The primary premise of the stimulus bill, otherwise known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was to keep workers working and to put earned income in their pockets.
One of the tools to ensure the lion’s share of Vermont’s stimulus proceeds doesn’t end up in the hands of a few large paving company owners is the federal Davis-Bacon law. In place for 70 years, it creates a special minimum wage for all the trades who work on highway and building projects. It is meant to ensure that federal money is not used to pay less than livable wages to American workers.
Unfortunately, though these rates are supposed to be revised every 3 years in every U.S. county, many Vermont rates haven’t been updates in 19 years. This means workers are not afforded proper wage protections. On the other side, it forces contractors to go through the absurd and abundant paperwork process to confirm, in many cases, they are not paying below Vermont’s minimum wages. A waste of time for them, at no value to the worker.
In the Legislature, I helped pass a bill that creatively modernizes the required wages in Vermont for stimulus-funded work. This needs to be in place until the federal government steps up and revises the Davis-Bacon rates.
The good news is that Bernie has been joined by the rest of Vermont’s Congressional delegation to request just that from the Department of Labor.
Read here for more: http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200912/120409b.html