Howzit Howard

Where are the cool building projects?

Shoring up Kailua Road, repaving a Hickam runway, and renovating a pilot's layover pad won awards Wednesday night at a banquet for builders, architects and developers at the Royal Hawaiian. BIA Hawaii -- it stands for Building Industry Association -- is the trade group for these people, and honored its own with its annual Renaissance Awards. I was privileged to emcee the festivities. These are some of the projects that won awards:

• Kailua Road Rockfall & Landslide Mitigation -- Earth Tech Inc. came up with eight different ways to shore up the hillside (the state chose a combination of two) solving the tricky problem of how to do the job without endangering workers or passing cars.
• Hickam Taxiway Resurfacing and Hot Cargo Pads -- Watts Constructors -- Denny Watts' outfit won two awards for these two projects, which involved using old concrete to make new aggregate, saving 500 truck visits, and building huge, heavy pavement pads in an area where the water table is only a few feet down.
• Latitudes by Gentry, Ewa -- Gentry Homes was one of several parties honored for greening up their projects -- in this case, with a 120-gallon solar water heater with automatic timer, recessed fluorescents, low flow commodes, and other features to make homes that are 30% beyond local code requirements.

This barely touches the surface of the awards but the rest of them are outlined in the free May issue of Hawaii Home & Remodeling.

Bernadette ' s report from Las Vegas

My wife has returned from a reunion of former Kunia pineapple workers. The reunion, like all Hawaii reunions, was held in Las Vegas. It's the law. No, it's not the law, but it's the practice, and indeed we can be more specific and say the practice is to stay in downtown Las Vegas rather than on the Strip. So many kama'aina do this that the California Hotel can no longer handle all the Hawaii crowd and it has spilled over to two other nearby hotels. Bernadette brought back some interesting observations, having not been to Vegas for a few years:

1. There is never any seating to simply watch people gamble; they want you to gamble, too.
2. If you find a Starbucks and sit quietly at the sidewalk, passersby treat you as a show, like monkeys at the zoo.
3. A lot of really fat mainlanders come to Vegas and ride around on motorized carts, though they can walk.
4. The cigarette haze in the older places with ordinary air circulation is enough to sicken even a smoker.
5. If you travel in a group, you don't do much, because it's like herding cats to gain consensus and mobilize to go anywhere.
6. Don't give a flight attendant a friendly warning that a family member is feeling queasy because the attendant will try to kick you off the plane by reporting the queasiness as a "serious illness."
7. Some Hawaii ex-pats who have lived in Vegas for a few years begin to lose their aloha and act like everybody else on the mainland.

How should a union behave?

