Government Affairs

Background

“Salting” is a coercive tactic where unions send professionally trained organizers into merit shop workplaces under the guise of seeking employment. These “salts” often attempt to execute campaigns designed to either force unionization on employees or put nonunion companies out of business.

Once hired, salts often try to create a toxic work environment by misleading co-workers and deliberately increasing costs through various actions, including workplace sabotage and frivolous discrimination complaints with various agencies. These actions cost companies significant time, money and resources, and prevent them from hiring more employees, investing in equipment and securing more work to grow the company and provide additional jobs in the community.

Desired Outcome

ABC will continue to work with the House Education and Workforce Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to advance legislation, including the Start Applying Labor Transparency Act and the Truth in Employment Act, which promotes workplace transparency and counters the detrimental impacts of union salting.

The Start Applying Labor Transparency Act would amend the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 and clarify that labor organizations and their consultants must report when they engage in salting. This change would ensure workers have the transparency they deserve and a fair environment to determine what is best for their workplace.

The Truth in Employment Act would amend the National Labor Relations Act to make clear that an employer is not required to hire any person who seeks a job primarily to organize employees or put nonunion companies out of business—or both. In doing so, the bill would alleviate the legal pressures imposed on employers to hire individuals whose overriding purpose for seeking a job is to disrupt the workplace or otherwise inflict economic harm.

Background

With many of the beneficial tax policies under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act set to expire at the end of 2025, it is imperative that the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate preserve critical tax policies and ensure certainty for thousands of small businesses throughout the construction industry in the United States.

The One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act (H.R.1), contains many ABC-supported priorities that provide critical tax relief to contractors. This legislation would provide certainty to the more than 95% of all American businesses structured as S corporations, partnerships and sole proprietorships. These pass-through businesses employ 62% of the private sector workforce and form the economic backbone of virtually every community nationwide.

As the House and Senate advance their versions of the bill, ABC urges both chambers to include ABC-supported provisions below:

• Small Business Deduction: Provide the pass-through sector crucial relief via a permanent, boosted deduction for qualified business income. Locking in the higher deduction under Section 199A will prevent a significant tax hike in 2026and ensure that ABC members—most of whom are passthrough businesses—can reinvest in their companies, expand their workforce and take on new projects without fear of future tax hikes.
• Estate Tax Relief: Provide permanent estate tax relief at $15M per individual, preserving and protecting family businesses from destructive estate taxes. This provision allows contractors to pass on the businesses they built to the next generation.
• 100% Bonus Depreciation: Renew previously expired immediate expensing via 100% bonus depreciation. This is a powerful incentive for construction businesses to invest in new equipment and technologies.
• R&D Cost Expensing: Permanently allow taxpayers to immediately deduct domestic research or experimental expenditures.
• Expanded 529 Accounts for Skilled Trades Training: Expand 529 plans for all recognized postsecondary credentials as defined by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. This would support the next generation of craft professionals—ensuring more Americans can pursue rewarding careers in construction.
• Relief From Overregulation and Red Tape: From the inclusion of the ABC-supported REINS Act to reducing 1099 reporting burdens to improving Opportunity Zones, this bill cuts unnecessary red tape and unlocks new growth in communities that need it most.
• Expedited Environmental Reviews: Provide project sponsors a deadline of six months for completing an environmental assessment and 12 months for completing an environmental impact statement, along with protection from judicial and administrative reviews, in exchange for paying 125% of the estimated cost to prepare or supervise the preparation of an environmental review.

While H.R.1 phases out some of the IRA’s clean energy tax credits, ABC urges Congress to also repeal the IRA’s anti-competitive labor policies. ABC believes that the IRA’s bonus credit penalizes employers that believe in fair and open competition and limits opportunities for construction workers who choose not to join a union and instead participate in industry-recognized apprenticeships.

Desired Outcome

Maintaining pro-growth tax policies will be essential to ensuring the economy’s growth. ABC will continue to advocate for the beneficial tax proposals included in the TCJA that will spur economic growth and create jobs throughout the country.

Background:

The Clean Water Act prohibits negligent discharge of pollutants, including dredge and fill material, into “navigable waters,” defined in the Act as “waters of the United States.” The CWA authorizes draconian criminal and civil penalties for violations, including fines of many tens of thousands of dollars per day. While settled law establishes federal jurisdiction over physically navigable waters, uncertainty about the CWA’s implications for wetlands has persisted since its enactment. Sackett v. EPA, a May 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, has major significance in the context of federal agencies and courts’ various attempts to expand and contract the scope of WOTUS.

In the 2006 split decision Rapanos v. United States, a plurality of the Supreme Court found WOTUS describes relatively permanent waters with a continuous surface connection to navigable waters, and Justice Anthony Kennedy found waters with a “significant nexus” to navigable waters also covered. Under Justice Kennedy’s Rapanos opinion, the EPA applied an essentially limitless complex of highly technical variables to demonstrate, often on the basis of subsurface conditions, a significant nexus between navigable waters and areas subject to construction and other private activity. As codified by the Biden administration’s January 2023 WOTUS rule, the significant nexus standard sustained federal jurisdiction over any land that functions to drain water at some point, subjecting virtually the entire United States to CWA enforcement.

Sackett disposed of the significant nexus standard, finding that WOTUS does not describe waters lacking relative permanence or waters without a continuous surface connection to navigable waters. The scope of WOTUS articulated in Sackett is consistent with the Trump administration’s 2020 Navigable Waters Protection Rule, which codified the Rapanos plurality opinion by removing ephemeral or isolated waters from federal jurisdiction. The second Trump administration is currently soliciting stakeholder recommendations for implementation of the Sackett ruling, specifically to inform development of new standards for relative permanence and surface continuity. Pending a new rule, CWA administration proceeds on a fragmented case-by-case basis under a patchwork of field memoranda reflecting the second Trump administration’s partial recission of guidance implementing the Biden administration’s unlawful post-Sackett September 2023 conforming rule, which court decisions either enjoin or preserve in many states.

