Rep. Pocan: Repealing Wisconsin’s Prevailing Wage Laws Will Take Money Out of People’s Pockets

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State Senate proposal will do little to improve Wisconsin roads and could undercut wages throughout the state

Apr 25, 2017 – Press Release

MADISON – U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (WI-02) released the following statement after the Wisconsin state senate heard arguments on a bill to repeal the state’s prevailing wage laws.

“Once again, Governor Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans are putting corporate cash and the 1% ahead of working families. This bill to eliminate prevailing wage requirements for public projects will literally take money out of people’s pockets and could allow companies to bring low-wage workers from out of state, undercutting wages throughout our state.

“We also know this legislation will do little to improve Wisconsin’s roads, which are ranked as one of the worst in the country. I hope my former colleagues in the Wisconsin legislature see this for what it is, another boost for big business that winds up costing working Wisconsin families, and reject it.”

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Prevailing wage repeal: Hurting blue-collar wages or saving tax dollars?

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MARK SOMMERHAUSER
Apr 25, 2017

Critics of a proposal to fully repeal the state’s prevailing wage laws decried it Monday as an assault on the wages of blue-collar workers, while proponents framed the move as frugal stewardship of public funds.

A state Senate panel gave the proposal its first legislative hearing Monday.

If enacted, it would mark another crushing defeat for Wisconsin labor unions. They, along with legislative Democrats, are among the staunchest backers of a prevailing wage, a minimum wage requirement for workers on public construction projects.

The bill would eliminate all state-imposed prevailing wage requirements for projects funded by the state. That includes state office buildings, University of Wisconsin System buildings and state highway projects.

…

Two who testified against the bill were Leroy Miller, a heavy equipment operator from New Berlin, and Luke Burnaman, a crane operator from Portage. Both are union members and U.S. military veterans.

Both men said they’re concerned about how prevailing wage repeal could affect veterans, who they and others who spoke Monday said are disproportionately represented in the building trades.

Burnaman said he and his family moved to Wisconsin from his native Louisiana last year, lured by the prospect of higher wages and better schools for his children.

He questioned why senators would mull prevailing wage changes after recently having increased their own expense reimbursements. State Senate leaders earlier this year approved a 31 percent increase in their daily per diem amount – up to $115 per day, compared to $88 per day last year, the Appleton Post-Crescent reported.

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Violation Tracker Expansion Adds 34,000 Wage Theft Cases

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Violation Tracker Expansion Adds 34,000 Wage Theft Cases; More Than 40 Agencies Now Combined in One Search Engine

 

Good Jobs First
4/18/2017

Washington, DC, April 18, 2017-Good Jobs First today announced a large new addition to Violation Tracker, the country’s first public database of corporate crime and misconduct: more than 34,000 cases brought by the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor since the beginning of 2010 for violations of overtime, minimum wage and other provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The largest violators captured by the new data are oilfield services company Halliburton, which in 2015 agreed to an $18 million settlement of alleged overtime violations, and CoreCivic (the new name of private prison operator Corrections Corporation of America), which in 2014 agreed to an $8 million settlement.

Violation Tracker, a public service of Good Jobs First’s Corporate Research Project, is available at http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/violation-tracker.

“The DOL Wage and Hour dataset is the first phase of our work plan to provide comprehensive coverage of wage theft cases,” said Good Jobs First Research Director Philip Mattera, who leads the work on Violation Tracker. “We are also collecting information on private collective-action Fair Labor Standards Act lawsuits.”

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Wage Violations Are Now “Public Record” Under Colorado’s New Wage Theft Transparency Act

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The National Law Review
Wednesday, April 19, 2017

On April 13, 2017, Governor Hickenlooper signed the Wage Theft Transparency Act into law, which is effective immediately. The Act makes “wage theft” violations in Colorado, including nonpayment of wages or overtime compensation, public record and subject to records requests under the Colorado Open Records Act.

The Act clarifies that information obtained by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE), relating to a finding by the CDLE that an employer violated Colorado’s wage laws, is not confidential and shall be released to the public or made available for use in a court proceeding, unless the director of the division makes a determination that the information includes specific information that is a trade secret.

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19th Annual NAFC Conference – Nashville, TN, Sept. 24 – 26, 2017

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NAFC will be holding its next Annual Conference in 2017 in Music City U.S.A., Nashville, Tennessee. The Conference will be held at the Sheraton Nashville Downtown Hotel, in the heart of the city. NAFC’s National Conference is attended by several hundred participants from across the nation, including representatives from labor organizations, fair contractors, fair contracting compliance organizations as well as researchers, academics, attorneys and officials from federal, state and local governments. Stay tuned for further details and registration information coming in early 2017.

(View NAFC Conference Page)

USDOL Wage & Hour Division Announces 2017 Prevailing Wage Seminars

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Join us at a Prevailing Wage Seminar in your region in 2017!

