Davis-Bacon Wage Survey Plan

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

USDOL News – April 20, 2022

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division announces its Davis-Bacon Wage Survey Plan set to begin in 2022. Construction workers working on Davis-Bacon and related Acts (DBRA) covered contracts must be paid prevailing wages, which are determined by surveys of wages paid on construction projects underway or recently completed within a geographic area.

As the Wage and Hour Division begins its wage survey process, we are reaching out to contractors, contracting agencies, unions, and others in the construction industry to ensure that all stakeholders have an opportunity to participate in the wage survey process.

The division is planning wage rate surveys for Highway construction in:

  • Florida
  • Georgia
  • New Hampshire
  • West Virginia

The division is also planning wage rate surveys for Building construction in:

  • Maine

The division is also planning wage rate surveys for Building, Heavy, Highway, and Residential construction in:

  • Guam

Stakeholders can find the list of 2022 currently planned surveys here, as well as the status of surveys that are currently in progress.

The criteria used to determine areas where a survey should be performed are:

  1. Age of the previous survey
  2. Federal procurement agency plans for construction
  3. Whether stakeholders have requested a new survey of a construction type in a state or locality
  4. Whether public and private data reviews show wages in a locality have sufficiently changed to warrant a new wage determination

The Wage and Hour Division will provide outreach in each survey area to inform stakeholders how to participate in the survey process.

If you have suggestions regarding geographic areas and construction types that you believe should be considered for the 2022 or 2023 Survey Plan, please send your suggestions via email to DB-Wage-Survey-Request@dol.gov.

For more information regarding the Davis-Bacon and related Acts and the Davis-Bacon survey program, please visit the division’s website.

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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)

State seeks cheating employers

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

BY MAGGIE LEE

March 3, 2015

 

 

ATLANTA — An untold number of Georgians are working when and where their bosses say, but instead of getting the benefits of employees, they are classified as contractors.

Some say that hurts the employee, the government and law-abiding companies. Now, the state Legislature is starting to listen.

State Rep. Ronnie Mabra, D-Fayetteville, is an attorney who said his law firm hires employees but also works with contractors. He told a House of Representatives panel that he respects the difference, but other employers are known to cheat and put workers in the wrong category.

“We have the issue where employers are misclassifying employees and independent contractors,” Mabra said Tuesday.

What that means is some employers set tight rules on the people who work for them but cut their own payroll tax bills by hiring the workers as contractors instead of as employees.

Misclassification is “pretty widespread,” said Ted Terry, state campaign director at the Georgia AFL-CIO. Some cable installers, construction workers, stagehands and even security guards at strip clubs are frequently used as employees but classified as contractors, Terry said