The Federal Davis-Bacon Act: The Prevailing Mismeasure of Wages

Abstract

One feature of public construction projects that the critics seem less willing to recognize is that they function also as a costly welfare system for union workers. This feature stems from the federal Davis-Bacon Act, under which construction projects funded entirely or in part by the federal government must pay a government determined prevailing wage to the workers on the project. While the Davis-Bacon Act (DBA) gets periodic attention from Congress and various critics, there is a general unawareness of the arcane and generally unrepresentative statistical calculations that underlie its enforcement. The purpose of this study is to unearth the methods behind these calculations, to identify some of the anomalies they produce and to estimate what they cost taxpayers.