Pennsylvanians are still facing a cost-of-living crisis.
If you’ve been to the grocery store lately or paid your electric bill, you already know the
truth: Pennsylvanians are still paying too much and getting too little.
Families are looking for relief. Small businesses are looking for room to breathe. Local
governments are trying to stretch every taxpayer dollar they have.
So what is Harrisburg doing?
Instead of lowering costs, cutting red tape, and making it easier to build, some lawmakers
are pushing Senate Bill 908: a bill that would expand Pennsylvania’s Prevailing Wage Act
and make taxpayer-funded projects more expensive.
Supporters call it “protecting workers.” In reality, it’s a cost hike that passes the burden on
to taxpayers.
Senate Bill 908 takes the prevailing wage system and stretches it beyond the job site. It
reaches into off-site custom fabrication work—the shops and businesses that make certain
nonstandard materials or parts for public projects—and drags them into the same
government wage mandates, paperwork, and enforcement process as on-site contractors.
Harrisburg would not just regulate what happens on the public work site but would reach
back into private shops and tell employers how work tied to a public project has to be paid,
tracked, and reported.
Who benefits from a deal like this? It’s certainly not the taxpayer, nor the small local
contractor trying to compete. It’s not the borough, township, school district, or county
trying to get the most out of a limited budget.
The winners are the big, politically connected, unionized contractors that can absorb the
compliance burden and use government rules to box out smaller competitors. When
government picks winners in the marketplace, taxpayers always lose.
This is exactly the wrong direction for Pennsylvania.
Prevailing wage mandates already inflate the cost of public projects. They reduce
competition. They make it harder for small and independent contractors to bid. They force
local taxpayers to pay more for the same road, the same roof, the same building, the same
repair. Every dollar wasted on a government wage mandate is a dollar that cannot be used
to fix another bridge, repair another school, improve another water system, or lower the
pressure on property taxpayers.
This is the bigger pattern we are seeing from Harrisburg and Washington: more mandates,
less choice; more bureaucracy, less competition; more government interference, less
opportunity.
Look at the Faster Labor Contracts Act in Washington. It is the same bad idea: government
stepping in between workers and employers and taking power away from the people
closest to the workplace.
The Faster Labor Contracts Act would impose federal timelines on first-contract
negotiations. If workers and employers do not reach a deal fast enough, the process can
move to government-directed mediation and then to a three-person arbitration panel that
can impose a binding contract for two years.
There is nothing pro-worker about taking decisions away from workers and employers and
handing them to federal bureaucratic processes or outside arbitrators. Real pro-worker
policy means letting people choose. It means making it easier to grow a business, hire
workers, complete projects, and raise wages through productivity — not through political
favoritism.
SB 908 and the Faster Labor Contracts Act come from the same mindset: politicians know
best, government should set the terms, and taxpayers or employers should just pay the bill.
At a time when families are still squeezed by years of inflation and higher costs, our
lawmakers should be focused on affordability. They should be removing barriers to
building, cutting red tape, expanding competition, and protecting taxpayers.
They should not be expanding outdated prevailing wage rules. They should not be helping
special interests rig the bidding process. They should not be making public projects more
expensive.
Workers do not need bureaucrats or arbitration panels making decisions for them. They
need freedom, flexibility, and opportunity.
Tell your lawmaker to reject these costly ideas by heading to AFPPennsylvania.com.
This is Emily Brey, State Director with Americans for Prosperity-Pennsylvania.