Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I have to say in contradiction to the gentleman who just spoke, on-the-job injuries, I don't know what would support that, whether or not there is a Davis-Bacon wage scale on that. That has to do with your safety policy on the job. It has to do with the culture of the company, and it has to do, to a degree, with the culture of the projects that you are on. The fewer benefits side of this thing, I think it goes the other way, because Davis-Bacon requires that you add dollars into this Federal- mandated union scale to pay benefits; and when that happens, you are paying a benefit figure on a dollar figure to the employees rather than, say, a health insurance package that is going to take care of them far better and in the long term. I point out also today that we had testimony from the Secretary of Transportation from the State of Oklahoma, Secretary Gary Ridley, who said that they run into the inefficiencies driven by Davis-Bacon where you have as many as three or more different pay scales on a single project that might stretch out over 6, 8, or 10 miles. They end up in different wage scales. So the contractors have to keep track of who crosses that line in what machine. The confusion of all that adds to the inefficiencies as well. The most important thing is this: the taxpayers are paying an unnecessary premium for projects that we could be far ahead of where we are right now if we hadn't had all these years of this Davis-Bacon wage scale.…”