Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, this is the amendment that strikes the funds that might be used to enforce the Davis-Bacon wage scale. That is a piece of legislation that passed here in this Congress sometime about 1931. It was designed to keep African Americans out of the labor force in New York as they were building Federal buildings. It is a remnant of the Jim Crow law. In fact, it is the only remnant that remains, as near as I believe, of the Jim Crow law. So it comes down to this. When you have a relationship between two people and they agree to a wage scale, that is all that should be required here. Instead, this Federal minimum wage scale sets a union scale. It is not prevailing wage; it is union scale. I have dealt with Davis-Bacon wage scales all of my business life. I started a construction company in 1975. We almost immediately had to deal with the Federal Government coming in and saying, on this side of the road you shall pay your shovel operator this, and on the other side of the road you shall pay him something that might be half again more than that, and the guy that runs the grease gun gets this, and the one that runs the excavator gets that. The Federal Government micromanaging and disrupting the efficiencies in our construction companies results in far higher costs for our construction projects.…”