ACHR NEWS Editorial Staff

WASHINGTON — Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) and its Southeast Texas chapter are challenging the U.S. Department of Labor’s final rule, Updating the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts Regulations, which applies to federal and federally assisted construction projects funded by taxpayers.

Court filings by the two groups, in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, were announced Nov. 7.

“Far from ‘updating’ the DOL’s enforcement of the Davis-Bacon Act, the final rule returns to failed policies of the 1970s and unlawfully expands coverage of prevailing wage requirements onto new projects and industries and increases its regulatory burden on small construction contractors working on federally funded contracts,” Ben Brubeck, ABC vice president of regulatory, labor, and state affairs, said in a press release. “The DOL’s final rule forces ABC to take legal action to address its numerous illegal provisions and protect its members, the free market and taxpayers from the devastating impacts of this regulation.

“Instead of instituting common-sense reforms to Davis-Bacon regulations to ensure accurate prevailing wage determinations while providing much-needed clarity to the regulated community, the rule makes it much more likely that the DOL will adopt union wage scales as the prevailing wage at a greater frequency than in current practice,” said Brubeck. “The DBA already adopts union wage scales at improbable rates, considering just 11.7% of the construction industry is unionized. The erroneous, arbitrary, and capricious changes to the implementation of the Davis-Bacon Act must be challenged to preserve fair and open competition on government construction projects, regardless of labor affiliation.

“The onerous new requirements, reduced competition and artificial inflation of construction costs imposed by this rule will only exacerbate economic headwinds and undermine taxpayer investments in infrastructure.”

In October, Mario Burgos, chief strategy officer at Prairie Band LLC, Albuquerque, New Mexico, testified to Congress on behalf of ABC, urging lawmakers to rein in the Biden administration’s wage determination process and what he said are unclear DBA regulations. Burgos detailed his efforts to comply with the process to determine prevailing wages on federal construction projects, and said the DOL’s recent rulemaking will only make compliance challenges worse, driving small contractors out of public works projects or even out of business.

In August, ABC pushed back on the DOL’s final rule, calling it “yet another Biden administration handout to organized labor on the backs of taxpayers, small businesses and the free market.”