Prevailing wage called “imperative” to housing bills

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

Oct. 10, 2017

State Building and Construction Trades Council President Robbie Hunter established a context in support of the prevailing wage in a Sacramento Bee story this week when he discussed how decent pay buys a highly skilled and trained work force that in the end cuts down on construction costs.

“Build it once, build it right,” the newspaper quoted Hunter as saying.

The Bee’s Oct. 8 story focused on the prevailing wage component included in five of the bills that were part of a housing package that was signed into law on Sept. 29 by Gov. Jerry Brown.

Three of the bills included an expedited approval process for contractors to get their projects built, including one piece of legislation, Senate Bill 35, which bypasses delays imposed by city councils and by a redundant environmental review process.

“Therefore,” Hunter said in a later statement, “it was imperative to have prevailing wage rates and a skilled workforce to assure that workers are paid a fair wage.”

As Hunter said in the video that accompanies the story, “If there is not a fair wage paid to the workers who are building a project, the very workers will be the ones who need the affordable housing.”

(Read More)

It’s accountability time in the construction industry (CA)

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

Tony Thurmond’s Assembly Bill 1701 is a simple but powerful piece of legislation that will bring accountability to the private construction industry

By Robbie Hunter
This article was published on 08.17.17.

When it comes to protecting construction workers in the underground economy,the history of California has found that the buck stops . . . nowhere.

Most of the cheating, most of the rip-offs, most of the theft of workers’ wages takes place two or three rungs down from the general contractors at the top of the construction pyramid. There’s so much of it that the overwhelmed state Department of Industrial Relations can’t keep up on the enforcement end. The outcome: tens of thousands of construction and other blue-collar workers are denied hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lost wages, while the state is shorted somewhere between $8.5 billion and $28 billion a year by employers who don’t pay their taxes.

It’s a situation studied to death by academicians while lawmakers have hesitated to throw up the stop sign.

Finally, somebody in Sacramento is doing something about it. Assemblyman Tony Thurmond has taken the lead, and if his colleagues in the Legislature follow it, we might soon have a mechanism to crack down on the cheating.

Thurmond, a Democrat from Richmond, is the author of Assembly Bill 1701, a simple but powerful piece of legislation that will bring accountability to the private construction industry. The bill maintains that if you are the general contractor on a construction project, and if your sub-contractors-or even their “sub-subs”-stiff a worker out of his or her pay, you are liable. End of story.

(Read More)

bill-would-allow-cities-counties-to-opt-out-of-prevailing-wage

Prevailing wage, project labor agreements protect living standards for construction workers

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

By ROBBIE HUNTER
July 6, 2017 at 12:01 am

In an era of political hyperventilation, it might be a good idea for some critics to take a deep breath before they launch into their attacks on the prevailing wage laws and project labor agreements that protect the living standards of construction workers in California and across the nation.

From Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, anti-union writers in recent weeks have incorrectly branded the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act that wrote the prevailing wage into the law on taxpayer-funded construction projects as born of racism and a rip-off of public funds. The same critics also have falsely characterized project labor agreements as costly to taxpayers and unfair to nonunion construction companies.

Now, for the facts.

Two Republican congressmen, Sen. James Davis of Pennsylvania and U.S. Rep. Roger Bacon of New York, sponsored their legislation 86 years ago to establish a minimum wage on taxpayer-funded construction projects, based on local measures of central tendency in any of the covered construction trades.

The idea behind the prevailing wage is to keep unscrupulous operators from low-bidding the legitimate competition to the detriment of the local workforce. The effect has been to allow blue-collar workers – 400,000 of whom are represented by the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California – to maintain their place in the American middle class.

Of the false charges that have been lodged of late about Davis-Bacon, perhaps the most repugnant is the smear that recirculates every so often that the act originated as an outgrowth of racism. The critics troll through the historic record to quote some congressmen in the debate over Davis-Bacon who supported the law based on their own warped view that it was designed to protect higher-paid white workers in the northeast represented by the authors of the law from “cheap colored labor” that would be imported to their districts from the South. The critics fail, however, to report Congressman Bacon’s reply that imported workers came in white skin as well as black.

(Read More)

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)

Prevailing wage, project labor agreements protect living standards for construction workers

Posted by National Alliance for Fair Contracting on

By ROBBIE HUNTER
July 6, 2017 at 12:01 am

In an era of political hyperventilation, it might be a good idea for some critics to take a deep breath before they launch into their attacks on the prevailing wage laws and project labor agreements that protect the living standards of construction workers in California and across the nation.

From Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, anti-union writers in recent weeks have incorrectly branded the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act that wrote the prevailing wage into the law on taxpayer-funded construction projects as born of racism and a rip-off of public funds. The same critics also have falsely characterized project labor agreements as costly to taxpayers and unfair to nonunion construction companies.

Now, for the facts.

Two Republican congressmen, Sen. James Davis of Pennsylvania and U.S. Rep. Roger Bacon of New York, sponsored their legislation 86 years ago to establish a minimum wage on taxpayer-funded construction projects, based on local measures of central tendency in any of the covered construction trades.

The idea behind the prevailing wage is to keep unscrupulous operators from low-bidding the legitimate competition to the detriment of the local workforce. The effect has been to allow blue-collar workers – 400,000 of whom are represented by the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California – to maintain their place in the American middle class.

Of the false charges that have been lodged of late about Davis-Bacon, perhaps the most repugnant is the smear that recirculates every so often that the act originated as an outgrowth of racism. The critics troll through the historic record to quote some congressmen in the debate over Davis-Bacon who supported the law based on their own warped view that it was designed to protect higher-paid white workers in the northeast represented by the authors of the law from “cheap colored labor” that would be imported to their districts from the South. The critics fail, however, to report Congressman Bacon’s reply that imported workers came in white skin as well as black.

(Read More)