Prevailing Wages Are Due for a Refresh, Attys Say

Labor, Employment and Benefits attorney Timothy Taylor was mentioned in a Law360 article about recent criticism toward the process of calculating federal prevailing wages for public works projects under the Davis-Bacon Act. Contractors, worker advocates, employment law practitioners and government officials have criticized the slow and under-resourced process of determining Davis-Bacon prevailing wages. Mr. Taylor mentioned that the lack of contractor participation complicates the process to obtain accurate wage rates through the U.S. Department of Labor's surveys, which makes it challenging to get a representative sample to accurately determine the prevailing wage.

"Two problems: One is that you simply have small sample sizes, which inherently lead to less confidence in the data," he said. "Secondly, you have responses only from a certain slice of the economy, so it's hard to say that it is in fact truly representative of the prevailing wage."

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