On October 20
th the Bush Department of Labor (DOL) issued a parting shot to the Davis-Bacon Act. Not since the Reagan Administration has there been a frontal assault on the certified payroll report, which is the central enforcement mechanism available to government investigators responsible for enforcement of the
Davis-Bacon Act.
The proposed rule will eliminate the decades-old requirement that contractors must provide government enforcement agencies with the identities of who is working on federal and federally-assisted construction projects. These recordkeeping requirements ensure that there is a meaningful and easily accessible tool in the hands of government investigators to enforce the Davis-Bacon Act on thousands of federal and federally-assisted construction projects around the nation. Without these key recordkeeping requirements in the hands of government investigators, fraud becomes rampant on federal construction projects and workers are cheated out of their hard-earned wages and fringe benefits.
The Bush Administration’s justification is that it is acting to protect workers’ privacy, even though federal courts have long held that the public cannot obtain the addresses and social security numbers of workers. These personal identifiers are deleted from payroll reports when the public requests to review them.
Weekly certified payroll reports serve as the central tool which allows the federal government to ensure compliance with prevailing wage and fringe benefit requirements. Armed with the certified weekly report, federal agencies can interview workers and contractors and compare the certified payrolls to other employer and worker records to determine if there has been underpayment of wages, misclassification of workers, fringe benefit abuses and illegal kickbacks on federal construction projects.
If government investigators do not have easy access to the addresses of workers who may have long left a construction site, they will have no means to investigate once a project is completed and the contractors, subcontractors and workers are long gone from the site of the work.
The difficulties which already exist in performing investigations in this transient industry are legendary. Depriving government investigators of a ready means to contact workers to verify their wages will place insurmountable barriers in front of them at a time when the Bush Administration has slashed their budgets and their numbers over the past eight years.
In addition, enforcement at the state level will be undermined in the states which require contractors to submit the federal payroll reporting form (WH Form 347) on state-funded projects under their “little Davis-Bacon” acts.
The proposed rule is nothing more than a blatant attempt by the Bush Department of Labor in its last days to severely weaken enforcement of the wage and fringe benefit protections available to thousands of construction workers at a time when their standard-of-living is already severely threatened by hard economic times.