Mayor Urges Bush To Pay Workers Union Wages for Katrina Rebuilding
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Mayor Bloomberg, taking on President Bush for the second time in less than a week, is asking the federal government to pay prevailing union wages for rebuilding work after Hurricane Katrina.
Mr. Bloomberg appeared yesterday with the president of New York’s Building and Construction Trades Council, Edward Malloy, to announce he was sending a letter to Mr. Bush urging him to reverse course on his decision to waive the requirements of the Davis-Bacon Act. The act normally requires the government to pay workers prevailing union wages.
On Friday, Mr. Bloomberg, citing the importance of abortion rights, said he opposed the confirmation of Mr. Bush’s nominee to be chief justice of the United States, Judge John Roberts Jr.
A White House spokesman, Kenneth Lisaius, said the president is committed to suspending Davis-Bacon to speed up the rebuilding process.
“The president is dedicated to cutting red tape where necessary and making sure that the victims of the storm are well cared for and their communities are restored as quickly as possible,” he said. “That’s what this action will do.”
Mr. Bloomberg, who started the day yesterday speaking at the Laborers’ International Union of North America leadership conference, said that union labor is better.
“I watched what happened at the World Trade Center site, and the numbers are clear – under budget, faster than projected, and with the safety to protect everybody. When you get the best workforce, that’s what you get. You’ve got to pay for it,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “My experience at my company has been that every time we have had construction to do, hiring union labor has got us the services that we need. The quality of the work is there, and that’s one of the reasons our company has been successful, and I’ve always believed in my company, that we want to hire the best, and you have to pay for that and it turns out that you get real value for that.”
Journalists at Mr. Bloomberg’s company, Bloomberg L.P., are not union members.
A spokeswoman for Fernando Ferrer, the Democrat who is running for mayor against Mr. Bloomberg, Christy Setzer, questioned the mayor’s motives. “Mike Bloomberg’s Johnny-come-lately challenging of George Bush is no more than election-year politics from the Republican Party’s biggest donor. New Yorkers would be better served if Bloomberg stood up against the president a lot more often – say, to get us transit security money,” she said.
By defending the Davis-Bacon Act, Mr. Bloomberg puts himself to the left of some centrist Democrats. Writing Monday in the online magazine Slate, Mickey Kaus called the law “notorious” and said it was a case of “a policy that benefits a powerful Democratic special interest (the Building & Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO) while undermining the general interest in affirmative government the Democratic party is supposed to be pursuing (by making virtually everything the government does – including building low-cost housing – unnecessarily expensive).”
Mr. Kaus noted that in 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke an AFL strike over “prevailing wages.” And he said that in the 1970s, “opposition to Davis-Bacon was a litmus test of whether a politician understood the difference between interest-group liberalism and reform liberalism.”
The act, passed in 1931, is named in part for a New York Republican, Robert Low Bacon, who represented Long Island in Congress from 1923 until his death in 1938. A paper on the subject from the libertarian-oriented Cato Institute reports that Bacon took up the issue when a contractor from Alabama brought a crew of black construction workers from there to work on a veterans hospital in Bacon’s congressional district.