Strengthening Davis-Bacon for all workers

In August and September, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita exposed President George W. Bush’s racist, criminal neglect of the Black population of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It will be forever in his legacy.

On Sept. 7, Bush declared a national emergency and suspended the Davis-Bacon Act (DBA) of 1931. The act sets a wage floor on federal construction contracts and provides that workers on-site be paid no less than “locally prevailing wages.” This blow against organized labor covered Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. This choice is no accident—they are all anti-union, “right-to-work” states.

Bush’s suspension of DBA, had it succeeded, would have strengthened his anti-union, right-wing base, expanded the low-paid workforce and shrunk wages in the Delta region. The suspension was calculated to cut redevelopment costs in New Orleans and the Delta region so as to guarantee the profits of Corporate USA, notably Halliburton/KBR—of which Vice President Dick Cheney is a former CEO—and a host of other anti-union companies supported by the Bush administration that have received contracts without competitive bidding.

On Oct. 26, however, Bush reinstated DBA. This backpedaling revealed weakness and vacillation. Why? Because Katrina is another quagmire, like Iraq and Afghanistan. The president was now shifting his base to “moderate House Repu blicans who argued that [white—MN] Gulf Coast residents were being left out of the recovery and that the region was becoming a magnet for illegal immigrants.” (Washington Post, Oct. 27)

The Post article called the decision “a rare victory for organized labor” and “a defeat for traditional Bush allies, including the construction industry and conservatives in Congress.”

This victory for organized labor has shar pened the fangs of the right wing, which is mobilizing to repeal DBA and restore the suspensions. In the wake of the hurricanes, congressional representatives from the House Republican Study Group have introduced legislation to repeal DBA on the fraudulent grounds that prevailing wages are bureaucratically controlled by unions.

The right wing’s allies include social conservatives like foes of reproductive rights, supporters of the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel Alito Jr., and powerful lobbyists like the Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Man ufacturers and the construction industry. This alliance has won the backing of a section of Black entrepreneurs who claim they can’t submit low bids if they have to pay DBA prevailing wages.

On the books are rules that supposedly guarantee jobs for “minorities” and women through affirmative action “set-asides,” but they are not enforced. The Black-owned companies need subsidies to enable them to win bids on federally financed projects while paying prevailing wages.

Ruling-class strategy is to exploit divisions between organized workers and oppressed nationalities, as happened when the DBA was first introduced, back in 1927. A contractor had employed African-American workers from Alabama to build a Veterans Bureau hospital in Long Island, N.Y., the district of Rep. Robert L. Bacon, a Democrat. The other sponsor was Sen. James Davis, a Penn sylvania Republican and former secretary of labor under three Republican presidents.

Their pet issue was protecting Amer ica’s “racial homogeneity,” a code word for racism. The American Feder ation of Labor was then all white. Samuel Gompers, founder of the AFL and the architect of business unionism, had died a few years earlier and was replaced by William Green, who followed in his footsteps. Craft unions and relatively high-paid, skilled white members dominated the labor scene.

DBA passed in 1931—the depths of the Great Depression and the end of Repu blican President Herbert Hoover’s administration. Millions of workers, skilled and unskilled—white, Black and other nationally oppressed—were unemployed. DBA put a floor on what a company could pay workers on public works construction projects. The law helped keep wages from plunging to rock bottom.

1930s labor upsurge

Amendments to DBA in 1935 forced companies that had violated the law to pay the prevailing wage when bidding for public works programs. The amendments came at the height of a labor upsurge and the beginning of the Congress of Industrial Organization’s (CIO) organizing drives, which included bringing Black and immigrant workers into a powerful union-conscious movement that changed the relationship of class forces. This upsurge was an historic moment in working-class history.

Independent class-wide struggle, general strikes and seizure of plants led to progressive legislation and prevented laws such as DBA from being overturned. The DBA was strengthened in 1964 to include fringe benefits in the calculation of on-site prevailing wages.

However, the DBA has been a political football, kicked around to suit the ruling class. Like all capitalist laws, progressive or reactionary, it reflects the vicissitudes of the times, the changing relationship of class forces and, most important, the struggle for the right of self-determination for the oppressed nationalities.

By the 1970s, the AFL-CIO was on the defensive. President Richard Nixon suspended DBA in February 1971. He blamed the AFL-CIO, and in particular the construction trades, for growing inflation and initiated a wage freeze. But, weakened by the Vietnam War quagmire, he reversed himself after only 28 days and reinstated the act to win organized labor’s support for the widening war.

In September 1992, President George H.W. Bush indefinitely suspended DBA in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew, which devastated southern Florida. His intent was to reinforce divisions within the multinational labor movement and relieve the costs of contractors bidding on public works projects by cutting wages.

When Bill Clinton became president, he reinstated DBA in March 1993 as a reward for AFL-CIO support. In 1994, DBA was again amended to cover the construction, renovation or repair of buildings used by Head Start programs.

Now that the Bush administration has reinstated DBA, it’s time to strengthen this law to serve the interests of both organized labor and the oppressed nationalities and prevent the bosses from sowing divisions—which DBA was conceived to do nearly 80 years ago.

Hurricane Katrina has laid bare the crisis of a Black population exploited by class, racism and poverty. DBA needs language that puts this catastrophe front and center. Bush has promised a $60 billion first installment on a $200 billion appropriation to repair, rebuild and restructure dozens of cities like New Orleans around the Gulf Coast.

Bush and the corporate parasites are planning to shape the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast to suit their need for profits. “With Congress dangling as much as $200 billion in hurricane-related aid, lobbyists for oil companies, airlines, manufacturers and others are clamoring to get their share.” (“Lobbies line up for relief riches,” Washington Post, Sept. 28)

To advance the workers’ struggle, there must be a united front that challenges the corporations’ racist plans. Strengthening DBA would be a step in wiping out the lingering division between the organized labor movement and the oppressed nationalities. Ending this division is part of the challenge to labor.

The Million Worker March Movement (MWMM) has provided a perspective that takes on this challenge. Led by a core of Black leaders, the MWMM has called on the AFL-CIO, the Change to Win federation of unions and the anti-imperialist, anti-war forces to join them in this historic mission. Katrina will be an acid test for these potential allies.