Opinion: Writers offered bogus info for ‘answers’ to housing crisis (CA)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

By ROBBIE HUNTER |
PUBLISHED: July 24, 2017 at 11:07 am
UPDATED: July 25, 2017 at 4:27 am

Too bad that John Gamboa and Herman Gallegos didn’t dig a little deeper before they did the bidding of greedy developer/speculators in their July 7 column on California’s housing crisis.

If they would have looked around in their own back yard in the Bay Area, they would have found some real research instead of having to regurgitate the misleading information that the California Center for Jobs & The Economy spoon-fed to them as a “study.”

A study it wasn’t. Instead, the center’s report cherry-picked a few numbers out of some tired old statistical abstractions to trash the idea of paying decent, middle-class wages to construction workers.
If Gamboa and Gallegos wanted real information, they should have checked with the Mountain View City Council, which in 2013 asked its staff to look into a real-world prevailing wage project. The city’s analysis determined that the use of the prevailing wage added 10 percent to the cost of a taxpayer-subsidized, 51-unit Franklin Street Family Apartments complex.

Mountain View’s staff report relied on numbers that came straight from the developer. Gamboa and Gallegos, on the other hand, lifted some of the most CCJE’s most ridiculous readings of the prevailing wage’s impact to predict outlandish rises in housing prices, rents and poverty. They got it wrong.

The bottom line on the prevailing wage is that the higher productivity of a highly-skilled and trained work force keeps added labor costs manageable – about 4 percent, according to the research of SmartCitiesPrevail.org. And that’s before you add in the social cost savings when construction workers and their families don’t have to obtain food stamps or MediCal to survive.

(Read More)

Democratic leaders: Prevailing wage is good for Delaware (DE)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

Senators David McBride, Margaret Rose Henry and Nicole Poore
Published 2:07 p.m. ET July 21, 2017
Updated 2:33 p.m. ET July 21, 2017

The 2017 budget debate is behind us, and plenty of page space in this publication and others has been committed to its finer details. We’re perplexed, though, by how much of the Republican dialogue continues to be dominated by an issue completely peripheral to the budget: the prevailing wage paid to blue-collar workers on public works projects.

Partisan misinformation has clouded the truth surrounding both the budget and the prevailing wage. We believe that the public deserves a discussion that cuts through political spin and cocktail napkin math and offers a straightforward inventory of the facts.

Prevailing wage laws ensure fairness in government contracts by basing laborers’ total compensation on a survey of similar workers in their area, just as anyone would expect wages commensurate with their skills, occupation, and cost of living.

You may have heard some of the following myths:

Myth: The prevailing wage is a budget issue that affects the $354 million deficit closed by the General Assembly earlier this month.

Fact: Public works projects are funded almost entirely by the capital budget, or “bond bill,” a completely separate balance sheet. Our operating deficit was caused by a unique combination of factors: growing public school enrollment, special education costs, national health care prices, and a tax portfolio that works more like a scratch-off ticket than a speedometer for our economy. Our colleagues across the aisle who sit on the budget-writing Joint Finance Committee are perfectly aware of that fact.

Myth: Reducing or repealing the prevailing wage would lower public construction costs by as much as 24 percent.

Fact: Multiple studies and real-world examples show that this is simply untrue. States that slash public works wages rarely realize the cost savings that are promised in campaign years, while middle class wages tumble and the economy suffers. That actually does hurt the state’s bottom line.

(Read More)

Wilmington-Based Electrical Company Cited $100K+ (DE)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

The AG’s Office zeroed in on the company, which dissolved in 2016.

 

By Mike Carraggi (Patch National Staff)
Updated August 9, 2017 12:31 am ET

WILMINGTON, MA – A Wilmington-based electrical company was cited more than $100,000 in restitution and penalties for not properly paying employees working to repair streetlights in Worcester, Attorney General Maura Healey announced today. …

Wilmington Wiring Corporation and owner John Garrett had three civil citations issued against it for failure to pay the prevailing wage, failure to furnish payroll records, and failure to furnish certified payroll records to the AG’s Office.

“Prevailing wage laws ensure workers are paid a real, living wage, and level the playing field for companies that play by the rules,” said Healey. “Workers, honest employers, and taxpayers lose when companies fail to follow wage and hour laws.”

WWC was based in Wilmington until it dissolved in May 2016. The AG’s Office began investigating the company in January of that year after an employee filed a complaint alleging he was not paid the prevailing wage rate for five years of work on a public project repairing streetlights in Worcester, the AG’s Office said. An investigation revealed six employees were not paid proper prevailing wage for the public works project; only WWC union employees were. WWC also then ignored the AG’s Fair Labor Divison’s payroll demands, the AG’s Office said.

(Read More)

3d_money_construction_dreamstime_xxl_21903206

Are Georgia firms cheating 1,000s of workers out of benefits, health care? (GA)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

By Jon Greenberg on Thursday, August 10th, 2017 at 2:51 p.m.

With health care policy in limbo in Washington, the politicians who would like to be Georgia’s next governor are staking out their own policy outlines. Democratic State Rep. Stacey Evans favors expanding Medicaid, but said the state could take other action as well.

