Governmental red tape, the lack of money for enforcement and the complete absence of political will to enforce state and federal laws are taking money out of pockets of Michigan construction workers, and work away from union contractors.

"I know of no other industry whose workers' wages are subject to drop every year because of the lack of enforcement of the law," said Greg Sudderth, executive director of the Michigan Fair Contracting Center.

The laws in question are the federal Davis-Bacon Act and the Michigan Prevailing Wage Act, which are the single most important statutes upholding the financial well-being of the state and the nation's construction workers. On taxpayer funded projects, the laws assure a wage standard for workers, so that contractors cannot bid and win work by undercutting the competition based on wages.

Prevailing wage laws maintain community standards by allowing workers to afford to stay off public assistance and buy a new car, or pay taxes on a home. However, while state and federal laws have survived amid near-constant political attacks, the effectiveness of prevailing wage has withered under the increasingly popular tactic for killing laws: choking off funding for enforcement.

Michigan's Hardhats work under separate state and federal prevailing wage laws, depending on which entity is paying for the project. Michigan Laborers Secretary-Treasurer Jerry Hall said the State of Michigan does a terrific job of keeping prevailing wage information up to date - and in our state, union scale is typically the prevailing rate - but under the Engler Administration and with Republican control of state government, funding for enforcement has become nonexistent.

On the other hand, he said there is enforcement of prevailing wage available under federal law, but "the feds do a horrible job of updating information - we call and harp on them over and over, but it doesn't do any good."

Sudderth said the obvious result of an ineffective prevailing wage law is less money in workers' pockets. But the cut goes deeper, especially on federally funded projects and in areas where union scale isn't so prevalent.

For example, if surveys of construction worker wages aren't performed regularly and don't reflect the prevailing wage for a given area, then contractors who can get away with paying their workers the two-year-old prevailing rate of $25 per hour have an immediate advantage in the bidding process over contractors whose current collective bargaining agreements require them to pay $30 per hour.

And with construction wages starting to make some big gains in recent contract settlements it doesn't take very long before an out-of-date survey starts to have a negative impact contractors placing bids and on workers' paychecks.

"If prevailing rates aren't current, it just erodes the base of the industry, for both labor and contractors," Sudderth said.

The U.S. Department of Labor is trying to improve record-keeping. Results of a recent test program to overhaul how prevailing wages are determined for a locality was found to be "pretty accurate," labor and contractor reps said. But there was still dissatisfaction with the overall system

The Construction Labor Report said the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. DOL has spent the last three years studying how best to improve the way it sets prevailing wages. One of the four test areas of the country was in Toledo.

Unions and contractors confirmed that the main problem with the federal prevailing wage is that it's not calculated often enough to reflect wage increases. There is no automatic increase every year, even to adjust for inflation, as there is with Social Security pensions. Even the program instituted by the DOL was using two-year-old wage figures.

Old data can lead to some wild misreporting of wage levels: Carpenter wages in the Rocky Mountain area were as low as $7 per hour under the prevailing wage - set eight years ago - that was still being used until last year. In 20 counties in southeast Georgia, a new prevailing rate hasn't been determined since 1980.

In order to provide the most updated prevailing wage information, the Laborers and Operating Engineers in Michigan have contracted with a group called Construction Industry Resources to basically do the government's job. The firm compiles reliable wage data, gets labor and management to sign off on the numbers, then presents them to state and federal governments, which both accept the figures.

But the work of the CIR is hardly a cure-all. The handy information helps maintain worker wage levels, but it's an added expense. It can still take six months to get updated numbers put into the federal system, because a total of one government employee is assigned to input prevailing wage information for every craft for each of Michigan's 73 counties, plus do the same thing for the states of California, Wisconsin and a southern state.

"The woman who compiles the information does a great job, but there's literally always a four-foot-tall stack of records next to her desk that needs processing," Sudderth said. "They need more staff."

Beyond that, Hall said unions in Michigan ask the U.S. Department of Labor to take about 20 prevailing wage surveys in jurisdictions around the state every year, but the government only has resources for two or three surveys. As a result, old wage rates are being paid, and workers are having money taken out of their pocket.

"Enforcement is bad for both the state Prevailing Wage Act and the Davis Act," Hall said. "But both are still a lot better than nothing."