Gov. Chet Culver encouraged lawmakers to make a run at prevailing wage legislation that led to a three-day standoff in the Iowa House last year as majority Democrats struggled to find a 51st vote.
“I still believe we need to push forward,” Culver said Wednesday after signing an executive order telling state agencies to consider using project labor agreements on large-scale construction jobs. “We’re talking about paying a carpenter, a pipe-fitter a couple more dollars an hour at a time when, again, families need more income, they need to work, they need to have good wages and that’s what prevailing wage will do.”
Although there’s been no action on prevailing wage this year, House Labor Committee Chairman Rick Olson, D-Des Moines, is having a bill drafted he thinks might be more palatable to the so-called “six-pack” of Democrats who refused to vote for prevailing wage last year.
House Speaker Pat Murphy, D-Dubuque, kept the voting machine open for
68 hours in March, waiting for someone to change their vote to give Democrats a majority on the prevailing wage bill. It didn’t happen.
“It’s what you might call a softer bill,” Olson said, noting it would require the state, regents and community colleges to pay prevailing wage on projects of $100,000 or more. However, local government — cities, counties and school districts — could opt-out of paying prevailing wage on a project-by-project basis, Olson said.
His bill also would set prevailing wage — the hourly wage, usual benefits and overtime paid to the majority of workers, laborers and mechanics for each trade and occupation in a given area — on a county-by-county basis.
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Quad-City Times
James Q. Lynch
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