These days, Mitt Romney can hardly find enough hours in the day to bash unions enough. But as the video above shows, it was a different story in 2002, when he was
thanking the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for making a 500-foot mountainside light sculpture of the Olympic rings possible:
We thought it was going to take three weekends with 20 people. Instead it took 20 weekends with several hundred people. And the work was done by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. They worked up there, they put on the snow shoes, they treaded up there to help us.
Romney's reference to snow shoes gives a small hint of the project's challenges—the workers involved had to be trained in
avalanche duty.
The IBEW's work on the rings was not the only way a union made the success of the Salt Lake City Olympics possible. Before the Olympics started, a stretch of highway in the Salt Lake Valley had to be reconstructed. That work was completed ahead of schedule under a Project Labor Agreement involving six unions as well as nonunion contractors and ensuring that most of the workers involved were hired locally. The American Society of Civil Engineers named the project the top civil engineering achievement of the year.
Project Labor Agreements, by the way, are one of the things Romney told the anti-union Associated Builders and Contractors he'd "curb" as "giving union bosses an unfair advantage" if he's elected president. But if that stretch of highway hadn't been completed on time, and the Salt Lake City Olympics had been a disaster at which athletes, media, and audience spent all their time stuck in traffic, would Mitt Romney have that important entry on his resume to make him a viable candidate for Massachusetts governor then and president now?