7 minute read
News
from March 14, 2013
Pardon effort continues
It’s not often that bipartisanship is seen in Congress anymore, but one issue with great emotional resonance is getting support from both sides of the aisle.
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A resolution calling for a presidential pardon for former world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson is sponsored by U.S. Rep. Peter King and Sen. John McCain, both Republicans. They have sponsored the same measure in previous Congresses. Democratic Sens. Harry Reid of Nevada and William “Mo” Cowan of Massachusetts have signed on as cosponsors this year. Jack Johnson won the championship JACK JOHNSON in Reno on July 4, 1910 (“The great black hope,” RN&R, July 10, 2010), and held it until 1915. His lifestyle of white women and fast cars was offensive to whites in that era—77 African-Americans were lynched the year Johnson won the championship—and the Mann Act, which was enacted nine days before the Reno fight, was used to convict him of taking a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. The prosecution was a misuse of the law, which was passed to deal with prostitution, not consensual relationships. The prosecutors, judge and jurors were all white.
The resolution was approved by the Senate on March 5.
Opposition to the pardon came from one surprising source. On the liberal Daily Kos, Richard Riis wrote, “Call me cynical, but I can’t help but suspect the motivation here is more political than moral. Perhaps McCain and collaborator Rep. Peter King (R-New York) are sincere, but my suspicion is they simply hope African-American voters can be manipulated into feeling better disposed toward Republicans.”
In a press briefing on Dec. 22, 2009, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said President Obama had not considered a pardon for Johnson because the U.S. Justice Department was “not recommending a pardon.”
Eagle Scout notes
• Architect and contractor Ted Jones has died in Sonoma.
Jones grew up during the Depression in New York, which did not stop him from becoming an Eagle Scout. In Nevada in the 1960s, he built homes all over the western part of the state during the terrific population growth then underway. He was honored by the Northern Nevada Builders and the Sertoma Club.
• Derek Nance, who became an Eagle Scout while growing up in Las Vegas and graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno, has succeeded in getting some major performers—Train and Carly Rae Jepsen—to cancel their concert appearances at the Boy Scout national “Jamboree” this year in West Virginia to protest the ban on gay Scouting. Nance used an online petition and a U-Tube video to draw attention to the cause and some major media like ABC News picked up on the issue.
—Dennis Myers
In December 2010, construction was underway at UNR on an expanded earthquake lab. Under legislation being considered in Carson City, the wages paid on such projects would be reduced.
Prescription for recovery: cut wages
Legislators look at prevailing wage laws
Members of the Nevada Legislature are promoting a means of improving the by Nevada economy by slashing wages Dennis Myers on public works projects. They want to carve out exceptions to “prevailing wage” laws, which require that the approximate average local wage be paid on public works. In earlier legislatures, measures to do away with prevailing wage laws altogether failed. Now critics of the practice seem to be trying to incrementally erode them. This year there are measures to exempt education projects and projects below certain financial thresholds from the prevailing wage laws.
Assemblymember Cresent Hardy Clark County republican
In public works, the prevailing wage is decided with a survey of the wages paid to most workers in an area. The prevailing wage helps prevent the large expenditures for government contracting from disrupting local construction markets, but critics say union wages inflate the average, and the surveys do not truly reflect the market. Prevailing wage laws date back to the Gilded Age that followed the Civil War.
In the Nevada Legislature so far, there are four bills, though not all seek to curb the practice.
Assembly Bill 37, introduced for Clark County, allows that county’s officials to enforce prevailing wages if the state labor commissioner does not.
A.B. 211, sponsored by Assemblymember Ira Hansen of Washoe County, seeks to exempt public works costing less than $20,000 from prevailing wage requirements, twice the current threshold.
A.B. 218, also sponsored by Hansen, tinkers with the requirements for prevailing wages.
Senate Bill 146, sponsored by Sen. Ben Kieckhefer of Washoe and Carson, would exempt education construction from prevailing wages.
Assemblymember Cresent Hardy of Clark County has said he and his small counties colleague John Ellison will also introduce a measure in the Assembly that exempts education construction and will raise the threshold at which prevailing wages are paid.
“One of the issues that I’ve got in my bill is increase the threshold to 1.5 million,” Hardy said, “which I truly believe that not only schools but other municipalities will be able to do maintenance and repair projects without having to go through the prevailing wage process, which will create jobs and actually help get some maintenance items done for our schools without having to deal with that process also at the same time.”
Union activist Andrew Barbano responded, “Increasing the threshold is the construction equivalent of the Rostenkowski-caused savings and loan crisis under Bush the Elder. It turned stable S&Ls into casinos.”
Hardy also said, “The other issue is, the way the reporting is done, through the labor commissioner presently. Typically, if 51 percent [is] turned in by unions, it automatically goes to that rate.”
Barbano: “These cats need to go back to school. The wage surveys are voluntarily compiled and turned in by employers. Some contractors are reluctant to participate in the annual survey because they don’t want to disclose wage information to their competitors.”
Hardy: “Right now you have DETR [Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation] that already does a rate survey, analysis survey on wages throughout the state, which I believe is a fair rate. And it doesn’t include all the collective bargaining ingredients that the labor commissioner has to deal with which don’t even go into the pocket of the employee. A large amount of that money goes back—in those prevailing wage rates—goes back into those unions for items that I don’t even know what they are when you look at the chart. The labor commissioner has all of those and we can’t get answers for a lot of it, what it even is, that they’re reporting.”
Barbano said that if Hardy has evidence of what he is saying and hasn’t turned it over to authorities, he is concealing felonies--which is a felony in itself. “The survey reflects areastandard wages, not just union rates,” Barbano said. “Unions get monthly dues, usually around $30 to $50 a month. They may also get contributions to their health and welfare funds, i.e., health insurance and retirement payments, which unions have negotiated for their members. … At best, this underinformed disinformation disseminator is endorsing low-wage, no benefit work.”
Hardy: “And then the other situation that happens is the way that it’s reported, is that if somebody from the rural counties don’t report the
shop, the non-union shop doesn’t report, because it costs a lot of money to put all this paperwork and reporting together, so it doesn’t get reported like at the same way the unions do, because the unions make sure they pay for their people to get their reports out, so it continually [grows], and right now you’ve continued to have because of overtime and everything else, prevailing wages [in] many cases
is higher than the actual rate than the unions are charging with the collective bargaining agreements.”
Barbano: “Again, employers compile and turn in the surveys.”
Hardy is in the construction business. He said wages could be cut by perhaps 25 percent by doing something about prevailing wage law. Republican leaders last week linked changes in prevailing wage with changes in the Public Employee Retirement System. Assembly Republican floor leader Pat Hickey said action on the two issues is not the price of cooperation with the Democrats on other issues, but did also say at the same news conference that leaders from the two parties will begin meeting on ideas for changing the state’s tax structure.
Democratic leaders were critical of the prevailing wage and pension proposals as worker-bashing that does little to help the state’s economy. Ω
ASSEMBLYMEMBER CRESENT HARDY
Andrew Barbano Labor activist
A thing of beauty
Reno residents last weekend gathered in the former downtown Reno Post Office at a farewell party held by the Historic Reno Preservation Society. The U.S. Postal Service has moved out. The gorgeous 1932 art deco building has ornate features inside and out. The building could have stayed in public hands, but after it was turned over to the city, it was kept in city ownership for less than 24 hours and then sold for $1.2 million to a developer with very little public input on the decision. (See “15 minutes,” page 35.)
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