Reading today’s Politico Morning Shift column, this sentence stood out in a short piece on Wisconsin Republicans’ efforts to repeal the state’s prevailing wage law: “That’s an 80-year law requiring that workers on construction jobs for local and state governments be paid a wage that the state determines to represent the prevailing norm—a calculation that tends to raise labor costs.” The bias in that construction is pretty simple, and it's one that is often repeated by journalists despite it being a very clear anti-worker frame: Workers are a “cost” and not an investment and not the part of a business that does the work that creates the company’s profits. In other words, this common construction says workers are a pesky obstacle instead of the source of revenue a company needs to survive and grow.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Sierra Construction Co. Inc. has agreed to pay $87,239 in back wages to 39 employees who worked on The Prescott apartment building, a federally financed construction project in Portland. U.S. Department of Labor investigators found that Sierra and two of its subcontractors failed to pay the prevailing wages required by the Davis-Bacon and Related Acts.

The department’s Wage and Hour Division determined that Sierra, the general contractor, violated the DBRA by improperly classifying workers in lower-paying positions that did not reflect all duties performed by the employees. For example, on the project carpenters and laborers spent significant time working as ironworkers, but were not paid the proper rate, which can be $7 to $15 more per hour than they were typically paid. Sierra also failed to include information listing the required DBRA wage rates in contracts with two subcontractors, who then failed to pay their employees the required prevailing wages.