Last week we wrote about changes to Alaska Davis-Bacon laws, with the goal of reducing costs for public works projects. This week, we wanted to highlight another government entity – this time, the county of Shelby, Tennessee – which came to the exact opposite conclusion of their northern neighbors. According to an article in the Mephis Commercial Appeal, the Shelby County Commission voted to enforce new prevailing wages for the county.We won’t go too deep into the article – that’s why we’re linking to it – but there is a new prevailing wage argument we haven’t seen before.
The Commissioners in Shelby cite providing of fringe benefits to public works employees as a direct benefit to taxpayers by relieving them of having to provide health care and other forms of public assistance to those prevailing wage employees. In other words, as this line of argument goes, if there’s no prevailing wage fringe benefit, then those employees would not have health insurance at all; and if they didn’t have insurance at all, the public would wind-up paying for their healthcare anyway – most likely at the emergency room. As with all aspects of the prevailing wage debate, it will be interesting to see how the health care cost argument gets used by both sides.