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remote regions and other circumstances 40 The City has built several public construction projects <br /> under the CWA in recent years. <br /> The debate over PLAs has gone under the radar in Washington State. Nevertheless, as the <br /> percentage of private construction workers covered by a union contract fell from 33.9 percent in <br /> 1983 to 25 percent in 2018,PLAs have become less justifiable.41 <br /> Evidence on PLAs <br /> The evidence on whether PLAs drive up construction costs has, until recently, been mostly <br /> anecdotal. The claims outlined above,fall into two categories:those that depend on the estimates <br /> by consultants that were made in the pre-bid stage of a project, with no attempt made to verify <br /> their cost-saving claims after the fact;or, two, those for which the cost analysis was restricted to <br /> only a few projects, as in the Sound Transit case. No "analysis" of that kind provides any <br /> quantitative evidence that PLAs increase or reduce construction costs. <br /> It is statistically possible to test whether PLAs raise construction costs by using the approach <br /> taken in our previous studies. However, we were unable to find enough Washington public <br /> school construction projects built under a PLA requirement-the method used in our previous <br /> studies-to get statistically significant results. Therefore, we had to turn to another method for <br /> the purpose of this study. <br /> In this study, we measure the effect of government-mandated PLAs on the level of competition <br /> in the bidding process. As discussed above,it is widely believed that PLAs discourage non-union <br /> contractors from bidding on public construction projects. We examined data on public <br /> 4°Seattle Washington—Municipal Code,Title 20—Public Works,Chapter 20.37.20—Director Powers, <br /> Paragraph B, <br /> https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal code?nodeld=TIT20PUWOIMPU SUBTITLE I <br /> IPUWO CH2O.37PRHI 20.37.05000WOAG. <br /> 41 Barry T.Hirsch and David A.Macpherson,"Union Membership and Coverage Database from the <br /> Current Population Survey:Note,"Industrial and Labor Relations Review,56 no.2(January 2003):349-54 <br /> (updated annually at unionstats.com). <br /> The Anticompetitive Effects of Project Labor Agreements on Public Construction in Washington State 15 <br />