Restore the Prevailing Wage in Livingston County!

The prevailing wage ordinance sets a floor on the wage component of contractor bids for county work. That floor is generally a bit below the union scale, but not so far below that there is huge pressure on contractors who work with unions to cut their wages. There are other ways the contractors who work with unions can be competitive when the union/non-union wage gap is not too large, such as the higher worker productivity and the higher quality work that union labor does, because their unions invest millions of dollars every year in upgrading the training of their members.

Without a prevailing wage ordinance, the wages of *all* construction workers who do work for the County will fall, whether or not they belong to unions, as a race to the bottom dynamic takes hold. And injury rates on the job site will rise.

This dynamic is not just bad for all construction workers; it is bad for the public if union wages fall substantially, it becomes much harder to support the same level of union training programs through member dues payments. And if the unions can no longer provide that training, either such training will not happen at all -- with the resulting down-skilling of the local construction workforce -- or it will have to be provided by public institutions and paid for with some combination of taxes and tuition.

The loss of more living-wage jobs to race to the bottom dynamics hurts the public interest in another way: it means further hollowing out the middle class in Livingston County. This erodes the county's tax base, forcing increases in tax rates and/or cuts in services.

Last but certainly not least, hollowing out the middle class erodes the quality of democracy. As the great U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it, "“We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

For an overview of evidence on the impacts of ending the prevailing wage in other states, and suspending it at the state level in Michigan from 1994-97, see the three-page summary posted on the web page of the Huron Valley Central Labor Council at hvclc.org.

The Huron Valley Central Labor Council, AFL-CIO represents working people in Washtenaw and Livingston Counties.