Rockford Register Star
  • Chuck Sweeny: $30 an hour for planting trees? Sign me up!

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  • I'm thinking of packing this job in and going to work as a contractor planting "new" trees for the city of Rockford.
    I figure I'll make $29.58 an hour for putting little sprigs in the ground.
    I know that sounds like a lot, but what the heck, it's the "prevailing wage." This is thanks to the Davis Bacon Act, which established wages for construction work paid for by a government contract, based on the union wage in a particular area of the country. I learned about it in an urban history class in college.
    This law was passed in 1931, in the presidency of Herbert Hoover. It was a time when blacks were leaving the South and flooding into the North, seeking work. Also, immigrants had streamed into the country by the millions, and they, too, were looking for jobs.
    This competition was a threat to white, unionized workers; Davis Bacon kept immigrants and blacks, who were not members of unions, from working on federal public works projects. The law's effect was to set artificially high wage rates that companies employing blacks and immigrants could not afford.
    To this day, the law helps prevent small, minority contractors from getting government construction jobs. And the building trades unions remain overwhelmingly white.
    The curious story of the tree-planting job, brought to you in Sunday's newspaper, is just one more example of bone-headed government regulations that make me scream.
    See, if Rockford were replacing dead ash trees with new ones, in the exact same place, that would not qualify as a prevailing wage job. But if the new tree is planted someplace else, say, across the street to avoid a power line, then that is a "new" tree, requiring the city to pay the prevailing wage to the company that plants it.
    What ridiculousness! All we want to do is replace 5,000 trees that are dying because of the emerald-ash-borer, an imported bug.
    The spokesbot for the Illinois Department of Labor, Sue Hofer, said, "The bottom line is if you're improving the nature of the property with landscaping, you have to pay the prevailing wage." So, is the act of replacing dying trees an improvement? Or is it merely restoring an area to what it looked like before the trees died? If so, I'd call that a restoration.
    So, it looks like the city will be able to replace 20 percent fewer trees than intended because it will have to pay "prevailing wage," or $29.58 an hour, to put in some of them.
    I liked Alderman Venita Hervey's take Sunday on this nonsense: "I want people to receive a fair wage, but this is reprehensible. We will now get far less for the same amount of money." Hervey is a Democrat representing the 5th Ward.
    Page 2 of 2 - Maybe we should disregard Davis Bacon altogether. Let's form a "tree posse" and plant all the new trees in the middle of the night without telling the state or feds. In the morning, the state won't know who planted them; it's not likely they would pull them up, and that would be that.
    As retired Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley knew when he sent bulldozers in to destroy the runway at Meig's Field in the dead of night, it's better to ask forgiveness than to seek permission.