Arlington’s state legislators are calling on school officials to provide more labor protections for workers building the multimillion-dollar Arlington Career Center.
Sens. Adam Ebbin and Barbara Favola, along with Delegates Patrick Hope, Alfonso Lopez and Adele McClure, sent a letter to the Arlington School Board last month requesting a prevailing wage requirement. This would require workers to receive wages comparable to market rates when constructing the roughly $180 million project at 816 S. Walter Reed Drive.
“Studies over many years show that prevailing wage requirements have a negligible impact on project costs, and our experience in the Commonwealth has borne that out,” the legislators, who are all Democrats, wrote. “While costs do not rise, safety and equity do improve.”
Since 2021, Arlington County has mandated that county construction projects of over $250,000 pay workers wages comparable to market rates. It was among the first counties in Virginia to adopt such a resolution.
But that requirement doesn’t extend to Arlington Public Schools projects.
“APS cannot include a prevailing wage requirement because we don’t have a School Board resolution authorizing us to do so,” school system spokesperson Frank Bellavia told ARLnow.
Several local labor unions sent a letter to the School Board last month demanding that officials rescind and revise the Career Center’s current request for proposals.
“It is disturbing that the School Board decided to take a low-bid, low-road approach to building the Career Center, which would not only sacrifice quality, safety, and equity, but would inevitably invite in the underground economy that is prevalent in our region,” wrote representatives from the Northern Virginia Labor Federation, the Arlington Education Association and other labor groups.
Virginia Diamond, president of the NoVa Labor Federation, told ARLnow that she hoped the new building — which will offer vocational education for many different trades, among other programs — would be “a showcase” of local workers’ abilities. She said she was “surprised” to find out the School Board had not approved stronger labor protections.
Diamond now fears that the project will simply go to the lowest bidder which, she says, may cut corners in ways that harm workers.
“It’s just a very poor judgment on the part of the School Board, to think that they’re somehow squeezing more money out of the workforce,” Diamond said.
The Board has not yet approved a contractor for the Career Center, and current bidding process does not close until next Thursday, April 11. Adopting a prevailing wage resolution would likely cause delays in this and other construction projects, Bellavia said, but he did not say how extensive they would be.
The state legislators argued that prevailing wages help prevent exploitative practices such as wage theft, especially among immigrant communities.
“The new Career Center can be a source of pride to our community, but only if it is done right, with an equity lens and opportunities for apprenticeships and good jobs for our residents,” they wrote.