Prevailing Wage: The sordid truth about racism and the Davis-Bacon Act

Recently, at First State Politics, Dave Burris has taken considerable heat for his stand that Delaware's Prevailing Wage laws should be repealed. I happen to agree with him, but that's not the point of this post. The arguments for and against this policy involve unions, taxpayer interest in reducing costs, and a wide variety of other factors, all of which can be argued with logic, passion, and evidence by all comers. That debate has been fruitful and enlightening from all sides, even though I doubt it has changed the position of too many (if any) of the participants.

However, Dave made the following comment during the course of the debate:

According to many scholars, prevailing wage laws were first created in order to help labor unions stifle the prevalence of black labor that was undercutting their racket.

This has been seized upon by the Progressive blog Delaware Watch for an extended posting Disgusting: Dave Burris’ Use of the Race Card in the Prevailing Wage Debate, in which the author says,

I want to address an “argument” that is not only irrelevant to the economic points he attempts to make but is in fact a disgusting and, as I will show below, a laughably erroneous smear [followed by the Dave Burris quote cited above].

There follows an impassioned description of the labor situation in 1931 (the second year of the Great Depression) in which the Federal prevailing wage law--the Davis-Bacon Act--was passed. Delaware Watch goes on to cite Dr. David Belman's draft study of the Davis-Bacon Act that concludes,

As Professor Belman points out Senator Bacon’s words actually demonstrate that the issue was not about race but about contractors using itinerant labor to slash local wages and worsen working conditions:

"In any case, Bacon explicitly stated that the issue was not whether the outside labor was black but rather whether the outside labor undercut local union wages and working conditions. When Georgia congressperson Upshaw suggested that the problem was created by the presence of black labor, Bacon responded: the same thing would be true if you should bring in a lot of Mexican laborers or if you brought in any nonunion laborers from any state."

And again:

As a matter of fact, according to Professor Dale Belman, the Davis-Bacon Act Congressional debates and hearings were remarkable for their lack of racial references:

"In fact, direct reference to race in the debate over Davis-Bacon was rare. Of the 31 Senators and Representatives who spoke in favor of the Davis-Bacon Act in 1931, Alabama Representative Allgood is the only one to have explicitly mentioned the issue of race. Furthermore, only one of the thirteen witnesses who spoke at Senate and House hearings in that year mentioned the issue of race. Thus, the view that Congressional debate demonstrates that the Davis-Bacon Act was motivated by racial animus relies primarily on the view that proponents of the Act hid their animus with racial code words."

So Delaware Watch has shown that Dave Burris has committed a "disgusting" act by playing "the race card" and distorting scholarly consensus on the issue of racism and the Davis-Bacon Act?

Not quite. In fact, not even close.

Belman's conclusions are, in fact, quite revisionist and do not reflect the consensus of general historical, sociological, economic, or political research on race and the Davis-Bacon Act.

Some examples:

1) Dr. Richard Vedder is Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio; in Employment Effects of Prevailing Wages by Race, he writes,

Earlier it was suggested that prevailing wages should reduce employment opportunities for groups subject to racial discrimination, such as blacks. The historical evidence is that from the very beginning some proponents of the Davis-Bacon Act and companion state legislation wanted to reduce construction employment for African-Americans.(17) Although a detailed examination of this issue as it pertains to Michigan is beyond the scope of this study, some descriptive statistical evidence is consistent with the view that the Michigan law has disadvantaged blacks more than whites,

.

2) In 1993 the Washington DC-based Institute for Justice filed suit against the Department of Labor regarding the Davis-Bacon Act, arguing in part that

The Davis-Bacon Act was passed in 1931 at the urging of unions to stifle competition from migrant black workers by requiring "prevailing wages" on all federal construction projects....

The National Association of Minority Contractors has opposed the law due to its devastating impact on minority contracting opportunities. The black unemployment rate in the construction industry in the fourth quarter of 1992 was 26.8 percent -- more than twice the white unemployment rate.

3) This was also the position taken by USA Today in 1993:

The 1931 legislation designed to keep black construction workers from jobs on Depression-era public works projects continues to promote discrimination six decades later.

The U.S. can be proud of the strides made over the past several decades toward ensuring legal equality for black Americans. Especially since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Federal government has engaged in massive efforts to stamp out discrimination. Yet, since 1931, that same government has aided and abetted racial discrimination through enforcement of an expensive Jim Crow law known as the Davis-Bacon Act.

Passed at the beginning of the Depression at the instigation of the labor union movement, Davis-Bacon was designed explicitly to keep black construction workers from jobs on Depression-era public works projects. Today, the act continues to restrict the opportunities of blacks on Federal and Federally subsidized projects by favoring disproportionately white, unionized, and skilled workers over disproportionately black, non-unionized, and unskilled ones.

