Posted on 04/14/2014 9:19:19 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Lately, labor law issues have been much in the news, including the vote against the UAW at Volkswagens Chattanooga plant, and the ruling that college football players are free to unionize. And on March 31, another federal labor statute was the focal point of a court decision, namely the Davis-Bacon Act.
Here is the background on the law. In 1931, Republican Congressman Robert Bacon (NY) teamed up with Republican Senator James Davis (PA) to push through a bill to rectify an egregious wrong (at least as they and some of their constituents saw things) that construction contractors were choosing to employ lower-wage non-union black workers on federal projects rather than employing higher-wage and mostly unionized white workers.
The Horror allowing some workers to compete by accepting lower compensation! Bacon and Davis had been trying to enact their anticompetitive bill since 1927. It was finally passed and was signed into law by President Hoover on March 31, 1931.
In order to protect against the employment of lower-cost construction workers on federal projects, the law declares that on all such projects, laborers must be paid at the prevailing wage. So instead of simply allowing competition on that aspect of federal contracting, we have to pay bureaucrats in the Department of Labor to find out what the prevailing wage is for all the different kinds of construction labor. What they find to be the prevailing wage is almost always the union-scale wage in the nearest locale where there are union contracts.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Don’t forget to get your taxes done tomorrow. Pay your fair share. Millions of bureaucrats and welfare slobs depend on you.
Labor law in general should be repealed.
Let employers and employees decide on their actions—and suffer the consequences within the law—as a result.
Ignorance just flows year after year from one politician to the next one. Politics breeds ignorance.
The entire permitting and licensing apparatus was designed to keep “cheap southern labor” out. “Cheap sounthern labor” is a euphemism for blacks. Sadly, whites sat buy and watched the leviathan grow because, at the time, it was doing their will.
We got government schooling the same way. Protestants, fearing the growing Papist horde would breed them into a powerful majority, demanded compulsory education to indoctrinate the Catholics into the Protestant work ethic.
Today we have a government school system indoctrinating people against the Protestant work ethic. Go figure.
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