Desired Outcome:

ABC is a member of the Waters Advocacy Coalition, which seeks to restrain burdensome and unlawful assertion of federal jurisdiction over private land via expansive interpretations of WOTUS. ABC welcomes Sackett’s provision for a clear jurisdictional test that permanently excludes from WOTUS areas susceptible to ephemeral inundation that are not obviously connected to a navigable waterway.

The significant nexus standard exposed small businesses engaging in virtually any land disturbance activity to the potential for crushing penalties, including criminal prosecution, chilling investment in housing, infrastructure and other critical projects. As outlined in the Waters Advocacy Coalition’s May 2025 comments to the EPA and USACE, ABC supports a comprehensive, specific description of covered wet areas that eliminates subjective and expansive terms to the maximum extent practicable and facilitates efficient jurisdictional determinations by reference to the original regulatory text, rather than informal subregulatory material.

Background

At a time when the construction industry needs to attract an estimated 439,000 additional workers to meet the demand for labor in 2025 alone, attracting employees remains one of the industry’s greatest challenges. Even with growth in career technical education and apprenticeship programs, continued support and access to these programs is essential to equipping new and existing workers with durable and transferable skills to expand their opportunities to enter rewarding, lifelong careers.

ABC’s analysis of government data indicates that government-registered apprenticeship programs are struggling to meet the construction industry’s workforce needs, with just under 250,000 apprentice participants in fiscal year 2025 and approximately 40,000 graduates in FY 2024. This data suggests it would take nearly 11 years for all federal and state construction industry government-registered apprenticeship programs to educate the 439,000 workers that the construction industry needs to hire just in 2025.

Unfortunately, the complexity, paperwork burdens and compliance costs associated with GRAPs often deter small businesses from participating in such programs. In addition, the threat of burdensome regulations, such as the Biden administration’s National Apprenticeship System Enhancements proposed rule, magnify existing disincentives to participate in GRAPs. While the administration withdrew the proposed rule before leaving office, it would have reduced flexibility by replacing competency-based GRAPs with time-based GRAPs, eliminated state governments’ ability to approve apprenticeship programs for new occupations needed to keep up with the modern economy and incorporated dozens of expensive new recordkeeping and administrative requirements. Overall, this rule would have cost the regulated community more than $1.3 billion over the next 10 years, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s own flawed and lowballed regulatory cost analysis.

Further, ABC’s surveys on apprenticeship have found disturbing examples of state government regulators working in tandem with unions to enact polices that needlessly delay or even prohibit nonunion apprenticeship programs from getting approved and prevent contractors from winning contracts to build taxpayer-funded construction projects if they are not participants in union-affiliated GRAPs.

ABC sees the withdrawal of the Biden administration’s apprenticeship proposal as an opportunity for the Trump administration to build a stronger GRAP system for the construction industry that will prioritize developing the workforce needed to complete critical infrastructure projects across the nation.

Desired Outcome

ABC supports maximizing opportunities for hardworking Americans to enter the construction industry with the skills and resources they need. By supporting the expansion of the Pell Grant program to apply to workforce programs and advocating on behalf of industry recognized apprenticeship programs, ABC is paving the way for more workers to benefit from careers in the construction industry.

ABC and its 67 chapters continue to work toward meeting America’s infrastructure demands and upskilling the workforce by providing more than 450 GRAPs in over 20 construction industry trades, such as electrical, plumbing, carpentry, HVAC, welding and more. Notably, none of ABC’s chapter GRAPs are affiliated with unions. ABC supports providing access to all individuals interested in joining the industry, regardless of labor affiliation.

Background

On May 21, 2024, ABC joined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a coalition in business groups in filing a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division against the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Worker Walkaround Representative Designation Process final rule. Read the news release announcing the lawsuit.

Effective on May 31, 2024, the final rule allows employees to choose a third-party representative, such as an outside union representative or community organizer, to accompany an OSHA safety inspector during site inspections, regardless of whether the workplace is unionized or not.

Now, construction employees and employers could face serious safety concerns because the final rule has the potential to allow anyone on a jobsite. There simply is no business case for this final rule and no benefit during a compliance inspection.

By allowing outside union agents access to nonunion employers’ private property, OSHA is injecting itself into labor-management disputes and casting doubt on its status as a neutral enforcer of the law. This final rule negatively impacts the rights of employers while simultaneously ignoring the rights of the majority of employees who have not authorized a union to represent them. OSHA’s rule also poses unnecessary risk to the individual joining the inspection and others on the jobsite if the authorized person is not trained to safely walk a construction jobsite. The rule does not include any requirement that the authorized person be equipped or conduct themselves to the same standards as OSHA safety inspectors. Further, the final rule fails to answer who is legally responsible if the third party gets injured during the inspection or harms someone else.

On Nov. 13, 2023, ABC submitted comments urging the DOL to withdraw its Worker Walkaround Representative Designation Process proposed rule. ABC also signed on to comments submitted by the Coalition for Workplace Safety and Construction Industry Safety Coalition.

Desired Outcome

ABC opposes the final rule because it does nothing to promote workplace health and safety. OSHA can have a bigger impact on jobsite safety by fostering positive partnerships with employers and promoting safety practices that produce results.

Following the completion of the litigation regardless of which way the courts decide, the DOL should rescind the Biden-era Worker Walkaround final rule.