Prevailing wages?

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Some companies have a leg up on the competition if they have a minority owner or a women owner. I worked a PW for 1.5 years. My J-man pay was $36 helper was $19 turns out 2 helpers that I know of were wiring up panels and no one told them not to. A guy that works for the state interviewed them when they were working, just asking question what they were doing and who they were. Well long story short those helpers got back pay at J-man wages.

I am finding that a way around PW is if a 3rd party does the project and the School leases the land and building from them thus not needing federal funding because the 3rd party is the funder at about half the project cost.

like they say, ask your owner first. I think projects need to be 51% federally funded to be PW.
 
In Mass, if .01 cent of the job is tax money, it's PW. In a PW enviroment, the only way to pay a "helper" or "apprentice" or whatever you want to call someone who isn't at full journeyman status less than the prescribed wages is if they're in an approved, registered apprenticeship program recognized by the entity funding the project.

On a PW project, a helper or apprentice must be supervised.

The "helpers" in your example were paid back wages because they weren't working in the capacity of helper, they were wiring panels. And more than most likely, they weren't enrolled in any sort of formal, recognized apprenticeship program.
 
I am finding that a way around PW is if a 3rd party does the project and the School leases the land and building from them thus not needing federal funding because the 3rd party is the funder at about half the project cost.
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Show me one documented study that shows any major difference in the total project costs between a PW job and a similar job that is not required to be PW. Every study that I have seen shows a very small difference in total costs and some show sightly lower costs for the PW job.
Don
 
In non-prevailing wage states: dollar value of new construction was $37,305,560,070; total square feet of new construction was 364,346,200; and mean cost per square foot of new construction across all structure types was $74.94
? In prevailing wage states: dollar value of new construction was $241,524,373,519; total square feet of new construction was 3,089,590,300; and mean cost per square foot of new construction across all structure types was $78.17
? Conclusion: There is no statistically significant difference in mean square foot costs (difference is $3.23 per sq. ft.) across all types of construction for the period 1993-2002 for prevailing wage states versus non-prevailing wage states.
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The above is from a study done by the University of Missouri.
 
don_resqcapt19 said:
The above is from a study done by the University of Missouri.
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Great study, but it doesn't get into owner's profit. Those numbers will never come out. What the market will bear is PW. If the project is non-PW, and the owner knows the market will bear PW, the price will be about what PW would have cost.
 
Show me one study
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Here's the first one I found in less than a minute of searching

"The Legislative Research Commission found that Kentucky’s prevailing-wage law increases the cost of labor on public projects like schools and justice centers by as much as 24 percent … and drives up total construction costs by more than 7 percent. At first glance, this might not seem like a lot. But the cost to Kentucky taxpayers adds up to more than $100 million annually."
http://www.bipps.org/ARTICLE.ASP?ID=781


$3.23 a square foot isn't significant? That's not far from the average % net profit for most companies.
 
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Here's the actual study. It says the type of study you cited that uses regression analysis is faulty and why. It also says the majority of peer reviewed studies find costs are increased but there are studies that find it doesn't.

One thing is for sure. PW doesn't lower the cost of public construction.

http://www.lrc.ky.gov/lrcpubs/RR304.pdf
 
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pw job

pw job

The old story you get what you pay for holds true. I just finished a pw job for a schol district and the masons were fly by night. they screwed up a tremendous amount of the job causing other trades to have trickle down grief and steel being refabricated walls being redesigned because this knucklehead got the job. The construction manager just wanted to finish the job on time so the school district got screwed because shoemakers were doing the masonary. I could post pictures of the masonary work that looks like a dr seuss booknconstruction . I dont care If you are in a union or not but try to do your job for gods sake. A lot of waste is in the performance bonds and clerk of the works jobs who oversee the work that is an easy 25%
 
I too just went looking at schools - for another reason... My daughter born 3 weeks ago needs to get on a waiting list for the one in my neighborhood - a different story all together, and in some ways the same story... But as I went looking around at a few of them, I had to ask myself why so many of them were sets of double wide trailers made in Waco TX??? A: Pre-fab limited use, limited life trailers are cheaper to install at Prevailing Wage than BUILDING a real building. IMO the law needs to be scrapped and have contract compliance that is already in place do it's job - rather than this "why pay less" mentality that only seems to increase the dollar number in the profit percentage column - without changing the percentage... Sure, Workers make more money, but are out of work longer due to the lengthy debate over inflated costs. Meanwhile your kids go to school in a trailer park.

