KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The Greater Kansas City Building Trades & Construction Council, a voluntary council of over a dozen local unions representing tens of thousands of unionized workers in the Kansas City-metro, has been working behind the scenes for months, lobbying and providing education to the Board of Commissioners at Port KC, to make two policy changes that would result in a better deal for local workers and taxpayers.
Port KC has become one of the largest players in incentivized development in Kansas City, Mo., but does not require that the contractors or subcontractors on its projects pay their workers prevailing wage or participate in registered apprenticeship programs.
Port KC is an independent governmental agency created by the State of Missouri, but governed by a seven member Board of Commissioners appointed by Kansas City’s mayor. On its website, the agency says it “share[s] the goals of Kansas City and the State of Missouri.”
Despite saying that, almost every project that receives taxpayer-subsidized incentives from Kansas City or the state of Missouri come with these requirements, with the notable exception of Port KC who could simply opt in and adopt policies to follow prevailing wage, like St. Louis’ port has.
“The Greater Kansas City Building & Construction Trades Council believes that Kansas City, and its workers, deserve certain basic promises: fair and equitable wages for local workers, safe workplaces, and that taxpayer subsidized projects contribute to the development of a skilled local workforce,” said Ralph Oropeza, business manager of the Building Trades.
Oropeza, the son of immigrants himself and a first-generation union member, credits his apprenticeship with IBEW Local 124 for changing his life.
The Port KC board is made up of Denvoir Griffin, Councilman Wes Rogers, Morgan Said, Jack Steadman, Claire Terrebonne, Kansas City Public Schools Boardmember Matthew Oates, and Councilman Kevin O’Neill.
The Building Trades is now seeking to have the Board of Commissioners approve new language during the upcoming Port KC meeting on Jan. 26, 2026 that would not only require contractors and subcontractors doing work on Port KC projects to pay prevailing wage and participate in registered apprenticeships, but also require the agency to either hire a third party or use internal resources to monitor and enforce these rule changes.
Port KC has come under significant recent heat from not only unions seeking to protect local workers, but also from members of the community who disagree with its broad power and minimal oversight. A recent proposal regarding a $1.4 billion bond plan for the Country Club Plaza received so much testimony against it that the Board of Commissioners was forced to table the measure.
Local unions have become increasingly frustrated as project after project has come through Port KC, worth well over a billion dollars in work, has been handed to out-of-state contractors who bring in workers from low-wage southern states.
“What we are allowing Port KC to do is to take Kansas City taxpayer dollars and incentive other state’s workers and workforce instead of investing those tax dollars in Kansas City’s workforce development,” said Mike Talboy, political director for the Greater Kansas City Building Trades & Construction Council. “Kansas City is not just a national leader in construction sciences, we are a world leader! Why in the hell would we spend our Kansas City taxpayer dollars to subsidize other states’ workforce development? Taxpayers should be furious about how their tax dollars are being siphoned off to other states.”
Benefits and History of Prevailing Wage
Anne Marie Brady, the Workers Rights and Equity research director at Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) Worker Institute, and Russell Weaver, Economic Geographer, ILR Buffalo Co-Lab, have written extensively about the impacts of prevailing wage and registered apprenticeship programs.
According to Cornell, “research has shown that compared to states with strong prevailing wage policies, states with weak or no prevailing wage laws are more likely to experience displacement of local workers by migratory, low-wage, exploited workers who were forced to put up with significant health and safety violations while on the job.
“When local workers and companies are employed, researchers found that more project funds remain circulating in the local economy. Prevailing wage laws provide important pathways into the middle class for construction workers by keeping industry wages high.
“Prevailing wage laws encourage skilled workers to enter the construction industry and incentivize firms to train workers, boosting productivity and lowering worker injury rates. Combined, these benefits promote overall stability on a job site (i.e., low turnover rates), which helps reduce total project costs.”
