MADISON, Wis. — Welders, bricklayers and other construction workers under the U.S. government’s $787 billion stimulus law would earn significantly higher wages in some areas than crews on private, non-stimulus projects.
Wage rules in the law are a potential bonus to workers’ wallets, but contractors say the rules will increase their costs and reduce the number of projects that can be funded.
Tucked within the 407-page law is a requirement that laborers and mechanics employed on government stimulus projects be paid “prevailing wages,” which is defined as the salary and fringe benefits for corresponding work on similar projects in the area.
The prevailing wage is usually on par with union wages and is higher than the average wages for the same category of employees in the same county.
For bricklayers in Madison, for example, the “prevailing wage” is $30.61 per hour, but the average bricklayer there earns $25.77 per hour, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Working 40 hours per week over one year, a bricklayer under the prevailing wage would earn $10,000 more. The prevailing wage for cement workers is $29.78 per hour in Madison, compared with the average cement worker wages there of $20.80 per hour — an annual difference of $18,678.
Major U.S. government construction projects have required contractors to pay prevailing wages since 1931, but the Labor Department has acknowledged that the stimulus law will apply the wage standard to certain projects that previously weren’t covered. It plans to release new instructions but hasn’t said when that might happen.
“The point of the stimulus was to turn our economy around by creating jobs,” said Jacob Hay, a spokesman for the Laborers International Union of North America, the construction workers union. “That will only happen if the jobs created are good jobs with fair wages that spread paychecks throughout local communities.”
Another trade group, the National Association of Homebuilders, said the rules will jack up costs, reducing the number of homes that will benefit from $5 billion in weatherization upgrades.
