Given scant moments to decide, many workers would opt to take the pay.

I have a nagging feeling that I’ve seen a similar story locally. After some googling, it turns out to be Romney, not Trump.

“Several miners at Murray Energy’s Century coal mine in Beallsville, Ohio, contacted a nearby morning talk radio host, David Blomquist, over the last two weeks to say that they were forced to attend an Aug. 14 rally for Romney at the mine. Murray closed the mine the day of the rally, saying it was necessary for security and safety, then docked miners the day’s pay. Asked by WWVA radio’s Blomquist about the allegations on Monday’s show, Murray chief operating officer Robert Moore said: “Attendance was mandatory but no one was forced to attend the event.”

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-xpm-2012-aug-29-la-pn-miners-romney-rally-20120829-story.html

which honestly flabbergasted me.

Chump had nothing - zero - to do with this project. Except he showed up last week to collect the free praise for it. Most likely if you dig through Chump's tweets from around 2014 he probably criticized Obama while the project got off the ground.

First, these weren't plant workers, they were construction workers working at the plant. Most union construction workers don't get paid time off. No vacation time, sick time, or paid holidays. That's all negotiated into their hourly rate. If one doesn't go to work, for whatever reason, they don't get paid.

The contractor was doing their workers a favor by letting them know that there wouldn't be a problem if they didn't show up that day. If it had been me, I would have appreciated the heads up.

There WAS no work to be done there, that day. You could show up, but couldn't go to work. Had to go celebrate shitler's glorious economic vision and infrastructure plan (that he didn't get around to making yet, coz 'it's so easy to do.') Or lose a day's pay.

Most of those people came out of union halls to work on that site, pretty much no contractor is big enough to have the hundreds of trade members, that this contract takes to build the plant, as steady employees on the company books.

In the past, a contractor called me out to a tunnel job, then after I was there for a week, informed me by phone that there was no work at the site, told me 'don't show up'. Told me sit at home with no money coming in, and come back in 2 days.

I told the company jagoff on the phone, ''Oh, O.K. See you then." Then went back down the hall and signed the book to go elsewhere. Let him figure out I wasn't coming back. Told the hall "I didn't quit, they said there's no work." Which just let them know their contractor was an asshole, and they could read between the lines what my advice was for them to do as union officials.

That kind of action wouldn't work with 500 union members going down the hall. Their fear about not being able to provide for their families kept them from walking away from this big project and taking their chances on signing the referral book.

Labor did jack up the big pipe mill project in Brackenridge in 2013, when a contractor was behaving the same way as the general contractor on this cracker plant, it almost put a stake into that contractor's heart. I was proud to be involved in that.