Quoting Bible, Cutting Worker Pay

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Quoting Bible, Cutting Worker Pay



Dan Haar

September 11 2005

The Bush administration, never satisfied to rest on its laurels, has found a way to shock and stun advocates for American workers who thought they'd seen it all.

In a highly televised and publicized stunt, President Bush on Thursday called for a "National Day of Prayer and Remembrance For Victims of Hurricane Katrina."

"Across our nation," Bush said solemnly, "so many selfless deeds reflect the promise of the Scripture: `For I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in.' I encourage all Americans to respond with acts of kindness in the days ahead."

Fine. That passage was from the Book of Matthew. Hours later, after most news deadlines had passed, the President quietly invoked the Book of George to stab in the back thousands of poor Katrina victims.

Bush used his powers to suspend a law that for 74 years has guaranteed a decent wage to construction workers in federal contracts. The suspension applies to more than 100 counties and parishes in the states hit by Katrina - indefinitely, for all contracts, whether or not they are meant to clean up and rebuild devastated areas.

The order cancels "prevailing wages," which assure that workers on federal jobs receive hourly pay akin to workers doing similar work in those areas. Prevailing wages in the Deep South states are barely above poverty: $9.55 an hour, for example, for a construction laborer in New Orleans.

Now Bush is yanking away even that shaky floor - for the very same people hardest hit by the nation's worst natural disaster. We don't know how much that poor laborer will earn under Bush's decree, but let's face it, we're talking about slave wages here for a desperate group of workers washed out of their homes, out of their jobs, out of the world as they knew it.

Bush did this on the same day when he called on the Lord.

Does this man have no shame? Is there no level he won't stoop to, to line the pockets of his buddies in business? We might wonder how his mother could have raised him this way, but we've already seen Barbara Bush's disgraceful statements about low-income people.

Consider, Bush has put little or nothing in place to control the money that will flow to businesses receiving chunks of the $62.3 billion authorized so far for Katrina relief. Five private firms have already been hired, and a sixth, Vice President Cheney's Halliburton, is already on the job, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Count on seeing hundreds of no-bid federal contracts for all sorts of companies hoping for a way to help out in this national effort.

Count on seeing workers lose wages in hundreds of federal contracts that have nothing whatsoever to do with hurricane damage. In addition to swaths of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, Bush threw in Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties in Florida, areas not devastated by the storm.

Count on seeing the poverty rates in these areas - already among the highest in the nation before Katrina - rise sharply with no relief from federal reconstruction efforts.

And we thought the whole economic point of all this federal spending was that it helped restore some lost prosperity as it rebuilt cities and towns. It's more than a touch ironic that the administration - having botched the rescue in a national embarrassment - has spent great effort in recent days putting emergency cash in the hands of low-income victims.

Bush's stated reason for suspending the prevailing wage law is to "cut red tape" and "relieve the burden from the backs of taxpayers" in this emergency. The "red tape" comes in the form of wage records that employers in federal contracts must keep - until now.

As for the burden on taxpayers, let's do some simple arithmetic. Suppose 100,000 workers each labor for 1,000 hours on these federal contracts - big numbers - and suppose each one earns $2 an hour less than he or she would have earned, thanks to Bush's order. That still amounts to a savings of only $200 million, a rounding error in the total cost of Katrina.

A rounding error for the taxpayers, but a precious $2,000 out of the pockets of working families struggling to rebuild their lives - in the precise counties where Bush invoked prayer to help working families.

The law at issue is the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, adopted in the Great Depression to make sure government did not help drive wages down at a time of widespread unemployment. Presidents have rarely suspended Davis-Bacon. Richard Nixon did it very briefly, once. Ronald Reagan never did it. George H.W. Bush did it after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, but in a much more targeted way, when a region's economy was not in shambles.

This time around, American families at the middle of the pay scale have lost buying power for four straight years, unprecedented in years of economic growth.

There's a healthy debate about whether suspending Davis-Bacon even saves money at all, as both sides cite studies showing costs lining up in their favor in the long run. Anyway, U.S. Rep. George Miller, ranking Democrat on the House labor committee, pointed out Friday that there's no guarantee against contractors simply pocketing the short-term savings.

Even Bush's own Labor Department distanced itself from his order Friday, and that agency is headed by Elaine Chao, who has proudly stripped workers of organizing and overtime rights. A spokesman there offered no comment on Chao's role in the order and referred questions to the White House.

Much has been said these past two weeks about how Katrina has laid bare America's racial and economic divide. Hogwash. The divide has long been obvious to everyone. Bush, never complacent, has acted to make it worse.

Dan Haar can be reached at [email protected].

Copyright 2005, Hartford Courant
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