Congress's Deconstruction Theory

...Union workers at IN/Tek, Inland Steel Industries' new joint venture with Nippon Steel Co...

...A study by Oregon State University in 1982 found that the act drove up construction costs in rural areas by 26 to 37 percent...

...I can't do that...

...if he touches steel, he's a steelworker, at steelworker's wages," says Ralph C. Thomas III, executive director of the 3,500-member National Association of Minority Contractors...

...The cops can't do police work because their union won't let them...

...That's what Elzie Higginbottom says, and Higginbottom builds low-income housing in Chicago's grim South Side ghetto and manages his 2,500 units with a magic touch...

...Our union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, whose motto is 'Protecting Those Who Protect and Serve Others,' has gone to war with Gates to keep us off the street...

...He is black himself and fiercely committed to building a social and economic base in Chicago's poor neighborhoods...

...Since Kemp's lost that fervor, maybe the Democrats will gain some, although at this point most of them still seem to think that defending Davis-Bacon is a way to help the little guy...

...If the work were done in the afternoon, then classes could proceed in peace...

...Congress's Deconstruction Theory How Congress is beating the low cost of construction by Patrick Barry What if there were a way to build more low-income housing, invigorate the national economy, and help the small business owner, all in one shot...

...The Republicans don't show much promise either...

...Union Dues & Union Don'ts Why is the labor movement in decline...

...Another in Washington, D.C., sweeps away some of the restrictive work rules that have made union work so expensive...

...Members of the painter's union, however, picketed the graffiti cleanup for three hours, tying up rush hour traffic...

...People would be coming in from out of state and stealing jobs from your local contractors...

...With an in-box even...

...The guild wouldn't agree, and the film was never made...

...Got promoted (more money...

...So when a one-school elementary district in California created a special tax to paint the school and approved a low bid of $33,600 from a three-person contracting company, it ran into trouble...

...Three months ago I wrapped up a tour working the burglary detail at Hollywood...

...of Japan, have thrown out job classifications almost completely (there were once seven classifications just for crane operators...

...The Baltimore-based Enterprise Foundation, a developer of low-income housing nationwide, has found that even in areas like Dallas, where Davis-Bacon wages aren't out of line, the law drives up prices because small contractors are scared away by the paperwork and other requirements...

...The union even went to court and tried (though it failed) to block Gates from putting hundreds of extra officers on the streets tonight to prevent a repeat of last year's Halloween near-mayhem in the Hollywood area...

...Tobias says many congressmen are so used to voting the union line that they aren't paying attention to the substance of either of the current amendments, both of which are billed as "reform" measures...

...As for the "fly-by-night" contractors slashing wages to steal jobs, the GAO report points out that when wage protections were eliminated from the Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act, there was "apparently no adverse effect on wage rates...

...Sacred pig That was 10 years ago, but the act lives on, as does the cult-like respect for it on Capitol Hill...

...Having only $40,000, he asked the Screen Actors Guild for permission to make the film at experimental rates...

...Power tells Republican members of Congress that, should the Stenholm amendment pass, these babyeaters will grab contracts on the local post office and highways, "and we'll have a new Davis-Bacon in a month...

...Equally difficult to understand is the lack of awareness of what Stenholm-type reform of the law could do for the nation's health...

...But the GAO and Oregon State studies showed that the opposite is true today: Because of Davis-Bacon, local firms are less likely to work on federal jobs, while larger, nonlocal firms are more likely to work on them...

...This argument might have held water back in 1931, when two Republicans, Rep...

...He was passionate back then: "Someday somebody is going to ask organized labor what they're for in the inner city, welfare and food stamps, or jobs and housing for the poor...

...When the small firms shy away from the job, that kicks us up to the next level of contractor," says Gene Ruckle, a development specialist for the foundation...

...Three recording artists had donated 10-second segments of popular songs...

...That's a far cry from what he told the The Washington Post in 1986 when he was fighting for Davis-Bacon exemptions for maintenance workers at the Kenilworth-Parkside Resident Management Corp...

...If that doesn't scare away small contractors, the paperwork and bureaucracy might...

...factories institute just-in-time shipping or new housing to inject some life into the Bronx or Watts...

