Just Say Yes to Prevailing Wage Rates

One of the long-term problems environmentalists have with making alliances with the labor movement is simply not caring that much about unions and what they need, nor what their non-union work does to organized labor. We are making enormous gains on these issues right now, with labor-environmentalist relations the best they have been in decades, as I recently wrote about at length in the Boston Review. So you will have to find me extremely unsympathetic to whining that Minnesota passing a law making restoration work part of the state’s prevailing wage rates is going to hurt the environment. It’s in fact necessary to not only create green jobs but make those green jobs good jobs. That means good wages that you can support a family on.

Workers planting trees and removing buckthorn under state-fundednatural restorationprojects will get a substantial pay hike — from about $18 an hour to more than $40 in some cases — under new language in Minnesota’s prevailing wage law. Nonprofit leaders managing the projects worry the change will diminish the amount of work that gets done across the state.

A handful of the nonprofits sought clarification last week in a meeting with Commissioner Nicole Blissenbach of the Department of Labor and Industry. She confirmed for them that the jobs, including other tasks such as chainsawing, tractor work and herbicide treatment, must now be paid at rates already established for comparable construction work whenever the work is funded in whole or part by state funds. There could be rare exceptions, she told them, but prevailing wages are hard-wired to the type of work laborers perform, not the purpose of the work.

“Are you digging a hole? Are you using a chain saw? Are you driving a skid-steer?” Blissenbach said in an interview after the meeting. “We’re helping the stakeholders to understand which classifications apply to that work.”

Nonprofits largely exist on exploitable low-wage labor, let’s be clear.

It means wildlife habitat projects, trail building, invasive species removal and other restoration endeavors funded by state grants to conservation groups will cost more than the groups are accustomed to paying. One example expressed to Blissenbach is that basic forest and conservation work in Cook County costs less than $18 an hour. Under the prevailing wage law, those same workers will now get paid $40.26 an hour.

The cheaper of those two rates “is much more in-line with market rates for conservation work,” Blissenbach was told in a letter of concern from David Hartwell, chair of the Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Council.

…

Mark Johnson, executive director of the Outdoor Heritage Council, said the law change delivered a shock to the system and that Tuesday’s meeting helped resolve misunderstandings. The conservation groups are getting together to consider state codes for restoration jobs as deadlines approach for projects early next year.

He said project managers want to do the right thing for workers, but they also want the best return on the investment of public dollars. Blissenbach said her staff stands ready to help project managers mesh existing wage standards to the different types of work they assign in the field.

I guess I am not completely unsympathetic for the need for rapid restoration and that this slows that done but there are other values at play and note how the non-profit folks frame this entirely through the market and efficiencies, masking their own responsibility for creating a unequal economic system.

This story is exceptionally biased against labor as most newspapers are, but at least the Laborers get a chance to weigh in:

Kevin Pranis of the Laborers’ International Union of North America didn’t attend the meeting with Blissenbach. He said her agency was right to call on the Legislature to pull state-funded restoration work into the parameters of prevailing wage law. Millions of dollars a year go into the projects for the benefit of the environment and public recreation, and workers deserve equal pay to those working at state-funded construction sites.

Pranis said “your back hurts the same” whether you’re laboring on the edges of a trunk highway or in the woods. His office previously heard from laborers who received less than half as much money for restoration field work than they did for the same type of work at state-funded construction sites.

“If you are doing public works with state funding, all of that is covered by the prevailing wage law,” Pranis said. “The threshold is quite high to say, ‘This is actually a new job and it deserves its own [labor] code.’ “

Pranis said various non-profits that manage labor costs on state-funded public works projects have complained in the past that they work with very small contractors who can’t handle the red tape involved in complying with the prevailing wage law. But over and over, the small firms figure it out, he said. Many of them use readily available computer tools.

That’s exactly right. Hard labor deserves compensation. I’d also wonder what workers these nonprofits are getting at $18 in Minnesota in 2024…….