On September 8, as the streets of New Orleans remained submerged in water filled with raw sewage and unknown numbers of bloated corpses, President George W. Bush found the time to further insult the people of New Orleans by signing an executive order which suspended the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act.
The Davis-Bacon law requires companies, which gall contracts for leuerallyfunded reconstruction work, to pay their workers at least the prevailing minimum wage for the area where the work is being completed.
The argument from Bush and his supporters is that the law allowed for "discrimination" against non-union contractors, which would in turn "drive up costs" of the reconstruction efforts.
One need not be a genius to see through this twisting of terminology. An attempt to argue that they are being "fair" by not allowing contractors who pay their workers a living wage to do the reconstruction would be laughable if it were not so tragic.
As the poor of New Orleans return to their devastated city to seek new employment, they will be met by Bush's fat cat buddies holding contracts in one hand and Bush's executive order in the other as they hire the city's residents at below a livable wage while skimming off the cream to furUnion leaders and a few liberal Democratic Party politicians have demanded the immediate reinstatement of the Davis-Bacon Act.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney called it "nothing less than profiteering" and the recently formed Change to Win Coalition's Chairperson Anna Berger said, "This crisis should not be used to compound the tragedy that has befallen tens of thousands of working people that have already lost their homes, their jobs and their loved ones."