suit in state or federal court. This means that a worker who faces age or racial discrimination at Halliburton cannot sue. The United States Supreme Court gave such agreements the green light in 1991. In a January 25 article in the New York Law Journal titled "Bypass Unions to Negotiate Individual Agreements to Arbitrate Statutory Discrimination Claims," Samuel Estreicher, a professor of labor law at New York University School of Law, identified Halliburton as a leader in this practice. Other companies that use such agreements include Philip Morris and International Paper.

In the abstract, such a provision may not seem like much. But consider the case of 32 African-Americans working for Halliburton at an oil refinery in Belle Chasse, Louisiana -- a case first reported by the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

Although company rules preclude the workers and their attorney, Reva Lupin, from discussing the case in detail, Charles Sanders, 31, a worker and informal spokesman for the group, did agree to tell his story. Belle Chasse is off the beaten path in the heart of the Louisiana bayou, 30 miles from New Orleans. At the refinery, laborers make $7.50 per hour. Workers in the machinist department make between $13.50 and $14.95 per hour. Supervisors and managers make more. Sanders says that during his three years at the company there has been only one African-American manager, despite the fact that African-Americans make up about one-third of the company's work force -- and that most African-Americans work as low-paid laborers.

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Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com.

The Talking Politics archive

Cheney's corporate past, continued

by Seth Gitell