US judge blocks Biden’s wage bill on construction projects By Reuters
Written by Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) – A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s legislation that expands cases where construction contractors are required to pay existing workers wages for $200 billion in federally funded infrastructure projects.
US District Judge Sam Cummings in Lubbock, Texas, said the US Department of Labor does not have the authority to impose prevailing wage requirements where government agencies do not expressly include them in contracts and pass them on to truck drivers working on construction sites.
“Presidents and their agencies … do violence to the Constitution when they try to amend Acts of Congress to suit their own policy,” wrote Cummings, the nominee of former Republican President Ronald Reagan.
Cummings blocked the law, which went into effect last October, from being implemented nationwide pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by the Associated General Contractors of America, a major construction trade group.
The Department of Labor and the United General Contractors did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The New Deal Act, the Davis-Bacon Act, mandates the Department of Labor to establish wage floors for state-funded construction projects, based on the income of certain jobs in certain geographic areas.
Today, there are salaries for more than 1 million construction workers on projects worth 200 billion dollars.
The Biden administration’s legislation revived the method of calculating those wages that excluded many low-wage workers and led to higher wage rates, abandoned by the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Other trade groups are opposing those changes in a separate pending lawsuit.
The law made several other important changes including giving the existing wage standards “statutory effect,” meaning they remain in effect and agencies are no longer required to expressly include them in contracts, and expanding the definition of “mechanics and laborers” covered by the law to include delivery truck drivers in workplaces.
The Associated General Contractors challenged those two regulations in a lawsuit filed in November, saying they go beyond the Labor Department’s authority to set prevailing wage levels.
Cummings on Monday agreed and said the law will cause irreparable damage to construction businesses, including calling some of them out of government contracts, if it continues to operate.
In accepting this law, the Ministry of Labor said that it is important that the existing wage laws be modernized in order to reflect changes in the law and the economy.
This has been confirmed by the unions and others who support this law, who said that it will ensure that workers are paid appropriately and prevent wage theft, especially in the expansion of projects to build clean electricity.