Prevailing wage and registered apprenticeship requirements are fairly standard in most major metros across America, particular in states with a strong union presence. St. Louis’ port authority recently adopted a more stringent version of the language than what Kansas City unions are asking for.
While many Americans are familiar with the concept of a minimum wage, they may not know what prevailing wage is unless they are familiar with the construction industry.
In America, construction projects that are funded through public monies, like taxes or through certain incentives, go through a bidding process where procurement agents are generally required to select the lowest bidder.
This leads to a unique problem. Contractors will do whatever it takes to make sure they have the lowest, winning bid, including reducing wages or benefits, eliminating safety rules, or skipping out on apprenticeship programs intended to train the next generation of skilled construction workers.
Further complicating things, out-of-state contractors, some from areas where wages are significantly lower than they are where a project is being bid, will enter into a market and undercut the wages and standards negotiated by a local workforce in an aggressive race to the bottom.
As a reaction to this problem, starting in then-progressive Kansas in 1891, states passed prevailing wage laws that required contractors who bid on work to not pay their workers less than the most prevalent wages and benefits that were already agreed upon by the local workers engaging in similar work on similar types of projects.
Local construction unions abide by strict rules for their apprenticeship programs. Women, Hispanic workers, and workers of color have higher participation and, importantly, completion rates in union-based registered apprenticeship programs compared with nonunion programs.
These programs, which are in increasingly high demand, are paid for via a percentage of each hour of work performed by the current union members. When non-union and non-local contractors win bids to perform work, these apprenticeship programs cannot afford to take on new local apprentices. This reduces the long-term workforce development opportunities available to future local workers.
Notable for a city like Kansas City, where the rate of people living in poverty is four percent higher than the national rate, 14.6% compared to 10.6%, well-paid construction workers are also significantly less likely to draw on essential public benefits, such as SNAP and Medicaid, to meet basic economic needs. A core component of that is prevailing wage laws, which are proven to reduce economic inequality by reducing wage gaps between the top and the bottom earners in an economy that is increasingly stacked against working-people.
Unions Fight Poverty Through Pro-Community policy
The fight at Port KC, in a city that is supposedly union-friendly, is reflective of a broader problem in America. Do we believe that the forces that create and shape economic inequality are within our control? Do we believe that local taxpayer dollars should be spent towards development that does not create opportunity for local workers? Should contractors be allowed to skip out on participating in apprenticeship programs to maximize profit, stealing from the future of Kansas City’s workforce?
These policy decisions are not out of our control. Social and economic policy choices shape economic disparities. Importantly, key social and economic policy choices made can be traced, directly or indirectly, to changes in the balance of power.
When workers are in unions, they wield significantly more power.
In 2021, Tom VanHeuvelen of the University of Minnesota and David Brady of the University of California-Riverside presented their study on the connection between poverty and unionization in America across 40 years. Unsurprisingly, they found that households in which there was at least one union member had an average poverty rate of 5.9%, compared with 18.9% for nonunion households.
Cornell’s Brady and Weaver argue that “countervailing power must be applied if we are to reduce economic inequality. A good example of countervailing power is our choice to apply important labor market policies, such as prevailing wage laws, to influence the distribution of wages in the construction industry. Prevailing wage laws are an important way to realign the balance of power between capital and labor, thus altering the distribution of wages toward a fairer world.”
Tristin Amezcua-Hogan is the Editor of The Labor Beacon and a member of LIUNA Local 264. Tristin also serves as the Director of Communications for the Greater Kansas City AFL-CIO and the Chair of the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance.
Tristin grew up as the son of a UA Local 669 member in Tecumseh, KS and the great-nephew of George C. Amis, longtime leader of the United Rubberworkers (now USW Local 307) in Kansas. Growing up in rural Kansas as the child of teen parents, Tristin quickly came to appreciate the life-changing benefit of a union job.
Tristin and his partner, Rebeca Amezcua-Hogan, are residents of the Westside, Kansas City, MO's historic Mexican neighborhood. They are proud members of Kansas City's New Reform Temple.
