Talk about something up-to-date of which Pittsburgh should be proud! That would be the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers' spanking new training center on the South Side.

The IBEW's $4 million, 50,000-square-foot facility, opened in 2000, offers a five-year degree apprenticeship program in connection with the Community College of Allegheny County to train electrical workers needed for Pittsburgh's industrial and commercial future. Moreover, its program, with 350 apprentices, is one of two dozen such training opportunities offered by labor unions in the Pittsburgh area -- notably that of the carpenters on Neville Island, the sheet metal workers in Harmarville, the steamfitters on Saw Mill Run Boulevard and the painters in Carnegie. Funding arrangements are included in collective bargaining agreements, with both management and labor represented on the trust-fund committees.

Now you would think that this system of training workers for a variety of crafts useful to business and industry would be heralded far and wide by Pittsburgh promoters. But, no, instead we constantly hear grumblings about Pittsburgh's "poor labor climate." What the detractors really mean is the "U" word -- namely, labor unions.

At the same time, Pittsburgh promoters tout the region's "wonderful work ethic." Does anyone really believe that only nonunion workers exhibit a work ethic? In the face of the evidence across more than a century of the output of union workers in steel mills, coal mines and building trades? Come on!

Another achievement on the Pittsburgh labor scene we keep hiding under the bushel is the development of various Project Labor Agreements with 1) no-strike clauses and 2) arrangements for conflict resolution, whether between contractors and unions or between unions.

The impetus for these stabilization agreements came after the 1960s strife over the construction of Three Rivers Stadium and the employment of African Americans. An outstanding early PLA example came with the construction of the Pittsburgh International Airport, allowing it to open in 1992 on time and within budget.

Similar agreements have eased progress for the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, the Heinz and PNC stadiums, and the prospective North Shore casino and Penguins arena, not to mention the University of Pittsburgh's Biomedical Science Tower, the new Children's Hospital complex in Lawrenceville and the Gates Center at Carnegie Mellon University. PLAs also have been used in the private business sector, for such projects as the Heinz Co. plant expansions on the North Shore and the new PNC and Mellon Bank buildings Downtown.

These agreements have saved hundreds of millions of dollars while unions have helped provide entrepreneurs with an invaluable base of skilled workers. What's not to like and tout about that?

There's no denying that unions have often been in the wrong in the past. They've sometimes been corrupt, inflexible on work rules and slow to bring minorities and women into their ranks. And the union movement's anti-globalization stance today ignores the plight of millions of workers abroad when it should focus on pressuring foreign nations and companies to raise wages and benefits while protecting the environment, ensuring worker safety and combating child labor.

The erosion of Pittsburgh's economic base can be blamed in part on long steel strikes in the post-World War II period and on high wages, even though those wages lifted thousands of families into the middle class. But management, too, can be blamed for the mistakes that cost us Gulf Oil, Jones & Laughlin, much of Westinghouse and the headquarters of what used to be Mellon Financial Corp.

Fortunately, the power structure, as part of Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary celebration this year, is working with the annual Labor Day Parade organizers to recognize labor's role in Pittsburgh's history. Unfortunately, a chance was missed to help underwrite a realistic portrayal of the underside of that history, a staged version of Thomas Bell's esteemed novel, "Out of This Furnace," by a small theater company, Unseam'd Shakespeare. While performances were sold out, the company lost $22,000 for this portrayal of several generations of a Slovak steel family in Braddock, highlighting the long hours, family-decimating mill accidents and other discomforts of the turn-of-the-century decades when unions were weak.

Even WQED's Pittsburgh magazine, in a long compilation of Pittsburgh events over the past 250 years, mentioned only two remotely connected to labor: an 1802 Pittsburgh Almanack list of industrial plants and the 1946 "largest single walkout in the nation's history," involving 800,000 United Steel Workers. Nary a mention of the founding conventions -- all in Pittsburgh -- of the American Federation of Labor, 1881; the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, precursor of the United Steel Workers union, 1936; and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1938. Not even a note about the bloody 1877 railroad strike and the 1892 Homestead battle between workers and Pinkerton strike-breakers.

Summing up: Our city is doing a good job of overcoming its "Smoky City" image and in telling the world about it. Isn't it high time that it do the same concerning "the labor climate" tag?