Life was easier for labor unions in the first half of the 20th century when most of the major ones were created. Today, unions are trying to figure out whether, and to what extent, they should behave like talent agents, or even like businesses themselves. Labor-management relations were political in the old days, sometimes almost theological. This is perfectly understandable. Early union organizers were sometimes arrested and beaten. Sometimes hired goons roughed up the rank-and-file. Sometimes police were ordered to do it. There was polarization in those days. Labor was one class and management another. Managers were trained to hate unions in general and their shop stewards in particular. Unions returned the favor, taking a them-and-us attitude toward management which left little room to respect the good ones. Today, many unions act more like talent agents, working in a low-key and professional way to negotiate the best deals for their clients. Management takes a bean-counting view of things. Often the managers were promoted from within and are former shop stewards themselves. This happened long ago in broadcasting -- at the Mutual Broadcasting System I was the AFTRA shop steward before accepting promotion into management, working under another manager who had taken the same route in the supervisorial ranks. Later, at UPI, represented by the Wire Service Guild, it happened again. (That's why I have experience negotiating labor contracts from both sides of the table.) It changes the dynamic both of contract bargaining and conflict resolution when the people on opposite sides have worked side by side in the same unit. You can still have differences -- and sometimes different marching orders put you at cross purposes -- but you're no longer sworn enemies. Some current labor-management issues in Hawaii make me think of this. At the Pacific Beach Hotel, management has been meeting with employees. It says employees are telling it the union is bad for the hotel. The union says the work force is so frightened by management they dare not show up at the picket line. So the union, the ILWU (the longshore union has one of the strongest traditions of theological unionism, one of its pioneering members having been killed in the thuggish days of yore), has taken a page from the management playbook and is doing an end-run in the free market, enlisting Japan's biggest trade union association in blacklisting the property.  Management hasn't said much, though the lead manager did make a brief comment over the weekend and is to be commended for that, but it's beyond question that the hotel has repeatedly used the expedient of changing management contractors to make workers reapply for jobs they already do. A different situation can be seen at Aloha Airlines, where the profitable air cargo division is being sold to a company that already owns some unionized operations. The Air Line Pilots Association has taken an accusatory tone with Saltchuk Resources for not meeting with ALPA on Friday. Over the weekend, however, it came out that Saltchuck was meeting with a union, not ALPA but the IAM, which represents a lot more workers. Furthermore, source say they reached agreement, despite the fact that labor contracts don't usually carry to new owners in Chapter 7 asset sales. IAM achieved quietly what ALPA could not achieve noisily, but it did have two advantages: Saltchuk could probably find enough pilots without hiring anyone from Aloha, but it couldn't manage that with ground workers, and, secondly, it didn't want to, because the ground workers are the ones who dealt with customers and have such a great reputation with them. Still, it's probably possible this week for Saltchuk and ALPA to come to some kind of mutual accommodation. I don't know if that's possible with the Pacific Beach Hotel, where management's view of the union seems to harken back to the old days. I base that assumption on the fact that the hotel has repeatedly changed management contractors, and each time has forced all employees to reapply for their own jobs. It's legal. But it's also insulting. One difficulty in a labor dispute sitation -- we saw this at Turtle Bay in the bad old days -- is that the only employees who talk to you about the situation are the ones who are sympathetic to your own view of things. So labor and management both feel they own the hearts and minds and become more entrenched in their positions. It's human nature. But it's also unfortunate. But an able management should know the effect and not be deluded by sicophants.  

Expanding a little business

You've got a small family business and you've got interest from Japan or Korea in your products but you've never exported before. What to do? You've always done all the accounting and human resources paperwork yourself, but as the business grows it's becoming too much. What to do? Well, you might start by attending the Business Fair for Small Business Owners, which will be held this year at Chaminade. It's Saturday, 8:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. The Mayor's Office of Economic Development and the Hogan Entrepreneurial Program are cosponsoring it with the university, as are SCORE and First Hawaiian Bank. Speakers include Greg Kim from the Small Business Law Corps, Linn Garcia and Michael Holl on state and federal taxes, Naomi Masuno from First Hawaiian Bank -- she's the lady you saw promoting the festival this morning on "Sunrise" -- Alan Yee on accounting basics, Beverly Marica from Adecco on human resources, Dan Flood from SCORE on business plans, Kim Hite from SBA on financing, Chuck Steilen of HPU on sales and marketing, and Steve Craven from the Export Council on import-export information. For more information, contact Naomi Masuno at 487-0205.

What can kill Aloha now?

Aloha Airlines has taken off again. The air cargo jets began flying Thursday evening after a lot of different people all did the right thing.

1. Ground employees, working for free, kept the service ready to relaunch.
2. Pilots, their seniority issue unresolved, chose to, as one elegantly put it, fly now, argue later.
3. Saltchuk Resources agreed, after a phone call from Uncle Dan, to make one last attempt to reach a deal.
4. GMAC, the bankruptcy lender, which provoked the shutdown in the first place, agreed to turn the money tap back on.

There were others, too, including, but not limited to, the customers who brought food for the people working free, and the airport officials who facilitated the reissuance of security tags. The story isn't over yet. The sale hasn't been finalized. But so far so good.