Trade unions can now go all-in to meet labor demand for Shell's cracker project

For Jim Cassidy, business manager of Aliquippa-based International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Allied Workers, a difficult guessing game is over.

This year, Cassidy has delayed seeking applications for his union's apprenticeship program because he wasn’t sure how big a class to offer without a final public decision from Royal Dutch Shell on whether the company was going forward with building its multibillion-dollar ethane cracker plant in Potter Township, Beaver County.

Now, with Shell’s final announcement Tuesday and the need for skilled workers to provide industrial insulation for the cracker plant's piping a certainty, Cassidy can ramp up his union’s apprenticeship program.

“You always knew in the back of your head that it would go,” he said of Shell’s cracker plan. “But without that commitment, you just can’t bring people in and train them and not have a job for them.”

Cassidy’s union, which recently opened a new training facility, is one of many that have been eagerly awaiting Shell’s decision.

The project is expected to need more than 6,000 construction workers at its peak, and it will rank among the biggest projects the region has seen in generations.

“We’ve been waiting for this decision for the last four years,” said Jason Fincke, executive director of the Builders Guild of Western Pennsylvania Inc., a union-management collaborative organization representing 17 union trades and 11 contractor organizations in the region. “It’s always nice to see the ‘t’s finally get crossed and the ‘i’s get dotted.”

The Steamfitters Local 449 expects the cracker project will need up to 1,700 trained steamfitters for a union with a total membership of only about 1,700.

Calling it “a great day for the steamfitters and for the building trade unions of Pittsburgh,” Ken Broadbent, the business manager for the union, noted both the employment need for his membership, which is facing 18 percent unemployment right now, as well as the major commitment Local 447 has made to prepare for the cracker’s job demands.

He said Local 447 has ramped up its apprentice program to take on 70 percent more students than it usually does at the same time that it has invested more than $18 million in a 75,000-square-foot training facility expected to open next year in Jackson Township, Butler County.

“We’ve always been proactive in bringing apprentices in and building a new school,” Broadbent said. “It’s good now that it’s announced that our vision of moving ahead and doing things in advance is going to pay off.”

Now, the trade unions will shift to a new challenge Fincke expects to last five or ten years in which construction jobs will be so plentiful that there’s concern the region will need to bring in people from outside to meet the demand.

After 30 years in the business, Cassidy could only compare the scale of the cracker project for his union to the construction of the Shippingport nuclear plant decades ago.

When asked if the cracker project would be the biggest job his union has experienced, Cassidy said, "100 percent."

Source: The Pittsburgh Business Journal