Ensuring Decent Pay – Not Lower Pay – Key to Economic Recovery, House Labor Subcommittee Learns
WASHINGTON – Democrats on the Education and Workforce Committee vigorously defended the benefits of the Davis-Bacon act to workers in a hearing designed by the GOP to undermine the nation’s historic wage protection law.
“For the last eight decades, the Davis-Bacon Act has provided millions of hard working Americans fair wages for the their hard work. During all these years, the Davis-Bacon Act has done exactly what it was intended to do – prevent federal projects from driving down local wage rates,” said Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), the senior Democratic member on the subcommittee. “To be sitting here today debating bureaucratic churning about Davis-Bacon misses the point. The problem is more work. For people who are in the construction trades today, this law is not the issue.”
Davis-Bacon is a federal law that ensures that workers are paid local prevailing wages on federal construction projects so that government projects do not drive down local wages. A witness called by the Republican majority advocated repeal of the Davis-Bacon law and even agreed that workers’ wages would fall under repeal. House Republicans have tried to repeal the Davis-Bacon protections nine times over the last two years in a number of federal agency contracts. Despite these efforts, the House has repeatedly voted to retain these protections on a bipartisan basis.
“By protecting the wages of higher-skilled workers from low-wage, less-skilled competition, Davis-Bacon raises employee productivity and offsets the cost of paying higher hourly rates,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute. “Better-managed firms and more skilled employees also tend to work more safely, reducing the number of accidents, lowering workers compensation costs, and preventing damage to materials and equipment.”
Eisenbrey agreed with committee Democrats that efforts to increase working families’ pay – like increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, strengthening equal pay protections, among others – are vital to increasing consumer demand and economic growth.
“I can’t think of anything more fundamental to protecting our workforce than seeing to it that they are paid a fair wage. I don’t think you need to be a Nobel laureate in economics to figure out that if you pay people less, they are going to spend less. If 70 percent of our economy is rooted in what people spend, if we pay them less, that’s going to hurt our economy,” said Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.). “What I want this committee to look at is how we can protect wages.”
However, a Republican bill proposed in Congress would move Davis-Bacon wage determinations from the Wage and Hour Division in the Department of Labor to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Eisenbrey said that this move would seriously undermine worker wages.
“Any determination that ignores 20 percent or more of the typical construction worker’s compensation would obviously not protect the locally prevailing compensation, would undermine the local labor market, and would make it easier for migrant contractors to underbid local firms,” said Eisenbrey.
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