Call it “The Further Raise the Cost of Public Projects Act.”
The Republican-controlled Pennsylvania Senate voted 37-13 last week to expand the state Prevailing Wage Act to cover off-site fabrication work for public construction projects.
And the Mush for Brains Caucus is alive and well in Harrisburg.
We’ve long panned the Prevailing Wage Act. It mandates the payment of the inflated union wage, as set by the unions, and at the expense of nonunion workers and, of course, taxpayers.
It has unnecessarily inflated the cost of public works projects in Pennsylvania. Various analyses show the artificial wage-setting raises the cost of public projects anywhere from 17 percent to 30 percent, with the average cost being jacked up by 20 percent.
You can bet the new proposal, which is expected to sail through the Democrat-controlled Pennsylvania House, will only bolster this union-fueled money grab, further harm nonunion shops and blow a big, wet raspberry at John and Jane Q. Taxpayer.
The Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association (PMA) says the measure should be a nonstarter, not only for its inflationary result but also because it complicates supply chains, harms the Keystone State’s industrial competitiveness and pricing flexibility, all the while creating a paperwork nightmare.
Schools, healthcare facilities and “affordable housing” projects all will cost more, opponents say.
The Modular Building Institute (MBI) reminds that prevailing wages were designed “for on-site construction, where workers only perform tasks that align with their discrete trade classification. Carpenters only perform carpentry, plumbers only work on plumbing tasks, and so on. The fabrication of modular buildings is not traditional construction. It is modern manufacturing (emphasis in the original).”
MBI says that in a modular factory, “employees are cross-trained to perform various tasks throughout the manufacturing process, and they regularly move between tasks, and indeed between public and private projects. This well-established industry standard is unsuitable for a prevailing wage regime.”
Translation: Off-site fabrication is more cost-effective and more efficient in many cases. Great news for taxpayers is a threat to organized labor.
“By imposing prevailing wage requirements on the manufacturers who build for Pennsylvania, their almost certain exit from public projects will needlessly inflate costs for desperately needed infrastructure,” MBI warns.
Yet this is what the people’s representatives on the banks of the Susquehanna are supporting – waste, cost and operational inefficiency, inflation, less competition and a deeper regulatory morass.
In other words, Pennsylvania government as usual. Such prevailing insanity serves only two parties – the unions and pols in their pockets.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
