President Bush’s decision to suspend the Davis-Bacon prevailing wage law in parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida means construction workers in the battered region have suffered a double blow. First, many of them lost their homes and possessions in the hurricane. Now, they’ll be victimized by substandard wages and denied the chance to work their way back to their former standard of living.
Though many of today’s Republicans oppose Davis-Bacon, the measure was passed by a GOP-controlled Congress and signed into law on March 3, 1931, by President Herbert Hoover. If Bush and his friends in such construction firms as Halliburton didn’t like that part of their Republican legacy, they should have backed Colorado Rep. Marilyn Musgrave’s H.R. 2672, which would have eliminated the prevailing-wage rules. But they didn’t; Musgrave’s bill was defeated last year, much to our relief.
Bush is now using Hurricane Katrina as an excuse to trash more than seven decades of labor law, allowing Katrina contractors to hire employees at whatever wages the depressed local conditions might warrant. Of course, Bush’s proclamation suspending Davis-Bacon made no effort to ensure that that the savings that contractors will reap be passed on to the taxpayers.
It’s worth noting that today’s Davis-Bacon rules bear scant resemblance to those in the 1960s and ’70s that effectively imposed union-wage scales as the “prevailing wage” even in regions where most construction was done by non-union companies. During the Reagan administration, the U.S. Labor Department adopted more realistic rules based on what contractors in an area actually pay their employees. As the department’s website notes, “We first determine if more than 50 percent of the workers in a single classification are paid the union wage rate or the same wage rate. If so, then the union or same wage rate prevails for that classification. If not, a weighted average wage rate is calculated.” Given that organized labor now represents less than 8 percent of the private sector, that usually means union wages are averaged in with non-union earnings.
Pre-Katrina wage scales in New Orleans were pretty low to begin with. The prevailing hourly wage for a truck driver working on a levee is $9.04. Even skilled electricians pulled down just $14.30 an hour. Now, by misguided presidential fiat, they won’t even be guaranteed that.
