We're a hiring hall union. Hiring hall unions allow us to dispatch people to go to work for employers. To get on the hiring list, you need to be a member of the union. Our members are volunteers. For our pension plans and our training funds, we have about $600 million invested in training across the country, and we spend about $300 million a year training people. The bill will require us to disclose that information, and it will give our competitors, the merit shop, access to that information. They will know how much money we have, what we spend it on, what we do. It will give them access to an intelligence bonanza, bar none, to be able to compete with us.
We run the hiring hall; we run the pension plan; we run the training, with the assistance of our employer-partners. Our employer-partners bid against the merit shop. Why should they have to disclose what is essentially their trade and business confidentiality to their competitors? No other business has to do that.