Say No on Two

WHETHER to vote for George Bush or Mike Dukakis may not be the most important issue facing Massachusetts voters this election year. The debate over referendum Question 2, which calls for the repeal of Massachusetts' 74-year-old prevailing wage law, has been marked by an anti-labor campaign significant for its divisiveness and demagoguery. At stake in this campaign is not only the referendum question, but also a mandate on the purpose and function of a community.

The law requires state and local governments to pay prevailing local wages--based on union rates--for all construction and public works projects. The statute was created to prevent construction companies from submitting low bids to communities at the expense of employees' wages. With costs generally fixed on supplies and equipment, the simplest method to win a contract was to submit a low bid by slashing employee wages.

The cases for and against the repeal--a YES vote eliminates the wage, a NO vote maintains it--are fairly simple. It is a classic battle between big business and organized labor. Advocates of the repeal argue that the prevailing wage wastes taxpayer dollars by requiring artificially high wages on public projects. "The prevailing wage law creates a tremendous drag on local and town budgets," said Charlie Yelen, a spokesperson for the pro-repeal Fair Wage Committee. "Cities and towns can't afford to pay a wage mandated by the state."

Opponents of the repeal contend that taxpayers will gain nothing from voting yes, and that the measure would simply cut wages and increase profits for the contractors. The prevailing wage, they contend, insures that quality work is provided on public projects by preventing communities from automatically accepting the lowest bid.

Many of the arguments made by the pro-repeal movement are misleading and inaccurate. Despite claims by the Fair Wage Committee, the current law does not establish a state-wide mandate on how much construction workers should be paid; the hourly wage rate is based on local private contracting costs with union labor and can vary across the state.

The most successful tactic of the pro-repeal campaign has been to argue that eliminating the wage would contribute to lower construction costs and help create lower municipal tax rates. But according to the pro-wage Committee for Quality of Life, the average cost of labor on a construction bid is only 15 to 20 percent. If the prevailing wage were repealed, they claim, and wages were cut by as much as 20 percent, the overall decrease in the price of the project to a community would be as little as 2 to 3 percent.

Additionally, the tendency of the antiwage forces to focus on low-bid construction projects disguises the far more important issue of quality work on publicly-funded projects. An effort by communities to save money by accepting the lowest bid may lead to further costs for repairs and maintenance that would have been unnecessary with more skilled (and, yes, more expensive) labor.

THE most disturbing aspect of the repeal campaign is not the arguments made against the wage, but rather the style of those arguments and the framework in which the debate has been presented.

Although only tenuous evidence can be presented that repealing the prevailing wage would result in lower taxes, repeal advocates have continually stressed this as a major campaign issue. As Mark Erlich of the Committee for Quality of Life said, "the phrase `tax savings' is a code word that people accept on faith. Our feeling is that we need to educate the public on a fairly complicated issue. In an age where simplistic arguments are winning, it is gratifying to have won so much support for this issue."

More significantly, the repeal advocates have created a political atmosphere of "us versus them." The lines they have tried to draw have been stark: the poor, unarmed taxpayer doing battle with the evil giant, Labor, and his oppressive and omnipotent ally, state government. In short, the repeal movement has tried to paint a portrait of labor as out of the mainstream--they have tried to make the ludicrous case that the interests of organized labor in this state should no longer be part of the general concerns of the community.

Not only is the premise of this argument faulty--18 percent of the population of the state is part of the organized labor movement--it demonstrates a misconception of how different elements of the citizenry must work together for the betterment of the community.

An underlying premise of modern American politics is that all members of the society must carry the burden of helping certain of its members join into the community in an effective and beneficial manner. The most obvious example is public education. All citizens--not just the parents of students attending public schools--pay taxes which help support public education.

To allow the elderly or the childless exemptions from such taxes would undermine both the financial and moral base for the education system. The belief in public education as an important democratic value has persisted because as a nation we recognize the importance of education's role in developing an intelligent and well-informed citizenry. It's part of the social contract that holds this nation together.

THE effort to repeal the prevailing wage is simply another attempt to rend the fabric of this social contract; its proponents are not only anti-labor, but anti-community. Organized labor is a valuable and productive component of American society. The prevailing wage is as important to the labor movement as child labor laws, Right-to-Know laws, and the minimum wage.

To vote for the repeal is to express a belief that the government should not provide a safeguard for large numbers of productive citizens--in this case labor--against the selfish interests of the few--the contractors.

To endorse the repeal on the belief that local taxes might be marginally decreased is to accept a definition of community as being limited to a group of individuals gathered together with common borders, and nothing more. It is an abandonment of the idea that members of a community must grow together, work together, and protect each other.