Local 24 officers and staff recently attended the Baltimore Metropolitan Central Labor Council’s annual C.O.P.E. dinner, held at Pimlico Race Course. This year’s event honored United States Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez.
Prior to serving at the national level, Perez was the Secretary of the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation from 2007 to 2009 Continue reading →
With ground officially broken on the Baltimore Horseshoe Casino, the project is entering its next phase of construction with Enterprise Electric Company leading the charge in utility installations.
It was announced that Enterprise, an IBEW Local 24 affiliated contractor, was awarded the electric and tele/data communications contract on the $442 million casino site in late June.
The casino will be located in downtown Baltimore near M&T Bank Stadium, a former project that saw Enterprise install all of the electricity, fire alarm system, and audio/visual and broadcast systems used within the entirety of the stadium. In fact, Enterprise has self-performed over one billion dollars of electric work in Baltimore over the company’s eighty years of existence.
Upon the project’s completion, the two-story casino will house 122,000 square feet of gaming space, including 2,500 video lottery terminals and 100 table games, making it the second largest casino in the state of Maryland. More importantly, the casino will create 1,700 employment positions for qualified residents in the Baltimore area.
Groundbreaking on Baltimore’s Horseshoe Casino began on May 29 and is projected to be completed in mid-2014.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is moving closer to recommending a 20-criteria safety and health checklist for companies bidding on federal construction contracts going forward.
To evaluate applicants, the newest version of the checklist will allow procurement officers to score each of the twenty items on a scale of one (“no compliance”) to five (“full compliance”) points.
Among the criteria are:
• the contractor’s OSHA recordable injury rate,
• whether the contractor has been cited for a willful violation,
• whether the contractor’s foremen and supervisors have completed a 30-hour OSHA course and whether other workers have completed a 10-hour OSHA course,
• whether the contractor will develop a site-specific safety program for the project,
• the safety performance of subcontractors,
• whether the contractor have provided evidence that on past projects workers were encouraged to report hazards, injuries, and near misses without fear or retaliation, and
• whether, in previous projects, the contractor and the subcontractors addressed “the needs of a multilingual workforce,” such as offering toolbox talks in Spanish.
“We want safety and health to be more of a consideration than it is,” said Pete Stafford, chairman of OSHA’s Advisory Committee on Construction Safety and Health, at the committee’s May 24 meeting.
A final version of the checklist could be available by early September. The ACCSH hopes the checklist will eventually find support from the White House and become a presidential directive to federal agencies, some of whom already take into account construction companies’ safety records.
The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) represents more than 1.3 million people among more than 400 local unions in the U.S. and Canada who work primarily in grocery and retail stores, and in the food processing and meat packing industries.
UFCW members are advocates in their industries and a collective voice for working people. By purchasing union-made goods and services made by companies that provide fair wages, safe working conditions and access to health care, you are helping protect and grow America’s middle class.
So next time you are in a retail store or supermarket, try to support the UFCW by buying some of these American- and union-made products: