Steve Hilton

It's a bit like that private attorney general thing, where you get all these nuisance lawsuits.

70% of lawsuits under SECRA are filed to block housing.

Most of those lawsuits are filed by the unions.

The unions use them as leverage to get what they call project labor agreements, where they get deals and they negotiate.

two components of a project labor agreement are what they call skilled and trained workers and prevailing wage both of which sound very innocuous skilled and trained is a euphemism for union members only it's the closed shop which we banned in england with mrs thatcher back in the 80s that still exists in california it's amazing and prevailing wage and of course it's much more expensive

I was talking to someone in the Central Valley.

They're doing a housing development.

Carpet fitters.

You put the carpets in, you need to have union labor.

Mandatory there weren't any Union carpet fitters in anywhere nearby.

They had to bust them in From San Francisco put them up in hotel.

I mean just mad right prevailing wage sounds very nice This guy was telling me that he had a team of plumbers doing a job.

That was market rate 25 to 40 dollars an hour

The same people on a prevailing wage job, the other side of town, $95 to $120 an hour.

And for the same work, which actually, by the way, they spend three times as long doing the prevailing wage things.

They get more money.

So there's just incredible amounts of cost

inflation built into the system because for years no one's taken a look at it and it just goes on they pass these laws the unions run everything so to your point about when you say you have to increase spending no you have to get into all this like it should it's you know these we're spending money on apartment buildings that are four times what they should cost a public money so there's plenty of money there and also but it's going to cost a lot more to build penitentiaries steve

Well, they've shut four, and there's a fifth that's about to close, Gavin.

So I pledge to reverse that.