The administrators of California High-Speed Rail implemented a Project Labor Agreement in 2012 (PLA) without any public discussion or vote. Supposedly the Project Labor Agreement would encourage the employment of disadvantaged workers in the Central Valley.

Now the California Policy Center has begun researching the performance of the Project Labor Agreement and all of the taxpayer-funded union-controlled programs supposedly intended to place disadvantaged residents in the construction trades.

So far the findings have shown that unions are not interested or capable of giving jobs to disadvantaged residents. A pre-apprenticeship program at the State Center Community College District graduated lots of people eager to get jobs, but few of them were able to enter a union apprenticeship program. See California High-Speed Rail Jobs: High Hopes, Harsh Reality.

No one should be surprised about this. Unions have used their political power to monopolize control of construction jobs for California High-Speed Rail. In fact, high-speed rail basically exists nowadays as a reward for campaign support from unions and a handful of big multi-national transportation infrastructure corporations allied with unions.