The Icon Company sued two powerful labor unions in federal court in Los Angeles in 2019, alleging an illegal scheme by the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters and Local 300 of the Laborers International Union of North America (LiUNA) to manipulate the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to block their Panorama Project in L.A. unless Icon caved to the union’s demands to use union labor to build it. You can read about it here.
Following a significant victory for ICON, this lawsuit is finally scheduled to go to trial after much back and forth in court! The deposition is expected to begin within the next two weeks.
Union leaders are scared of this coming to trial (their attempt to have it thrown out was just lost in court) because they are rightly concerned that it will reveal their years-long campaign of extortion and blackmail (also known as greenmail).
This lawsuit has far-reaching repercussions for the whole state of California since union greenmail is affecting billions of dollars in work and preventing the construction of tens of thousands of much-needed homes.
The San Francisco Standard and San Francisco Business Journal have published articles highlighting what this union extortion is doing to stop much-needed housing projects.