On March 11, 2022, the Department of Labor (DOL) announced a notice of proposed rulemaking ("NPRM") related to the Davis Bacon Act (the "Act"), entitled "Updating the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts Regulations." The move to modernize the Act's regulations looks to deliver changes promised by President Biden to use the Act and its prevailing wage jobs as a method to "rebuild the infrastructure of this country" and to revitalize the country's economy through infrastructure and labor reform.
The Act applies to contracts in excess of $2,000 to which the Federal Government or the District of Columbia was a party for construction, alteration, or repair. Initially passed by Congress in 1931, the Act's stated purpose is to protect construction workers by requiring public contracts to pay the local prevailing wage where the work was performed.
Fifty-two years after the Act's passage, the Reagan Administration reworked how the government would calculate prevailing wages by removing a "30-percent" calculation rule that was in place since 1935. In 1983, DOL set the process of determining "prevailing wage" as: (1) any wage rate paid to a majority of workers, and (2) the weighted average rate. Now, nearly forty years after the Reagan Administration's revisions, DOL's new proposal represents an effort by the Agency to reverse course because the Department now believes the 1983 changes resulted in too much reliance on weighted averages to the detriment of construction workers.
To that end,...
President Donald Trump made a series of false claims at his Monday press conference about the war with Iran, during which his remarks strayed into other foreign policy issues. Trump also made mult...