IBEW Local 58 (Detroit) Pickets Archdiocese Project over failure

Unions picket St. John's project

BY TONY BRUSCATO, STAFF WRITER, PLYMOUTH NEWS

Nearly two dozen union plumbers and electrical workers Monday morning picketed outside St. Johns Golf & Conference Center at Five Mile and Sheldon roads in Plymouth Township, where an 118-room hotel is being constructed.

Union workers are dissatisfied with non-union companies that have been hired by the general contractor, Frank Rewold and Sons, Inc., of Rochester, Mich. Not so much because the non-union companies beat the union companies out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of work, but because they don't believe the non-union companies are paying union scale wages.

"They always preach on how people should be paid wages and pensions and health and insurance, and you get something like this and they don't," said Carlo Castiglione, business representative for Plumbers United Association Local 98. "That's got to change."

Castiglione and his counterpart, Gary Hellmer, business rep for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said nearly a dozen jobs are being affected.

"I don't feel we got a fair shake in the bidding process," said Hellmer. "Area standards are a concern."

Project manager Richard Scheck would only confirm the plumbers and electricians working on the hotel are non-union. He wouldn't elaborate on wages.

Although the hotel is being constructed on property owned by the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit, spokesman Richard Laskos said," The building is being built by a group of private investors. The Archdiocese of Detroit has no financial interest in the building."

tbruscato@oe.homecomm.net (734) 459-2700