We were having coffee at Hy-Vee. I’ve told him about the song with the refrain, “Nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb.” But Elmer doesn’t like those “sissy stir sticks.”

What he does like are big sweet rolls. What I like are his insights.

We chatted about Iraq and the Hawkeyes, he went for refills, and abruptly changed the subject when he returned. “Hey, Nick, you used to be on the school board. What’s this talk about a P-A-L?”

“Do you mean the Big Brothers Big Sisters program?” I asked.

“No. It has something to do with the school bond issue and the new schools.”

“Oh, you mean the PLA.”

“Yeah. PLA, PAL, whatever.”

“It stands for Project Labor Agreement,” I said.

“OK, what’s that?”

“It’s just an agreement between the school board, contractors and workers. It  only covers one elementary school. It would mean that all the workers on that job get the same pay, union and non-union alike,” I explained.

“So that’s why the unions are fighting it, right?” Elmer asked, taking a big bite of sweet roll.

“No, the unions are the ones that proposed it.”

Elmer choked momentarily on the sweet roll, finally swallowed, and exclaimed, “They what?”

He calmed down, sipped his coffee and continued, “So if the unions are for this who on earth would oppose it? Iowa’s wages are already 43rd in the nation. You mean there’s someone around here who wants to drive them even lower?”

“Apparently so,” I said. “A PLA is something new for the school district. They’re not sure how it would work.”

“New?” he exclaimed. “They’ve been doing it for years.”

“No, this really is a new idea, Elmer. They’ve never done it before.”

“Now let me get this straight,” he said. “A PLA lets non-union contractors bid on the job, requires they hire through a union hall, but says they can use their former non-union workers. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“It just says the non-union workers on one project will get paid something closer to a union wage. The non-union workers don’t have to join a union and pay dues. And yet they get all the benefits the union has fought for?”

I nodded, without knowing where he was going with this.

“Well now you just tell me, Nick, how is that any different from what the school district’s been doing with teachers for years?”

“Teachers? What do you mean?”

“You know my sister, Carol? She used to be a teacher. It would drive her nuts.”

“What would?” I asked.

“The Project Labor Agreement for hiring teachers. She was a dues-paying member of the teachers’ union. The ICEA I think she called it.”

I interrupted, “That’s the Iowa City Education Association. Teachers don’t like to call it a union.”

“Well, what else would you call it? It’s an organization of workers. It negotiates wages and benefits with management. Sounds like a union to me.”

“OK, if you want to put it that way. But how’s that like a PLA?”

“Teachers are hired through a central office, union and non-union alike. And the non-union teachers get the same deal as ICEA members, but don’t have to pay dues. They don’t have to live on what they’d get if each of them had to negotiate her own contract. Isn’t that what you said a PLA was?”

Elmer had done it again.

“So I just don’t see what the problem is,” he concluded. “It seems to me what the district thinks works just fine for teachers ought not be too much of a stretch for its trades people.”

The hot coffee may have put calluses on Elmer’s thumb, but there sure aren’t any above his neck.
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Nicholas Johnson is a former Iowa City school board member and FCC commissioner who teaches at the University of Iowa College of Law.