Tag: Prevailing Wage

E.J. McMahon, research director of the Empire Center for Public Policy, estimated that expanding the prevailing-wage mandate in New York to all projects that get public support would boost construction costs significantly. In an essay published after the legislation was filed, McMahon argued the proposed expansion resembled a “costly protection racket” for New York’s “politically powerful labor cartel.” Read More

New York’s AFL-CIO has issued a statement blasting the “misinformation campaign” by business groups fighting organized labor’s push to impose union pay levels on private developments receiving public subsidies. There is, indeed, plenty of misinformation wafting around this issue—but virtually all of it originated  in the union camp. Read More

Fiscal conservatives fault the state prevailing wage requirement for driving up the cost of public infrastructure by double digits. A 2017 Empire Center for Public Policy analysis found the law “drives up total construction costs by 13% to 25%, depending on the region, which will translate into billions of dollars in added taxpayer-funded spending.” Read More

But an Empire Center for Public Policy study estimated that the state's prevailing wage mandate would drive up the cost of publicly funded projects by at least 20 percent in the Buffalo area, compared to median private-sector construction wages. The study estimated the mandate led to increases of anywhere from 13 percent to 25 percent in the state, depending on the region. Read More

The Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank, has repeatedly highlighted the opaque process by which the state Department of Labor calculates prevailing wage in different regions and raised questions about the accuracy of the calculations. The group recently noted that the state “refused to publicly release copies of the construction union contracts and pay scales it uses as the basis for its prevailing wage calculation.” Read More

Few public policies carry a more misleading moniker than New York’s “prevailing wage” law for public works projects — a job-destroying cost-escalator that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the State Legislature may be on the verge of expanding as part of their impending state budget deal. Read More

Research has found that prevailing wage requirements increase the cost of construction. In New York, a 2017 report released by the Empire Center for Public Policy found that prevailing wage requirements inflated the cost of publicly funded construction projects in the state by 13 to 25 percent. Read More

With the clock ticking toward the April 1 start of the next state fiscal year, Assembly Democrats just laid out their budget preferences—and, as usual, they add up to a massive tax-and-spend fantasy. Read More