Don't Dis LEED Homes
The author of "Building New Isn't Building Green" (May 28, 2009) rants about Frank Geary's mess at MIT, and slides that into a dismissal of new design and construction as tinkering with a bad model. He then condemns the redevelopment of Village Hill, the old state hospital property in Northampton, denigrating the new Wright Builders' LEED-certified homes.
Hold on. Not all buildings are successful. Those in history which were not well built or suitable have long since been torn down or fallen down. The gems will remain, among them Geary's museum in Spain and I. M. Pei's redesign of the Louvre in Paris. Old Main at the State Hospital took 1.2 million gallons of oil in its last year to keep it unfrozen. It was studied to death and had no commercial future.
Wright Builders' Morningside homes at Village Hill have achieved LEED Silver Certification—not trivial in that this translates into a safer, healthier, longer-lived home that costs 50 percent less than a code-compliant home to operate, and 70 percent less than typical older homes. Northampton can be proud of the state's first LEED- certified neighborhood! As for workmanship, we have in the Valley remarkable trades- and craftspeople capable of building virtually anything that can be drawn by human beings.
Jonathan A. Wright
President, Wright Builders, Inc.
Nonprofits Bust Unions, Too
Kudos to the Advocate and Maureen Turner for covering "No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing" by Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University. The report is filled with statistics, facts and anecdotal evidence of employer harassment and intimidation aimed at preventing workers from exercising their rights to organize and join a union as supposedly guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
While for-profit corporations engage in these underhanded and often illegal tactics, the prevalence of those practices among many nonprofits in the Commonwealth should be of concern. UAW 2322 consists of many low-paid human service workers at area nonprofits and most of those agencies employ lawyers at great expense to fight our members' rights under the NLRA. One daycare facility spent $90,000 last year employing a lawyer to try to avoid its obligations to bargain with our members.
It's been said you don't need a lawyer to comply with labor law, only to evade it. The vast majority of funding [for nonprofits] comes from the taxpayers of the Commonwealth to provide services to the citizens of the Commonwealth. It should not be used to enrich antiunion lawyers and help nonprofit companies avoid their obligations. These are all more reasons that we need the Employee Free Choice Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama, so workers who want to join a union can do so without interference or coercion from their employers.
Ronald Rene Patenaude
President, UAW Local 2322