...It doesn't matter if the company was paying $15 or $18 an hour, or if the company is a family operation that pays what it can...

...It was a reasonable idea back then, before minimumwage and other labor laws were in effect...

...Nineteen states have recently repealed these so-called "Little Davis-Bacons...

...The current battle on the Hill is over a pair of amendments to the act, one introduced by Democratic Rep...

...What's needed is the repeal or substantial reform of the Davis-Bacon Act, a law passed in 1931 to protect construction workers from being exploited...

...Charles Stenholm, which calls for substantial reduction of paperwork, more use of helpers, and the exemption from Davis-Bacon provisions for projects of $250,000 or less (the current threshold is an almost meaningless $2,000...

...The other amendment, backed by Rep...

...So comes the time that Chief of Police Daryl Gates has the radical idea that in order to get more working cops on the street, he will require a good number of us indoor types to get out of the office a couple of times a month, put on the uniform, and do basic police work...

...In Chicago, immigrant Korean shop owners and a polyglot mix of small-property owners have brought inner-city commercial strips back to life using an innovative and low-cost city program...

...Well, union, though the benefits you have negotiated for us over the years are appreciated, I'm not feeling real protected right now...

...Part of the answer is provided by Jonathan Rowe, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, in his column in the Christian Science Monitor: As though the streets outside were not obstacle enough, a horrendous racket fills the halls at a high school in Harlem...

...Kemp cant While steel and auto workers marched to the brink with the help of torpid upper management, the trade unions are doing it with a different but equally wellmeaning ally: Congress...

...But when asked if he would unleash that weapon by working to repeal or reform Davis-Bacon, Kemp hemmed and hawed, praised the progress unions have made, and finally said, "We can work with the unions...

...I believe there is still a need for unions to fight to protect worker health and safety and to secure for workers, through a share in ownership, a fair portion of the profit this labor helps create...

...A pro-union advocacy group complained to the state's Department of Industrial Relations, and sure enough, the contractor was paying his painter only $20 an hour and a young helper only $8.50 an hour...

...He has built high-rise housing downtown as well, luxury housing, establishing a reputation among developers and government regulators as someone who knows how to work federal guidelines for all they're worth...

...The national average is $12.69 an hour, which is the highest hourly wage of the 10 occupational sectors surveyed in 1987 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics...

...well, you union folks are supposed to protect the cops, not the public, so what do you care...

...Progress is slower in the auto industry, but the buzz words are becoming familiar: teamwork, worker participation, flexibility...

...The law required both to earn $26 an hour, the "prevailing" wage...

...The rigid work rules that scare businesses away from old-line union towns like Chicago and Detroit are apparently putting union contractors out of business as well...

...Davis-Bacon is a blood oath for the Building Trades Council, and the council has a lot of support in Congress," says Damen Tobias, counsel for Stenholm...

...This year a municipal legal eagle realized that the program falls under the Davis-Bacon Act's provisions...

...And a lot of my friends aren't, either...

...When we go out to the bigger firms, they say `Aha!' and give us a nice fat bid...

...The Higginbottom line The law requires Higginbottom to pay the prevailing wage to all workers on federally assisted projects of more than 11 units...

...And the public...

...One said recently he wanted to win a Nobel Prize...

...The city used federal Community Development Block Grants to help merchants spruce up their facades, and over the past 10 years in one commercial district alone, 192 of 750 storefronts have put up new awnings, installed lighted signs, and built or rebuilt their brick and terra-cotta facades, each time getting a rebate of 30 percent of the project cost...

...The wage must be the Davis-Bacon rate...

...As Oregon contractor Paul Emerick pointed out to a congressional subcommittee in April, "This hardly seems like a situation in need of federal protection...

...Get rid of Davis-Bacon...

...Did you really think that well-trained, highly paid desk cops would be allowed to put down their pencils and do...

...One of the most striking effects of the law is the way it makes life difficult for the little guy: the immigrant, the black or woman contractor operating out of a rusty Ford van, the painter who hires students or unskilled labor as helpers...

...Augustus Hawkins, both Democrats, is billed as reform but actually strengthens the law, widens its impact, and adds to the bureaucracy...