By the 1930s, most major unions that represented skilled construction workers completely excluded blacks from their ranks. A few others relegated them to segregated locals. Despite their general exclusion from craft unions and discrimination in vocational education and occupational licensure, construction in the South in 1930 provided blacks with more jobs than any industry except agriculture and domestic service. Because the effects of union and educational discrimination hardly were felt in unskilled construction jobs, blacks performed most of that work in the South. They also did much skilled construction work there, composing 17% of southern carpenters, for example.

4) In 2002 the US Senate Republican Policy Committee advocated for the repeal of Davis-Bacon. I'm not citing this one for the economic arguments that the Republicans used, but for the direct quotations of period participants that pretty thoroughly refutes Dr Belman's 1997 assertion that race had nothing to do with Davis-Bacon:

In the first half of the 20th century, southern black migrants were able to compete with exclusive white northern unions by offering to do the same jobs for less, evoking economic and racial animosity toward black labor. In one infamous episode, a 1917 union-led demonstration in East St. Louis to protest the “growing menace” of “[t]he immigration of the Southern Negro into our city” erupted in violence that left 39 blacks dead.

While W.E.B. DuBois blamed “[Samuel] Gompers and his Trade Unions,” American Federation of Labor (AFL) President Gompers blamed local businessmen who had “lur[ed] colored men into that city to supplant white labor.”

Representative Robert Bacon was a Long Island Republican who once introduced a statement from 34 professors into the Congressional Record calling for limits on immigration from countries “in which the population is not predominantly of the white race.” Bacon’s complaints about an Alabama firm that brought in black laborers for a federal construction contract in his district found an audience with Republican Senator and former Labor Secretary James J. Davis of Pennsylvania.

Racial resentment permeated debate over Davis-Bacon. Testifying in favor, AFL President William Green complained, “Colored labor is being brought in to demoralize wages.”

Representative John Cochran, a Missouri Democrat, commented:

“I have received numerous complaints in recent months about southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing in employees from the south.”

Alabama Democrat Representative Miles C. Allgood described why 1931 was a particularly important moment to block minority laborers from public works jobs:

“Reference has been made to a contractor from Alabama who went to New York with bootleg labor. That is a fact. That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country. This bill has merit, and with the extensive building program now being entered into, it is very important that we enact this measure.”

Representative William Upshaw of Georgia responded wryly to Representative Bacon’s parochial interest:

“You will not think that a southern man is more than human if he smiles over the fact of your reaction to that real problem you are confronted with in any community with a superabundance or large aggregation of negro labor.”

The racial and economic animosity was palpable.

“What would be the result if cheap labor was brought into my city?” Representative Cochran asked. “It would be resented, and trouble would result.”

5) A Spring 2007 article in Sociation Today, The Official Journal of The North Carolina Sociological Association discusses Davis-Bacon's suspension during the Hurricane Katrina clean-up, and says,

Reinstatement of the Davis-Bacon Act was hardly a generous policy shift on behalf of New Orleans residents, especially in light of the act's historical entanglement in explicit racism and discriminatory practices (Bullock and Frantz 2005). Rather, reinstatement of Davis-Bacon served as an extension of previous neoconservative and neoliberal racial projects organized around labor: it is "simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines (Omi and Winant 1994, p. 56)." This occurs through two mechanisms: 1) racialization of laborers and 2) the state's use of color-blind language to initiate or amend a variety of policies.

6) Finally, this from the Foundation for Economic Education in 1994:

Davis-Bacon, passed in 1931, requires private contractors to pay “prevailing wages” to employees on all construction projects receiving more than $2,000 in federal funding. The Secretary of Labor is charged with conducting surveys of a region’s wages and setting rates for up to 100 various classifications of workers. Most often, the “prevailing wage” corresponds to the union wage, especially in urban areas, where union membership tends to be higher. The Davis-Bacon Act covers approximately 20 percent of all construction projects in the United States and affects more than 25 percent of all construction workers in the nation at any given time.

The Act was passed in order to prevent non-unionized black and immigrant laborers from competing with unionized white workers. The discriminatory effects continue, as even today minorities tend to be vastly under-represented in highly unionized skilled trades, and over- represented in the pool of unskilled workers.

Half a dozen citations ranging from 1993-2007 should serve to illustrate several points:

a) It is the generally scholarly consensus that racial discrimination played a HUGE role in the passage of the Davis-Bacon Act, and that the Unions expressed a strong interest in the act's passage explicitly to restrict the opportunities of black workers, who were most usually segregated at that time in "colored locals."

b) The history of labor unions in America, while notable for the many contributions that those organizations have made on behalf of the working class, is also a history that includes considerable incidents of both systematic and episodic racism, sexism, and nativism. To a large extent these elements have disappeared in the labor movement today (except for the nativist strain), but to pretend that they did not exist is disingenuous at best.

c) Dave Burris may be right or wrong with regard to his economic and political arguments about the Prevailing Wage act in Delaware, but his comments on the unions' original intent to use the law to keep black workers out of competition for high wages, or the fact that many analysts today see prevailing wage laws continuing to discriminate against minorities, is a mainstream argument and does not constitute playing the race card.

To suggest otherwise in the face of overwhelming evidence is--well--disgusting.