The Wage and Hour Division (WHD) Prevailing Wage Seminars (Prevailing Wage Seminars) are three-day compliance trainings designed for regional stakeholders (unions, private contractors, state agencies, federal agencies and workers). In these seminars, conference participants will learn about the following:

  • The Davis-Bacon Act and McNamara O’Hara Service Contract Act
  • Executive Order 13495 “Nondisplacement of Qualified Workers”
  • Executive Order 13658 “Establishing a Minimum Wage for Contractors”
  • The process of obtaining wage determinations and adding classifications
  • Compliance assistance and enforcement processes
  • The process for appealing wage rates, coverage, and compliance determinations

 

Prevailing Wage Seminars for 2017 are being scheduled in the following cities:

  • Pittsburgh, PA – TBD

 

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Total netted from state’s misclassification fight exceeds $1.1 million

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By: Dan Shaw, dan.shaw@dailyreporter.com
March 15, 2017 4:54 pm

State officials’ efforts to crack down on companies that misclassify direct employees as independent contractors has generated more than $1 million for the state’s unemployment-benefits system over the past few years.

The state began stepping up its enforcement of misclassification laws several years ago. Since then, those efforts have recovered nearly $1.13 million worth of in unpaid unemployment-insurance taxes, penalties and interest, according to a report on the state’s unemployment fund released by the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development on Wednesday.

Worker misclassification is believed to be particularly rampant in the construction industry, where frequent seasonal layoffs can blur the line between a permanent employee and someone hired for a particular job. Industry officials say deliberate misclassification not only deprives the state of unemployment taxes and other resources; it also gives dishonest companies an advantage by enabling them to avoid the sort of costs that their more scrupulous rivals often end up rolling into bid prices.

The state reported Wednesday that auditors found 8,613 misclassified workers at Wisconsin companies last year. The same year saw tipsters use a state-run website to report 59 instances of suspected misclassification.

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Trump Cuts Leave Bridge and Rail Projects Hanging

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By HIROKO TABUCHI
APRIL 5, 2017

When President Trump pledged during the campaign to spend $1 trillion to restore America’s crumbling bridges and roads, supporters across the country cheered.

A leaked list of the Trump administration’s priority projects seemed to speak to the scope of the president’s ambitions: a high-speed rail line linking Houston and Dallas; a desalination plant in Orange County, Calif.; and improvements to the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana, the longest continuous bridge over water in the world.

Then came Mr. Trump’s budget proposal, which would slash the Department of Transportation’s spending by 13 percent, end subsidies for Amtrak’s long-distance trains and eliminate the Obama administration’s “Tiger” grant program, which has helped fund mass transit systems across the country.

Among the potential victims of the president’s proposed cutbacks: Maryland’s long-awaited Purple Line, a planned 16-mile light rail system through the capital’s suburbs.

Maryland had been just four days away from clinching some $900 million in federal aid in August when a federal judge ruled to temporarily invalidate environmental approvals for the project. But under President Trump’s plan, projects that don’t yet have complete federal funding agreements would be financed “by the localities that use and benefit from these localized projects.”

Supporters of the project are devastated.

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Workers cheated as federal contractors prosper

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A Center analysis found that government agencies paid $18 billion over an 18-month period to companies with wage violations

By Talia Buford, Maryam Jameel
April 6, 2017 4:54

…

“I knew it was a federal building, but since everyone else was paying low wages, too, I just figured that’s how it was supposed to be,” Quezada, 40, said in a recent interview at her home in Arlington, Virginia.

Actually, that’s not how it’s supposed to be. But each year, thousands of contractors enriched by tax dollars skirt federal labor laws and shortchange workers. In fact, U.S. Department of Labor data show that upwards of 70 percent of all cases lodged against federal contractors and investigated by the department since 2012 yielded substantive violations.

But many of these violators go on to receive more federal contracts. An Obama administration effort to change that practice was derailed in late March by President Donald Trump.

The Center for Public Integrity examined a subset of 1,154 egregious violators – those with the biggest fines, highest number of violations or most employees impacted – included in the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division enforcement database and cross-referenced them with more than 300,000 contract records from the Treasury Department. The Center found that between January 2015 and July 2016:

  • Federal agencies modified or granted contracts worth a total of $18 billion to 68 contractors with proven wage violations. Among them: health-care provider Sterling Medical Associates, Cornell University and Corrections Corporation of America
  • Of all agencies, the U.S. Department of Defense employed the most wage violators – 49, which collectively owed $4.7 million in back pay to almost 6,200 workers. The department paid those 49 contractors a combined $15 billion.
  • Violations by the 68 contractors affected some 11,000 workers around the country – about the same number of people who moved to D.C. in 2016.

 

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