Political Quotes

“I may be the only Member of Congress, I know of no others, who has earned Davis-Bacon wages and paid Davis-Bacon wages, and I have lived underneath that for over 30 years, 28 years writing paychecks, over 14 consecutive months meeting payroll. I know what this does. But I can tell you the history of it also goes back to an Iowan, an Iowan President, as the gentleman said, Herbert Hoover. But this is the last remaining Jim Crow law on the books that I know of. It was designed to keep blacks out of the construction trade in New York. And I would ask the gentleman from Georgia to join me in helping to start the repeal of this process because this is the aspect of freedom between the employer and the employee. Prevailing wage by definition, union scale in practice, there is no other way to analyze this. Union scale is what gets produced when the Department of Labor produces the proposed prevailing wage. And when you talk about $4 billion set up for cellulosic and its being a highly sophisticated project, yes, it is; and we build these projects without its being union labor sometimes. If they can compete, we do it with union labor.”