I'm tempted to use the "Habitat for Humanity" model and get every Builder and Contractor I can find in my area to BUILD a School. But I can assume that too is in some way a violation of the Bacon-Davis Act? :mad:
 
I could be wrong. J-man PW was $36 normal wages was $18. A school is pretty big, and most likely there was at least 10 electricians there for 1.5 years sometimes up to 30 guys.
 
whoops

whoops

ITO said:
sheldon_ace-
Touching anything Div-15, it does not make you an electrician, but it might make you a plumber.
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how about div 16?
sorry wasn't thinking straight, just ranting from frustration..

Gerry
 
Actually after making my post I looked deeper and it apprears that the results of all of the available studies reflect the views of the group who actually paid for the study.
Don
 
Double Edge said:
Here's the first one I found in less than a minute of searching

"The Legislative Research Commission found that Kentucky?s prevailing-wage law increases the cost of labor on public projects like schools and justice centers by as much as 24 percent ? and drives up total construction costs by more than 7 percent. At first glance, this might not seem like a lot. But the cost to Kentucky taxpayers adds up to more than $100 million annually."
http://www.bipps.org/ARTICLE.ASP?ID=781


$3.23 a square foot isn't significant? That's not far from the average % net profit for most companies.
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I wonder what the NASA program costs Kentucky's taxpayers annually?

So far I haven't seen anyone here claim that the prevailing wage laws were meant to drive construction costs down. But there are other costs to taxpayers when an industry is permitted to simply do whatever it can think of to "value engineer" the labor on a construction project.
 
Double Edge said:
One thing is for sure. PW doesn't lower the cost of public construction.
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And it wasn't meant to. It was meant to stabilize the costs of construction, and it was meant to prevent out of area contractors and non-residents from lower cost of living states from undermining the industries in the areas that passed PW legislation.
 
Actually its a form of protectionism, which organized labor lobbied their representatives hard to get. You can candy coat it all you want but it is what it is.

I am a union contractor so it does not really affect my pricing other than making sure my subs are towing the line. What it does do is make one big headache pile of paperwork along with LEEDS and HUB requirements, but headaches are just part of doing government work.
 
ITO said:
Actually its a form of protectionism, which organized labor lobbied their representatives hard to get. You can candy coat it all you want but it is what it is.
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Of course it's a form of protectionism. And labor leaders lobby hard for more than just PW legislation. They also lobbied hard for minimum wages, labor laws, overtime rates, safety and osha regulations like hard hats, PPE and GFCI protection and MSDS.

You can't blame the collective voice of labor for looking out for it's interests, any more than you can blame a contractor's association for using it's collective strength in numbers to it's advantage.

I am a union contractor so it does not really affect my pricing other than making sure my subs are towing the line.
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As others have said, sometimes PW isn't the same as the local union rate of pay. I know in some States the PW is somehow artificially inflated over and above both union and nonunion scales. I remember reading a couple of stories on exactly how this is done - having something to do with proving that one single job, no matter how small or how few people employed, could pay double the area's typical wages and cause the PW for a large upcoming project to be based on that alone.

What it does do is make one big headache pile of paperwork along with LEEDS and HUB requirements, but headaches are just part of doing government work.
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If it was easy, everyone would do it.
 
There is a pretty big difference between “minimum wages, labor laws, overtime rates, safety and osha regulations like hard hats, PPE and GFCI protection and MSDS”, and making a modification to a free market system that pretty much ensures that a particular group is favored to the point of not really having to be competitive.

The word ‘protectionism’ does not mean ‘work place safety’ it means: : an advocate of government economic protection for domestic producers through restrictions on foreign competitors.

In this case I think foreign and non-union labor is implied.
 
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ITO said:
making a modification to a free market system that pretty much ensures that a particular group is favored to the point of not really having to be competitive.

The word ?protectionism? does not mean ?work place safety? it means: : an advocate of government economic protection for domestic producers through restrictions on foreign competitors.
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Which group is protected? You don't have to be a union contractor to bid a prevailing wage job you just have to pay the prevailing wage( and put up with all the BS ). I know of companies that do a lot of prevailing wage jobs and are not union. I know of one company that does all government work, some jobs pay well and others not much at all.
 
Which group is protected?
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Construction workers, as opposed to factory workers, mechanics, office workers, janitors etc. who don't have special wage protections for their particular type or class of work.
 
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