Legislative proposals to weaken Pennsylvania’s prevailing wage law covering state-funded public construction are a perennial in Harrisburg, but this year there are even more proposals than usual.
Some observers think that legislative action may result before the end of the year. I weighed in on the issue in an op-ed in Tuesday’s Harrisburg Patriot-News, explaining that if the real motivation is to save money on state-funded construction projects, research points in a different direction than eroding the wages workers earn on these projects.
Legislative proposals to weaken Pennsylvania’s prevailing wage law covering state-funded public construction are a perennial in Harrisburg, but this year there are even more proposals than usual.
Some observers think that legislative action may result before the end of the year. I weighed in on the issue in an op-ed in Tuesday’s Harrisburg Patriot-News, explaining that if the real motivation is to save money on state-funded construction projects, research points in a different direction than eroding the wages workers earn on these projects. Read on.
Prevailing-wage laws don’t hike costs
By Stephen Herzenberg
Some Harrisburg politicians have a novel idea about how to create more jobs in Pennsylvania. They want to slash the middle-class wages of construction workers who build schools and fire stations in our communities. If that means hiring less experienced builders who will take longer to get the job done and make costly mistakes, so be it.
Does that sound like a winning jobs policy to you? I like to think that public policy is shaped in part by logic and evidence, but the current legislative debates about Pennsylvania’s prevailing-wage law illustrate just how naive that notion is.
The law requires that jobs on public construction projects pay occupation- and area-specific minimum wages that typically range from $15 to $35 per hour. The state Legislature is considering various proposals to weaken this law. Some workers on public projects could see their wages plummet from $25 per hour with health and pension benefits to $12.50 with no benefits.
Why do this now? To erode the buying power of working families because their consumption is too robust in this economy? To see the unemployment rate climb above 10 percent again? No, supporters say, we need to weaken prevailing-wage laws because they are driving up construction costs by 10 percent to 30 percent. Is there any logic or evidence to justify these claims?
To support these assertions, conservative think tanks have produced a cottage industry of reports containing hypothetical or “what if” calculations. If labor is 30 percent of the cost of a project and labor costs $30 per hour, what if you paid only $15 per hour? That would save 15 percent, they say.
This line of thinking has been paired in recent media reports with anecdotes that follow the same “what if” logic. Press stories might quote a local government official saying: “We bid our project first without prevailing wage. Then we asked the winning contractor how much the cost would go up if they had to pay prevailing wage. The price went up 15 percent.” This is just a variation of what the right-wing think tanks do: The contractor assumes the same labor hours and simply increases the labor cost.
But “what if” calculations are not actual experience; they are really little different than conjecture. In the case of prevailing wage, the “what if” calculations fall apart with a little scrutiny. When you pay less for labor, you don’t necessarily get the same quality of work. Lower quality labor might use more hours and could require more rework. The project might cost as much — or more — without prevailing wage.
At the least, you can’t simply assume that you will get the same productivity and skill if you slash the workers’ pay. You have to look for real-world evidence. The good news is there is plenty of evidence. It comes from comparing construction costs in states with and without prevailing-wage laws. It also comes from “before and after” looks at construction costs in states that got rid of prevailing wage.
Variation across states and over time makes it possible to sort out statistically, from thousands of actual construction projects, whether prevailing-wage laws drive up costs. It turns out they don’t. This finding wouldn’t surprise the owner of a Delaware contractor who told me much of her business comes from rewiring private commercial jobs not covered by prevailing wage.
In one supermarket, the wiring “looked like a bird’s nest” — about what you’d expect from a low-ball contractor using workers without training and experience. Maybe we should relabel our prevailing-wage law the Pennsylvania Quality Construction Act.
If there are savings at all from eliminating prevailing-wage laws, the owners and executives of contracting companies must pocket them. Sounds like a way to take money from the 99 percent and give it to the 1 percent.
The data show that one factor does drive up construction costs: undertaking projects when demand is high. By contrast, undertaking projects with the market in the tank — like now — can save 20 percent.
If policymakers are interested in an “evidence-based” construction policy, they should keep the state’s prevailing-wage law and create a “Buy Low” fund to subsidize countercyclical construction. Better value for taxpayers and jobs when workers really need them. Now that would be a novel idea.