- Joined
- Aug 27, 2005
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- Houston, TX
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- Conservative
OK, first of all, if anybody starts claiming that the GOP is abolishing the minimum wage, I am gonna hit you over the head with a virtual brickbat. This is NOT about the minimum wage. It is about the Bacon-Davis Act, which requires companies on Federal projects to pay the prevailing local wage for the trades involved. Funny thing is, the Federal government doesn't know a prevailing wage from a rat's sphincter muscle. I know this personally, as I have done Bacon-Davis reports for all Federal projects my company worked on, in addition to each call we ran under the maintenance contract we had with the Coast Guard here. The prevailing wages plus benefits for HVAC mechanics in the Houston area comes out to be about $24.00 per hour, which is what we generally paid our technicians, but the government had this marked at almost $30.00 per hour. For sheet metal workers, it came to be about the same, but the local prevailing wage was actually about $18.00 per hour. Now for some observations:
1) The government doesn't know what the hell it's doing, but that's pretty obvious already.
2) The paperwork for Bacon-Davis projects took way too much of my time, time that could have been devote to other important tasks.
3) How about the Federal government butting out, and allowing the states and localities hash all this out for themselves?
4) Better yet, how about the Federal government saving the taxpayers some money by giving the bids to the lowest qualified bidder, and letting the companies bid the jobs without having to take Bacon-Davis into account?
5) How about the government negotiating with companies for price? That's what a lot of private corporations do. One restaurant chain we had as a customer gave us their business because we charged $75.00 labor, when our normal rate was $95.00. It was win-win for both sides.
6) Think of the addition money the government would save if it didn't have to employ bean counters to figure out and crunch numbers that were wrong to begin with.
7) Speaking of bean counters, if they were employed at the company I worked for, they would have been fired within two weeks.
8) But if the government really wants to save money, they should fire all the bean counters and make it a requirement that companies employ union workers on Federal projects. This statement by itself says a lot about how wasteful the government is.
9) Do you think they called it the Bacon-Davis Act because it had something to do with pork? :mrgreen:
10) The government doesn't know what the hell it's doing, but that's pretty obvious already. Did I say that already? Yes I did, so count this one double, because it sure enough is ****ing true. :mrgreen:
Article is here.
Bonus top 10 smart-assed remark:
11) Hey government, just **** off and leave us alone. Too many cooks spoil the soup, and when it's 535 critters in Congress trying to cook using OUR damn stove, we might as well just throw the damn soup out. Don't even feed it to the dog. He could very well ****ing die. LOL.
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