Obama to 84% Of Americans – Drop Dead
WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) today denounced an Executive Order signed by President Obama that repeals Executive Order 13202, that prohibited federal agencies and recipients of federal funding from requiring contractors to sign union-only project labor agreements (PLAs) as a condition of performing work on federal and federally funded construction projects.
It will be interesting to learn how this particular little gift to the American people will play out. If I recall correctly, most givernment project typically require a “prevailing wage” be paid. If in a given region your typical concrete guy makes $28.00 per hour plus benefits, the prevailing wage requirements require that anyone performing a contract would pay some percentage of the prevailing wage. While this does keep non-union contractors from deeply undercutting union contractors, at least it introduces some competition into a labor pool. Prevailing wages are calculated from non-union workers as well as union workers.
Now a government project can demand not that prevailing wages be paid, but that only union members be offered jobs. Nice work. If a fancy project in President Obama’s native Chicago begins, the local political thugs can see to it that only their union pals need bother applying for the job.
Only 16% of Americans work in a union. Millions of employees will get sent the bill for this pork-laden stimulus package – The Milwaukee School District will receive 84 million of our hard-earned dollars to build new schools even though 15 buildings are already vacant. In return, the overwheliming majority of them will not be allowed to work on the projects if the project managers elect to require union-only labor to perform them.
OK class, what happens when you increase demand and reduce supply – in this case labor? That is correct, you have wage inflation. Of course wage inflation will only affect the union labor force. Non-union labor will be frozen out of many projects. Prevailing wages will probably go up, however, so now the price tage of other projects will rise.
Couple this with Obama’s pomise to sign legislation eliminating secret ballots in union elections and you can see who his administration thinks about first. Good deal for the 16% of Americans who are union, but I guess the rest of us can just suck it up andcut the checks.
