CHAMBERSBURG – Two pieces of legislation in the Pennsylvania General Assembly have more than a few folks scratching their heads.
One is expanding the prevailing wage to include custom pieces in construction.
The other is the Family Medical Leave Act.
Michele Jansen of News Talk 103.7FM pointed out, “I’m a little confused about some bills that have come out of the Senate, the GOP-controlled Senate. We have expanded prevailing wages, which only four states have done. California wrote the model legislation, kind of confused about that. By the way, Senator Mastriano, Senator Judy Ward, they both voted no on that, but of course leadership voted yes, as did the majority of the members, so it is now in the House’s hands, and I just frankly don’t see the house not passing that. Then the other one is the family and medical leave also coming out of the Senate. I was a little surprised at that one. These are legislative pieces that have only passed in very blue states.”
PA Representative Chad Reichard said, “We’ve seen versions of those go through the House, both go through labor and industry, which I happen to sit on, and again they were party line votes for the most part. I mean, we have some of our southeast members who vote for it, but the expand the prevailing wage, prevailing wages requires municipalities, when they’re paying contractors to pay essentially top-tier rates, Philadelphia scale wages, which creates more headache for a lot of our contractors, because they don’t want to bid on the projects, because of just the internal conflict there, but it increases the cost to our taxpayers, so instead of getting something done for the lowest cost, as is the reason we have the bidding, the labor rates increase with that, and it almost doubles, if not triples, the cost of a project.”
Reichard continued, saying that, “We’ve been looking at prevailing wage reform, the threshold for when prevailing wage kicks in has been, I think $25,000 since the 1960s and we’ve been talking about adjusting it for inflation, which would take it to 100,000 plus, but it seems like what the Senate’s doing, or the legislation that they passed, they didn’t reform the threshold, they expanded the number of projects that are eligible. So now with that legislation, projects and prefab type projects that are taking place off site, the wages that the folks who are creating that product have to be scale wage, right? So it is an absolute expansion. It creates more headaches. It’s going to cost the taxpayers more money, and it’s bad government. So, I’m not understanding why they did that. We’ve certainly been relying on the Senate to stop some bad legislation. Smarter people than me are making those calls, but I’ll certainly be a no on both of these bills as they go through.”
Jansen said, “Just a point of context here, they did try to pass an amendment just to increase it from 25,000 to 250,000, which is where it is in Maryland, by the way, and that was tabled, and there were two other amendments, I don’t recall exactly what they were, tabled. They passed it just sort of clean with that expansion through. I’m assuming it has something to do with being an election year, but a little head scratcher there for myself. I guess we’ll see what happens.”