“There are thousands of Georgia workers that are misclassified as independent contractors, so that their employers can wrongfully deny them the benefits that they deserve, including health care,” Evans said Aug. 5. “By expanding Medicaid and classifying workers appropriately, insurance will be available to hundreds of thousands more Georgians.”

We decided to check Evans’ number of misclassified workers, and found she’s on safe ground.

Defining misclassification

Some businesses avoid treating workers as employees by calling them an independent contractor. The person might work only for that one business, use equipment the business provides and do exactly what the business tells him or her to do, and yet be labeled as if the person was in business for themselves.

The advantage for companies is they avoid paying a number of employment taxes, including Medicare, Social Security and unemployment insurance. If they offer health insurance, they would sidestep that too.

As Georgia’s Department of Labor put it, “independent contractors are not independent just because that is what their employer calls them, because that is what they call themselves, or because they sign an ‘independent contractor agreement.’ Independent contractor status depends on the underlying nature of the work relationship.”

(Read More)

How we investigated wage enforcement at the Illinois Department of Labor (IL)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

By Matt Kiefer | August 9, 2017

“There ought to be a law.”

We throw that phrase around casually in our civic discourse. But sometimes a new law passes that doesn’t make a dent in the problem, as reporter Melissa Sanchez found when she looked into the bleak and arduous process of filing a wage theft claim in Illinois.

Long wait times and high dismissal rates are nothing new at the Illinois Department of Labor, where every year thousands of workers file grievances against employers who have allegedly shorted their pay. A 2012 Reporter investigation, “Waiting in Vain”, revealed the average wage theft claim took about seven months to resolve, with 41 percent ending up dismissed.

Five years on, the Reporter followed up on this story to see how things worked out. It took half a dozen Freedom of Information Act requests and several months of delays, denials and appeals before the department handed over all the wage complaint and other operational records we requested.

Our findings: Wait times for wage theft cases had increased to nine months and dismissal rates jumped to 58 percent. The promised reforms didn’t deliver.

To do our analysis, we loaded the records into a Django database, which is handy for sorting, filtering and looking up related records. When calculating case durations and dismissal rates for wage complaints, we narrowed the record set to wage complaints filed in 2014 due to the volume of pending cases in subsequent years that had unknown resolution dates and outcomes. (Other calculations, such as those counting case volume by year, or the total amount of wages claimed, include all available complaint data.)

(Read More)

Porter County Commissioners setting conflict of interest rules for bidding (IL)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

By JEFF SCHULTZ
Posted 7/19/2017

The Porter County Board of Commissioners voted in favor of implementing a conflict of interest policy concerning how it hires consultants on Tuesday, and signaled their interest in compiling a responsible bidder policy.

The Commissioners voted 3-0 on first reading for an ordinance to establish the policy that many other states like Indiana have already adopted. Under it, County employees and elected officials would be prohibited from soliciting or accepting gratuities of anything valued at $50 or more from consultants or other parties in contractor agreements, said County Attorney Scott McClure.

McClure said forms of this policy have been put together at the federal level and have trickled down to municipalities. Conflict of interest policies are being required in order to receive matching funds from the federal government that the County would receive for projects through state agencies like the Indiana Department of Transportation, he said.
Commissioner President Jeff Good, R-Center, said that he agrees with the ordinance and not just on the merit that it is being required by the federal government.

“I think it’s just good business,” he said.

“I agree,” said Commissioner Laura Shurr Blaney, D-South.

Next, Marcella Kunstek and Josh Weger of the Indiana, Illinois and Iowa Foundation for Fair Contracting (IIIFFC) came to give the Commissioners a presentation on reasons they recommend the County adopt a Responsive Bidder Ordinance, or RBO.

The organization has been in existence for 20 years but not until recently have RDOs become a growing trend, Weger said. IIIFFC has helped 14 counties in Indiana, 25 in Illinois and seven in Iowa. The mission is to increase market share for contractors, increase hours for workers and drive value for taxpayers.

“We are here to help you in any way improve the value of public works construction to your taxpayers and government,” Weger told the Commissioners.

(Read More)

Education and Infrastructure Grow the Economy. Other Proposals Being Debated in Illinois Don’t. (IL)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

With the State of Illinois finally having a new budget for the first time in two years, the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Illinois Economic Policy Institute evaluated the economic research on policy measures currently under consideration by state lawmakers.

 

PUBLISHED BY – Frank Manzo IV
JULY 19, 2017

Economic and social science research generally finds that investing in K-12 education and postsecondary education- “human capital development”- and investing in infrastructure- “physical capital development”- are the most effective public policies at improving economic growth. Fiscal sustainability through balanced budgets also allows governments to fund these investments and boosts business confidence.

Investing in public education improves the economy.

  • A well-educated workforce raises median wages in a state.
  • An extra year of education increases a worker’s earnings by 7-10%.
  • A 10% increase in spending on public education leads children to complete more schooling and reduces their chances of living in poverty once they hit adulthood by 3.7% on average.
  • In a survey of economics professors and public policy academics from accredited universities in Illinois, 66% say that expanding enrollment in early childhood education programs would improve the state’s employment rate and grow the economy and a majority say the same about raising the share of the workforce with a bachelor’s degree.

