The Joplin Globe's roundtable interviews with area legislators about the upcoming session should give no one any doubt (if any doubt ever existed) that the agenda once again is going to be driven by business.
Steve Hunter, R-Joplin, is once again going to make an effort to further cripple unions in the state. Please don't tell me about how right-to-work states are so much more enticing to businesses. I am more concerned about the message being sent that it is okay to drive down wages and benefits, as long as we can bring in more low-paying jobs and insure higher profits for businesses.
Marilyn Ruestman, R-Joplin, is pushing a review of prevailing wage laws, something I wrote a great deal about during my days at the Lamar Democrat and The Carthage Press. There is a simpler way of doing it rather than wasting time with a bill. Under the current system, construction workers on southwest Missouri projects are being paid higher wages than they should be because the prevailing wage for Kansas City and St. Louis is being used here.
I investigated that more than 15 years ago and it is not the prevailing wage law, but the intractable attitude of the state workers who administer that law that has caused the problem. Making sure that workers are paid the prevailing wage for public projects is a noble goal, but the way the state did it at that time, and I am betting it is still being done that way, was to send out tons of paperwork and have people fill it out. When no one filled it out in this area, they went to Kansas City and St. Louis, where union officials took the time to fill out the papers, therefore projects in the Joplin area had to pay workers Kansas City and St. Louis prices.
I asked the man who was in charge of gathering this information, why he simply did not pick up the phone and do a little work to discover what the actual prevailing wage was for construction projects in this area. "That is not my job," he said angrily.
Have whoever is in that post call some people who have had construction work done and get a proper prevailing wage and there would be no need for this kind of legislation...but then again that would hardly fit in with the big business first, last, and everything in between attitude that has characterized our state legislature the past couple of years.
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