The debate focused on a county ordinance to add prevailing wage language for work performed under county construction contracts. In 2020, the Virginia General Assembly had passed HB833/SB8, which allowed state agencies and localities to require payment of the “prevailing wage” in public construction contracts. Governor Northam signed the bill into law, with a delayed effective date of May 1, 2021. The prevailing wage is determined by the Commonwealth’s Commissioner of Labor and Industry on the basis of applicable prevailing wage rate determinations made by the U.S. Secretary of Labor under the provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act. That’s a long way of saying “construction workers should be paid wages commensurate with their skills and training.”
Seems simple enough. People who work in the construction industry, who show up for work in all kinds of weather, who go home with sore knees and sore backs, but return day after day to complete the assigned project, deserve to be paid a fair wage, and create a pathway to the middle class. Prevailing wages help create that pathway, along with benefits (annual and sick leave, health insurance, and retirement accounts) that have been important attributes for labor since the 1930s. Prevailing wage rates can increase the cost of government projects by as much as 15 percent, but a clearer estimate is that implementation would cost less than half that, closer to five to seven percent. Paying prevailing wage also has One Fairfax-related...
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