Letter to President George W. Bush

On behalf of the 2.2 million members of the National Right to Work Committee, I am writing to express my dismay at your Administration’s decision to reinstate the restrictive and costly Davis-Bacon Act in the devastated Gulf Region next week.

FOR RELEASE: November 4, 2005

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Bush:

On behalf of the 2.2 million members of the National Right to Work Committee, I am writing to express my dismay at your Administration’s decision to reinstate the restrictive and costly Davis-Bacon Act in the devastated Gulf Region next week.

This decision is good news for construction union officials who are hungry for more power and more coerced dues money, but bad news for independent-minded employees, small businesses and taxpayers.

When you were running for office in 2000, you pledged your support for Americans’ Right to Work without having to pay union dues as a condition of employment.

But Davis-Bacon, originally enacted in 1931, effectively undermines the Right to Work by requiring all contractors and subcontractors on federal taxpayer-funded projects, union and nonunion alike, to submit to rigid union job classifications, work rules, and wage rates.

The huge volume of paperwork and other compliance costs foisted on employers by Davis-Bacon deter countless smaller, typically nonunion firms from submitting bids on federally-funded construction.

Of course, the firms that do participate in Davis-Bacon projects ultimately pass on most of their compliance costs to taxpayers. According to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Davis-Bacon artificially raises taxpayers’ construction costs by up to 33%.

The high price of Davis-Bacon is not primarily about wages. In fact, in the areas of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi that were hit by Hurricane Katrina, construction wages today are already quite high due to extraordinarily heavy demand and won’t be affected by the reinstatement of Davis-Bacon.

Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-Ohio), a leader of the 37 House Republicans who have publicly pressured you to reinstate Davis-Bacon along the Gulf Coast, admitted in the October 21 Daily Labor Report that your acquiescence to his demand would do nothing to raise construction wages in the affected areas.

For Organized Labor and its congressional allies and appeasers, the real issue isn’t how much the workers on Gulf Coast reconstruction projects get paid; it’s ensuring that the jobs are, in effect, union-only.

Caving in to union lobbyists’ special interest demand isn’t fair to construction workers, especially the roughly 85% who don’t belong to any union.

It’s also unfair to taxpayers. You owe it to the hard-working Americans who will be forking over billions of dollars for Katrina reconstruction to ensure their money is deployed as efficiently as possible. But now hundreds of millions of dollars allocated for Katrina projects will senselessly be wasted on bureaucratic paper shuffling and union work rule-induced construction bottlenecks.

And there is another major problem with Davis-Bacon: It helps unscrupulous union officials commit fraud.

In the mid-nineties, Oklahoma Labor Commissioner Brenda Reneau launched an investigation of fraud and corruption in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Prevailing Wage Survey, which is mandated under Davis-Bacon.

As Maryland economist A.J. Thieblot noted in a 1998 article, Reneau uncovered “hundreds of bogus wage survey forms, including multiple forms on single projects, and forms from supposedly different sources filled out in the same, distinctive handwriting.”

There were “forms containing phantom data, such as . . . nonexistent ghost workers paid fictional, inflated wages” and forms “reporting phantom jobs, such as one using seven asphalt machines and 21 asphalt related workers” to build a small parking lot that was actually made of concrete.

As a result of Reneau’s investigation, one union official was convicted on 14 counts of making false statements to the government and taxpayers ultimately saved millions of dollars. But similar abuses outside the Sooner State almost certainly continue, undetected, to this day.

Clearly, Davis-Bacon is contrary to the public interest. Your Administration recognized this fact when you exercised your authority to suspend this law to deal with the Hurricane Katrina emergency in early September.

But now your Administration has decided, apparently out of unwillingness to stand up to a small group of congressional Republicans who regularly look to appease union officials, to backpedal from the position you took just two months ago.

Of course, this move will in reality not appease the union hierarchy, which has been shrilly denouncing your Administration from the time it took office. Instead, it will embolden union officials to look for other weaknesses.

Now that your Administration has already flip-flopped on Davis-Bacon suspension, it may be politically impossible to revert to the correct policy in this case.

However, you can still mend fences with millions of Right to Work members and supporters across America.

To send a clear signal your Administration will not repeat the mistake it made last month, I urge you now to endorse the Cleanup and Reconstruction (CARE) Act (S. 1817 and H.R. 3684), introduced by Sen. DeMint and Arizona GOP Rep. Jeff Flake.

The CARE Act would automatically trigger a year-long suspension of Davis-Bacon in future disaster sites that receive presidential emergency declarations.

Mr. President, your Administration should never again allow the small minority of congressional Republicans who consistently kowtow to union officials to dictate the White House’s labor policy. Your advisors have served you poorly on this matter.

Please show you now understand this by granting your prompt public support to S. 1817 and H.R. 3684.

Sincerely,

Mark Mix
President