Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2012

Floor Speech

Mr. CROWLEY. Mr. Chair, I rise today to strongly oppose the Gosar and Scalise amendments to the 2012 Homeland Security Appropriations bill.

Not only do these amendments threaten the stability and well-being of our Nation's construction industry, they would seriously undermine the wages and benefits of hard-working construction workers across the United States.

It's no secret that since November 2010, many conservative leaders have sought to crack down on the rights of public sector workers across America. From Wisconsin to Indiana to Ohio, public sector workers like teachers, police officers, firefighters and other middle-class Americans are seeing their right to participate in labor unions and collectively bargain taken away.

However, what is less known is that many conservatives are simultaneously working, through measures like these two amendments, to drive down the wages and benefits of workers in a major private sector section of our economy: construction. The workers who would be severely hurt by these two amendments are not even employed by the federal government, but by private businesses. This means that federal law would be responsible for reducing the wages of private sector employees at a time when they can least afford it.

The Gosar amendment would eliminate important protections guaranteed by the Davis-Bacon Act, one of our Nation's oldest and most important labor laws, which requires payment of local prevailing wages on federal construction projects. The Scalise amendment would prohibit funds from being used to implement Executive Order 13502, a measure which encourages executive agencies to enter into project labor agreements on large-scale federal construction projects. Project labor agreements, like Davis-Bacon, are a cornerstone of the American construction industry and give cost and wage certainty to all parties involved in a construction project. Davis-Bacon and project labor agreements not only help hard-working construction workers make ends meet, they create a more skilled workforce that results in projects being completed with a high degree of quality and safety.

At a time when we face unprecedented threats from abroad and are working hard to create good American jobs, removing these two mainstays of the American construction industry makes no sense at all. The men and women who build our Nation's roads, bridges and buildings have the right to make a decent living instead of facing deliberate attempts to not only undermine their wages and benefits, but drag the entire construction industry into a race to the bottom.

I urge my colleagues to vote no on these two amendments.

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