...So says just about everyone, from Ronald Reagan to the Association of Minority Contractors of America to left-leaning nonprofit housing groups like Chicago's Bethel New Life, Inc., whose efforts to build low-income housing are hindered by high labor costs and dwindling federal support...

...But then on the next job, a private one with no federal connection, the boss must decide whether to set the wage back to the old level (bad for morale) or bid at the higher wage and possibly lose the project (bad for business...

...They run the super-efficient mill in Indiana under just two job titles: operators, who run the 2,000-foot-long cold-rolling machine, and equipment controllers, who maintain it...

...and the decline of the nation's unions, which once represented 34 percent of the work force but now claim just 18 percent...

...ABC is the nation's fastest-growing construction association, with 20,000 member companies representing 1 million workers, most of them nonunion...

...When HUD Secretary Jack Kemp spoke to the National League of Cities convention in Atlanta this past November, he preached his free-market gospel and said, "The entrepreneurial democratic system is the greatest anti-poverty weapon the world has ever seen...

...The steel industry's punch in the gut was brutal: the companies lost $12 billion in five years, and the United Steelworkers of America saw the permanent loss of 500,000 steel jobs nationwide...

...The road back for the steel industry, which once again makes some of the best and least expensive steel in the world, has been paved with many such work rule changes...

...There is a labor shortage predicted by the end of the century, so their wages aren't likely to drop...

...It also incorporates new language to prohibit off-site use of lower-priced labor, adds a complex framework to allow workers to sue for damages if they don't receive Davis-Bacon wages, and requires the Department of Labor (DOL) to do a wage survey every two years in all 3,000 U.S...

...Nor does it reflect the stifling effect the law has in the inner city, where unemployed workers are looking for entry-level jobs—not a $26-an-hour wage that no one will pay them...

...the rules, almost a carbon copy of union contracts, apply to everyone...

...In most big cities, carpenters, bricklayers, electricians, and plumbers earn at least $20 per hour with benefits...

...A good measure of that idolatry came last November when the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee rejected the Bush nominee for head of the Labor Department's wage and hour division, Debra Bowland...

...If there is just one lesson that's been learned in the steel and auto industries in the past decade, it is that rigid labor practices, high wages, and a stubborn union attitude seldom lead to lasting victory...

...The tuckpointer and electrician get a raise because of Davis-Bacon...

...Even Spike Lee, the popular young moviemaker, has had problems along this line...

...counties, a job that many critics consider undoable without a large increase in the size of the DOL bureaucracy...

...Sometimes that means filling out eight forms just to get started...

...The problem is repair work on the 65-year-old building...

...So now the contractors must pay their electricians $26.03 an hour, while the guy who trowels mortar between the bricks gets $23.34...

...Then last month, the state Health Department was about to distribute an AIDS-prevention video to every high school in the state...

...He fills out the paperwork, makes a bid, and wins the job...

...It causes personnel problems, and you get job-jumping, especially among the premium personnel...

...we're closing the little guy out...

...the growing gap between the demand for skilled labor and the large pool of people too unskilled to do it...

...In fact, the wage sometimes looks startlingly like the local wage paid under union contracts...

...But I'm sure unions will continue to decline if they continue to pursue policies that offend common sense and make this country uncompetitive in world markets...

...And since the unions helped write the regulations, that means you can't use "helpers" on the job except in very limited circumstances...

...Such an opportunity exists...

...One new program in the San Francisco Bay Area, for instance, allows contractors to bid jobs under $2 million with a 20 percent wage reduction for journeymen workers...

...When Mr...

...In August, New York City enlisted prison inmates to paint over graffiti on the Long Island Expressway...

...But I can't do police work any more...

...After Florida exempted school districts from such provisions, it calculated an immediate 15 percent savings...

...Still crazy after all these years But the act remains quite popular with Democratic members of Congress...

...They could chalk up some badly needed organizing victories by jumping in when small contractors try to cut wages, and they could once again earn a reputation as an ally of the little guy...

...What the Building Trades Council and its backers in Congress seem unwilling to admit is that the United States is reaching the end of the era when its economy was big and strong enough to protect a coddled work force...

...Power of the AFL-CIO says the unions are fighting back with pilot programs that reduce wages and eliminate some costly work rules...

