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Dive brief:
Diving knowledge:
The groups said the change would substantially increase the price of those projects and cost taxpayers more. Now ABC and AGC are claiming in court that the rule change is illegal, just two weeks after it was made official.
ABC called Department of Labor, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su and Wage and Hour Division Administrator Jessica Looman as plaintiffs in the filing. AGC justly appointed Su and the DOL.
The rule change, first announced in March 2022, restored the DOL’s current wage definition to equal 30% of workers, rather than 50%, in a given business locality. Under the previous process, at least 51% of wages surveyed by the DOL had to fall within an “equal or similar” range. If they didn’t, the weighted average would decide the prevailing wage, meaning that more frequent occurrences of low wages could drag down the overall rate.
In an effort to reverse this, the DOL returned to the system used until 1983, when President Ronald Reagan made changes, in a major blow to organized labor. During a 60-day comment period, the DOL received 40,938 comments on the rule change.
Formal complaints
ABC said it submitted nearly 70 pages of comments on the matter to dissuade the federal government from adopting the change. Now, take the matter to court.
“The DOL’s final rule requires ABC to take legal action to address its many illegal provisions and protect its members, the free market and taxpayers from the devastating impacts of this regulation,” said Ben Brubeck, vice president of ABC of Regulatory, Labor and State Affairs. , in a statement.
AGC’s challenge indicated that the federal government had overreached by applying the Davis-Bacon rules to other construction-related industries, such as manufacturing and delivery truck drivers.
“As an industry that pays substantially above the existing Davis-Bacon rates, our concerns are with the administration’s unconstitutional exercise of lawmaking power and not the wage rate itself,” the CEO said. of AGC, Stephen Sandherr, in a statement.
The organization also challenged President Joe Biden’s administration for ruling that the federal government can retroactively apply the Davis-Bacon rules to contracts that initially omitted them.
The DOL declined to comment on the litigation.
