[quickthrowman]

It depends entirely on where you live. My city has its own asphalt batch plant and they spend a few weeks every late winter/early spring repairing potholes.

Also, union labor is not mandatory for public work, but the prevailing wage scales that contractors are required to pay their workers do line up pretty closely to the actual union wages. It’s a good thing that people get paid a living wage, in my opinion. There are a lot of facilities that require union labor for certain trades due to the risk involved: mechanical, electrical, and plumbing for the most part.

[observationist]

It's awesome when unions serve the function intended. It's not awesome when there's mandatory contracts, 5 men standing around while a 6th holds a bucket, a 7th a shovel, an 8th a painbrush, while the 9th is driving a steamroller, etc. and they use cheap, inappropriate "repairs" that degrade on a predictable rolling 2 year basis. Noble institutions can be as corruptible as governments and private businesses and so forth, all it takes is one person willing to bend, a little, and poof, there's a tidy little predictable sinecure for a decade, with one or more middleman doing the subcontracting out to a union shop, or w/e. Peoples' capacity for grift and graft is endless.