...But Power puts the small changes in perspective by backhandedly describing the type of practices still going on: In Washington, D.C., he says, "they're getting rid of the two guys in the elevator [to operate it...

...Put a lot of deserving folks behind bars...

...In case one has to pee...

...The "prevailing" wage, as set by the Department of Labor, is a rough and frequently inaccurate average of wages contained in a survey by the department...

...No Democrats on the committee questioned Bowland's ability, but in voting against her, they pronounced her guilty of something apparently much worse than incompetence...

...If a helper picks up a hammer, he's a carpenter...

...Today, though, the law has a different effect...

...But he can't beat Davis-Bacon...

...Why were there two guys in the first place...

...It costs more to keep a person in prison than at Harvard University, so getting some constructive work out of these inmates would seem to make good sense...

...Robert L. Bacon and Senator James Davis, sponsored the law to stop roving contractors who used gangs of low-paid workers to snare federal building jobs...

...1 carry a badge...

...Some of them even specialize in facade work...

...But to give a local guy a chance, Higginbottom has to pay him a wage set by Department of Labor bureaucrats...

...Whether they have the insight and courage to reverse that thinking could indicate their chances of regaining power in the 1990s...

...But the union contract would make that too expensive...

...It set a "prevailing wage" on federally supported building projects, effectively guaranteeing a decent paycheck for the brickmasons and carpenters who built that era's post offices and highways...

...It raises the threshold for new work to What the Building Trades Council and its backers in Congress seem unwilling to admit is that the United States is reaching the end of the era when its economy was big enough and strong enough to protect a coddled work force...

...The building trades are doing no better...

...The union, however, demanded union scale for every producer and backup musician involved—$ 160.46 an hour and $80.23 an hour respectively...

...it doesn't take into account what that $10 billion could buy in the way of new roads to help U.S...

...If we lost Davis-Bacon, you would quickly see the return of the practices that made Davis-Bacon necessary in the first place," says Jay Power, legislative representative of the AFL-CIO...

...The GAO found it is often higher than it should be...

...the shameful need to build or rebuild housing for the poor...

...But standing in the way are two powerful groups that are so busy defending an old-fashioned idea that they are blind to its shortcomings...

...But let's say a contractor decides he wants or needs the federal job, as is often the case for a struggling young-firm...

...Got better hours and a big desk at Parker Center...

...From lock-step thinking like that, you'd never guess this legislation costs taxpayers $2.8 million a day, or, if you'd rather, $10 billion a decade...

...Stenholm's reform amendment has picked up only about 50 Democratic supporters...

...Wake me when it's over...

...Rowe's sad stories find an echo from the West Coast in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times by a senior Los Angeles police detective, Greg Meyer, who writes: Please let it be a Halloween nightmare...

...And 1 make more than $50,000 a year to sit at a desk at Parker Center...

...For more on' how that kind of union thinking continues to stifle American productivity, see sidebar...

...Change and worker initiatives are evident throughout the industry: Weirton Steel's unionized workers took over the whole company, and the 3,900-member union at LTV Steel's Bar Division voted this fall to buy the division and run it themselves...

...50,000, but adds more paperwork through a new category—rehab work—with a $15,000 threshold...

...As the unions hold out on Davis-Bacon, their position in the industry is slipping badly...

...It means using workers only in strict job classifications, or changing a carpenter's pay scale to the electrician's rate in the middle of the day because he threaded a piece of electrical conduit through a stud wall, or to a truck driver's rate because he drove a flatbed truck across the lot...

...Democrats have become so tightly linked with unions and so dependent on the union vote that Rep...

...in Washington, D.C., one of the earliest and most successful tenant-managed public housing developments...

...You want to know how to solve the low-income housing crisis...

...But if past experience is any guide, we shouldn't wait for unions to lead that charge...

...by 1987 they had taken over 70 percent of the marketplace, according to the Associated Builders and Contractors...

...What if the stroke of a congressional pen would help rebuild the nation's crumbling bridges and highways even as it reduces the budget deficit...

...While we're dreaming, why shouldn't this same initiative help minority and female workers gain a foothold in one of America's highest paying industries...

...Students strain to hear through the din...

