Skip to main content

Separate but Equal: State employees and the prevailing wage law

Speaking as someone who would be directly affected by any cuts to State worker benefits, I have absolutely no problem with Governor Jack Markell's plan, as long as it is tied to dumping the prevailing wage requirement for State construction jobs.

The LEAD report estimates that eliminating the prevailing wage requirement just for school construction would save the State $21-34 million dollars annually.

This is almost exactly equivalent to the $30 million saved by doubling State worker premiums for healthcare insurance (on workers who average $41 K annually, which is almost exactly the average per capita income for DE residents).

But let's see if our liberal and progressive friends are willing to accept the idea that union construction workers should share just as much of the pain as State employees.

Comments

Delaware Watch said…
If the LEAD study is based on the Ohio study (which I seem to recall it is), then the prevailing wage analysis is in tatters. See the refutation of it here: http://www.constructionalliance.org/analysisofohiolsc.pdf

You can also hear an audio interview I did w/ Prof. Weisburg here: http://delawarewatch.livejournal.com/30500.html
Dana,
The analysis in the document you cite is indicative more of a disagreement among statisticians who differ on the use and interpretation of regression analysis and the uses thereof than it is of a major problem with the Ohio study. In other words, there are two camps on statistical regression--the Ohio study authors belong to one and the author of this study belongs to another.

That said, the Weisburg rejoinder raises significant questions about the Ohio study, but is not definitive.
Anonymous said…
What prevailing wage does most is REDUCE jobs. If the same amount of money was spent on labor at a straight union wage there would be an additional 15-20% more jobs.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?