Investing in public infrastructure boosts economic growth.

  • For every dollar increase in infrastructure spending, the economy improves by $1.57 on average.
  • 67% of academic studies find that highway spending has positive impacts on the economy.
    Improving an expanding highways, bridges, and public transportation statistically increases the working-age employment rate by increasing connectivity and improving productivity.
  • In a survey of economics professors and public policy academics from accredited universities in Illinois, 79% think Illinois should increase transportation infrastructure investment.

Other policy changes that have been proposed in Illinois have no, mixed, or limited economic impacts.

1. Peer-reviewed studies demonstrate that “right-to-work” laws have no statistical effect on overall employment in a state economy, but research does find that “right-to-work” tends to reduce wages, limit unionization, and redistribute income from workers to owners.

(Read More)

3d_money_construction_dreamstime_xxl_21903206

Wage theft victims have little chance of recouping pay in Illinois (IL)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

By Melissa Sanchez and Matt Kiefer
Aug. 9, 2017

Most victims of wage theft in Illinois never see a dime because the system meant to help them isn’t working.

That’s not what labor advocates envisioned in 2010, when the state passed a bill meant to give employees a better chance of recouping stolen wages and to toughen penalties against the employers who stiff them.

The situation, however, has gone from bad to worse for the thousands of mostly low-wage workers who have filed roughly $50 million in wage claims with the state since the measure took full effect in 2014.

Workers who report wage theft now face longer wait times, higher dismissal rates and more red tape, according to a Chicago Reporter review of complaint records and enforcement procedures at the Illinois Department of Labor.

Fewer than 1 in 4 workers recouped wages within a year, the analysis found. The odds are so bad, many labor advocates say workers shouldn’t bother filing a claim.

“The worst that can happen to [employers] is that they can use the workers like a credit card, and pay them months after the claims were first filed,” said Jacob Lesniewski, an associate professor of social work at Dominican University, who has studied wage theft.

The Reporter’s review of wage enforcement records found:

  • More claims are dismissed: 58 percent in 2014, up from 41 percent in 2010. The state doesn’t track why cases are dismissed, but most are scrapped early, before workers get a chance to have the merits of the cases weighed.
  • Cases now take an average of nearly nine months to resolve, about two months longer than in 2010. If a case ends up going to a hearing, resolving it could take well over a year.
  • Even when workers win their cases, they might not be paid. Only about 1 in 10 of nearly 500 cases forwarded to the Illinois Attorney General’s Office for collection resulted in payment, and collection can take years.
  • The state has let dozens of deadbeat employers off the hook by allowing them to settle claims early in the enforcement process, avoiding formal violations or financial penalties.

(Read More)

A labor voice at Harvard: ex-union leader to study the underground economy (MA)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

JULY 17, 2017
DEIRDRE FERNANDES

Mark Erlich was a familiar figure at construction sites as executive secretary of the state’s carpenters union. Now Erlich is hitting the hallowed halls of Harvard.

He’s joining the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School as a fellow. He’ll be working with professors and researchers at Harvard and other universities on issues of wages and the underground economy.

It’s a topic, he said, that is important not just for the construction industry but for the broader economy.

The research will focus on the rise of independent contractors and under-the-table compensation and how that affects public revenues, as well as identifying best practices for wage-enforcement programs.

During his 12 years heading the New England Regional Council of Carpenters, Erlich was a consistent voice against wage abuses, pushing legislators to strengthen penalties for wage theft.

Erlich said several heavy-hitters on labor issues from the Obama administration are now in the Boston area, and he hopes to work with them as they explore a changing economy in which companies rely more on contractors, rather than full-time staff.

(Read More)

Massachusetts construction company $160,000 for wage violations on nine public projects in state (MA)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

by Mark Iandolo |
Jul. 19, 2017, 9:40am

BOSTON (Legal Newsline) – Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey announced on July 12 that a New Hampshire-based construction company will pay roughly $160,000 for allegations of failing to pay employees the proper prevailing wage and overtime for nine public works projects completed between 2014 and 2015.

Healey’s office specifically filed three citations against Northeast Partition Specialties Inc. and owner Fredrick Breth. The defendants purportedly failed to pay prevailing wage,overtime or submit true and accurate certified payroll records.
“Companies that do business in Massachusetts must play by the rules,” Healey said. “Prevailing wage laws are intended to ensure a level playing field for companies and provide a real, living wage to workers.”

The defendants allegedly committed the violations while working on public projects that included SSGT James J. Hill School in Revere, Bresnahan Elementary School in Newburyport, Acushnet Police Facility, Chelmsford Fire Department, Dracut Town Hall, Sudbury Police Department, Park Avenue Elementary in Webster, West Bridgewater Middle-Senior High School, Westborough Fire Department.

Handling the case for Massachusetts are Erik Bennett, assistant attorney general, and investigator Tom Lam.

(Read More)