...We are essentially making it impossible for the small guy to do this...

...While it lasted...

...Bowland's defect...

...nually just to administer and as much as $1 billion a year in added construction costs...

...Austin Murphy and Rep...

...It was a good program...

...In 1970, only 30 percent of the country's contracting firms were open shops...

...The AFL-CIO and its Building Trades Council are actively promoting the Murphy-Hawkins amendment while labeling the Stenholm approach "draconian" and bad for American workers...

...Besides, today's construction workers are in high demand...

...Most opponents of Davis-Bacon consider the Stenholm amendment a solid first step, since repeal at this point seems unlikely...

...English is the second language for most of the merchants, and now they've got to fill out eight forms just to get started...

...Most of the contractors are Hispanic or Korean," says Mike Reardon, who administers the program for the Lawrence Avenue Development Corp...

...The Democrats have the best shot at it...

...It could help the nation address five overlapping crises: the growing federal debt that eats up $173 billion a year in interest...

...The students here are not the problem...

...The blow to the auto industry came more slowly but just as forcefully...

...She opposed Davis-Bacon...

...Charles Peters...

...Then the Japanese automakers marched in and told the United Auto Workers where to go: the union is still smarting from its recent defeat in Smyrna, Tennessee, where Nissan workers voted 2 to 1 against unionization...

...Lee was just out of film school, Mother Jones magazine wanted to make a film about a bicycle messenger...

...Chief how could you he so naive...

...after years of small defeats as imports gained market share, unionized plants began closing and work forces were cut as sub-assembly work was contracted out to more competitive, nonunion shops...

...The unions, if they let Davis-Bacon reform come sooner rather than later, could begin attracting the minorities and women that will be tomorrow's workers and dues-payers...

...The workers can't understand [when the wage is cut]," says Thomas of the minority contractors association...

...The law's tentacles have reached beyond federal projects, because many states have passed local prevailingwage laws...

...And that's only the drain on the federal budget...

...Even though each could score important gains in membership and power with the right move, they're not making it...

...They are inner-city achievers, who aspire to become doctors and lawyers...

...In 1979, after the GAO conducted studies of Davis-Bacon that led to negative conclusions, it did a full-scale investigation that found a program so difficult to administer fairly—and so expensive to the nation— that it wrote a scathing report with this breathtakingly concise title: "The Davis-Bacon Act Should Be Repealed...

...Instead, Higginbottom and other contractors on federal construction jobs must grit their teeth and work to the Davis-Bacon requirements...

...So let's say Higginbottom wants to hire some of the unskilled black men from the neighborhood where he is building houses...

...They should be paid the prevailing $18 an hour [wage] ,' a union spokesman said...

...The point is, Davis-Bacon isn't very popular with blacks in construction...

...the looming infrastructure crisis, which at some point soon will force hundreds of billions of dollars worth of needed construction...

...And a gun...

...It is a business-stifling paperwork monster that costs taxpayers $12 million anPatrick Barry writes on urban affairs and business for U S. News & World Report and several Chicago magazines...

...The catchy pop segments were cut...

...Down the street from Chicago's biggest highrise projects, where graffiti mars the hallway outside the police station and where stores hide behind steelplate security doors, Higginbottom's manicured and tightly managed properties somehow repel broken glass and gangs...

...It always means paying workers weekly and sending weekly reports to the Department of Labor, at an industrywide cost of roughly $190 million per year...

...These people would eat their own young to get a contract...

...And the forms must be filled out...

...It doesn't matter if the construction firm is a nonunion "open shop" where innovation and get-thejobdone attitudes are encouraged...

...I've got to start out a guy at $16 an hour to find out if he knows how to dig a hole...

...There are three groups that could benefit by making that phrase mean something: the Democrats, the Republicans, and the unions...

...The culprits: Big Labor and its mostly Democratic support team in Congress...

...Even the big contractors are switching over, with 45 percent of the top 400 construction companies now open-shop, up from just 8 percent in 1973...

...In Chicago, that means paying carpenters $23 an hour, including benefits, and paying laborers $18.82 an hour for hauling in the drywall...

...police work...

...The jobs are typically small, about $40,000 on the average, and most of the contractors are tiny construction companies...