Turner Construction won the contract to design and build a new Duval County Courthouse because it guaranteed the company could do it for $224 million. When the company put out bids for 21 subcontractors to do the work, it weighted bids heavily in favor of those who quoted the best price. But it seems as though their frugality may have encouraged the hiring of illegal workers. 

On Monday, U.S. Border Patrol arrested four undocumented employees on their way to the courthouse construction site. Since September, a total of 19 employees from the courthouse job have been arrested for being in the U.S. illegally. Also Monday, the Florida Times Union reported that 100 courthouse construction employees provided the city with false information when it tried to collect additional documentation of U.S. citizenship, permanent resident status or the possession of work permits.

After the arrest of 15 illegal workers from concrete subcontractor United Forming in September, the city required that all 240 employees at the site reapply for city badges by filling out a new form documenting their status. But the discovery that almost a third of those workers gave false information indicates the problem continues. And not even the city’s threat to cancel Turner’s $350 million contract over the use of illegal workers has been an effective deterrent.

Jobs for Jacksonville, a coalition of area construction trades workers, asked the city in October to require contractors use E-Verify, an Internet-based employee verification system run by the U.S. government. Turner and United agreed use the system to check the status of new employees, but it wasn’t clear Monday if E-Verify had in fact been implemented.

The lure of cost cutting has troubled several Better Jacksonville Plan projects, including the Baseball Grounds and the Veterans Memorial Arena in 2002. According to John C. Parker, business manager of the Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association AFL-CIO, Local No. 435, undocumented workers tend not to complain about, or even know about safety standards, building code requirements and fair labor laws such as paying overtime. Unionized trades workers are educated about construction and labor laws, but the city didn’t want to contract with local labor unions to construct the courthouse. “We offered the city a project labor agreement that guaranteed local workers, who are legal, at a fair market rate, that didn’t discriminate against anybody, whether union or not, and the city flatly refused it,” says Parker.

(Pic of Courthouse site from downtownjacksonville.org)

— Susan Eastman

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 4:14 pm and is filed under City, city financial crisis, growth, legal matters, waste of money?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.