Double Davis-Bacon

A Labor Department field investigator takes issue with my post yesterday linking to a contracting specialist who told Kausfiles that enforcing the Davis-Bacon Act is largely a waste of federal time.

D-B, the investigator says, includes several provisions that ought not to be trivial to taxpayers, including, crucially, the ability to hold prime contractors liable for making sure their subcontractors actually pay prevailing wages. Why is this important? I'll let the investigator answer that:

Because this is the real world of government construction today: Many contracts are initially won by large, multi-state management firms who in turn take bids nationwide for the actual on-site trade work. I have seen many, many small (under 50 employees) companies take the sub work. Truthfully, I can’t recall any time in the last 10 years when I have seen a large employer with their employees performing the actual construction. These subs may be “local” in that they reside closer than the prime, but workers often are coming from outside a local commute and are dedicated to the one project only, sleeping in cars or friend’s couches.

In the states where I work, the workforce is primarily non-English speaking immigrants, and what we’ve found countless times is this: Subs calculating pay at piecerate...and promising to pay workers at the end of the job. Subs tell their people that workers get paid when they get money from the prime.

What’s wrong with this picture? First of all, in the best circumstances, this means a delay in pay from months up to years for the workers. In the worst, of course, the worker is never paid....

Did the government pay for those labor costs? You betcha. So where did it go? Here’s where the squabbling comes in between the contractors and the subs. Regardless, I can tell you it didn’t go back to the U.S. Treasury, and without the legal recourses offered in D-B, you can go to sleep at night knowing your local federal building, highway or port was built from slave labor.

Kaus, by the way, is still on the issue today, this time with a post from the "other side," that is, the contractors' side. But, as the Labor investigator shows, there's more than one "side" on the federal end of the equation.