Congressional Record, Volume 142 Issue 72 (Tuesday, May 21, 1996)

[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 72 (Tuesday, May 21, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H5370-H5374]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

REPUBLICANS' SNEAK ATTACK ON AMERICA

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May

[[Page H5371]]

12, 1995, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Owens] is recognized for 6
minutes.
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, there is a move afoot to pass labor
legislation in this half of the 104th Congress through a kind of
guerrilla warfare process, antilabor legislation, I should say
antiunion labor legislation, antiworker legislation.
We had a very interesting development take place as the Republican
majority assumed control of the 104th Congress. We had what might be
called a sneak attack on American workers. I say it is a sneak attack
because there was a Contract With America which laid out in great
detail what the Republican majority would do once they took control,
and it spelled out the issues, and that is the basis on which they went
to the American people and were able to win the majority of that small
number of people who came out to vote. They won a majority of the 39
percent of the people who came out to vote, and they had a clear bill
of particulars, a clear agenda, and it was felt that whether you agreed
with that agenda or not, it would be that agenda that the 104th
Congress would operate on.
It is to their credit that they have moved forward on their Contract
With America. But what has been surprising, what has been shocking, is
the fact that there were items that were not in the agenda that have
been pursued with great hostility, with great vengeance. The attack on
the American workers and the working families of America was
unexpected, totally.
It was not expected that the Republican majority would attempt to
wipe out the Davis-Bacon Act. The Davis-Bacon Act protects workers who
for the most part are middle income workers, middle class workers, or
they used to be when their wages were held at a decent level. As wages
have been depressed and gone down, more and more construction workers
who happen to be fortunate enough to be under the Davis-Bacon Act
protections, are quite poor, as I will point out in a few minutes.
Nobody expected the Republican majority to assault Davis-Bacon, or
any other programs that are protecting workers. They never said that
they would go after OSHA. OSHA, which protects the safety of all
workers, those in unions and those not in unions. As you know,
unfortunately, in America right now a great majority of workers are not
in unions. That is unfortunate, because that is part of the reason that
the wage level is going down for all workers, because there are not
enough unionized workers. Unions are good for workers and good for
America, but they are now every much on the defensive in terms of their
numbers. They are decreasing. It will not help to have the Republican
Party clearly out to destroy that basic underpinnings or protection for
workers.

Nobody ever said when they developed the Contract with America that
they would go after, over time, the Fair Labor Standards Act and the
provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act that provide for overtime.
They now want your overtime. They are coming for your overtime.
Nobody ever said they would go after the very heart of the collective
bargaining process by coming up with a thing called the TEAM Act. The
TEAM is a way to officially and formally recognize company unions and
to move in such a way that eventually you would destroy all existing
unions and have the unions tied to the management.
So nobody ever said that in the Contract With America. They never
stated that that was what they were going to do. Yes, certainly they
were developing secret contracts on the side, obviously. There were
contracts that were not contracts with America, but they were contracts
with somebody. They were contracts with the bosses, contracts with
unscrupulous management. There is a whole lot of businesses and
corporations in America that accept the fact that we have some very
civil laws which help protect workers, and by protecting workers, the
corporations are better off. The businesses are better off. Not all
bosses, not all businesses, are ready to make war against worker
protections, but the Republican majority had this as a secret agenda.
We know they made some contracts on the side, because they have told
us, they confessed, one Member, a chairman of the Subcommittee on
Workforce Protections of the Committee on Economic and Educational
Opportunities, the chairman of that subcommittee was quite honest and
forthright. He was forthright in his discussion with the Washington
Post reporter about the fact that although they did not put it in the
Contract With America, on the side they made deals with business
people. They made dealings with certain corporations, certain corporate
entities and certain business people which said in essence if you
contribute to our campaign we will go after OSHA, we will go after
Davis-Bacon, we will wipe out certain aspects of the Fair Labor
Standards Act.

This was in the Washington Post. It was a direct quote of the
subcommittee chairman. He did not deny it. He was honest enough to say
it and honest enough not to deny it. There was a figure of $65,000
mentioned in his State alone, $65,000 was collected as part of the
secret contract to go after labor.
So what you had was, much to the surprise of the American people,
what you had was what happened at Pearl Harbor. The Speaker has often
compared politics to war. We do not like the comparison, but that is
sort of the language of the 104th Congress. So politics are compared to
war; politics is war, without blood. In this case it was not stretching
the imagination at all to say that what we had was a Pearl Harbor sneak
attack. A massive attack. They threw everything they could at us at
Pearl Harbor. A massive attack, but it was a sneak attack. There was
nothing that said ahead of time that the probability was that the
Japanese would attack America at Pearl Harbor. In fact, the admiral who
headed the Japanese Navy was a Japanese who had been educated at
Harvard, Admiral Yamamoto. Admiral Yamamoto was educated at Harvard and
known as a great card player at Harvard. He had lots of friends. You
talk about deception made intimate, deception on a one-on-one basis,
the fact that Admiral Yamamoto commanded the Japanese Navy in the
attack on Pearl Harbor, the most humiliating defeat our Nation has ever
suffered was instructive.

{time} 2115

We should look at that. That is a good instruction as to what has
happened here, because what has happened here is that the Republican
majority have staged a sneak attack on the American workers, a sneak
attack of great force. They are moving across the board attacking
everything at once. The Davis-Bacon Act must be repealed. Nobody ever
said that in the contract, but now they are saying the Davis-Bacon Act
must be repealed.
They are saying that they want your overtime. We do not want
overtime. We want to have compensatory time instead. Substitute
compensatory time for overtime and make that part of a Fair Labor
Standards Act, changing the requirement that overtime must be paid
after working a certain number of hours.
They wanted to go after the National Labor Relations Board, which
makes it possible to organize workers, and they wanted to put the
National Labor Relations Board in a straitjacket fiscally. They moved
and cut it by one-third, proposed to cut it by one-third, but that did
not prevail.
They are moving again to put pressure on the National Labor Relations
Board, Some of the Members are writing letters to the National Labor
Relations Board. One member of the Committee on Appropriations said
your appropriation will be coming from me, and I am going to get you.
In so many words he was saying that he would stop the National Labor
Relations Board from functioning because it rendered some decisions
that he did not like. That was one member, but the spirit of the entire
Republican majority has been that kind of spirit, to bring to a halt
those parts of the American Government, laws that exist that have been
built up over the years which help to protect working people.

Mr. Speaker, Pearl Harbor was a massive attack. I say it was because
it was launched at the beginning of the 104th Congress, and it did not
succeed. So to replace the Pearl Harbor sneak attack, Admiral Yamamoto
was defeated. Now they are resorting to the guerrilla warfare. Some
members of

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labor assume that, since they did not prevail in the first half of the
104th Congress, that the Republicans will now break off the attack and
leave labor alone, that the scorched earth policies that started the
session will no longer be pursued. That is not the case. It is
guerrilla warfare now. They are waging the same, have the same
objectives, but they are waging the war in a different way.
But it is instructive, and I hope that labor leaders, union members,
workers in general will understand how the sneak attack was
promulgated. The sneak attack was forced upon us by a group that
pretended to be friendly to labor. A lot of labor legislation in the
last 10 years, certainly since I have been here in this Congress, has
been bipartisan legislation. Even when the legislation was not
bipartisan, after the legislation was passed without Republican votes,
throughout the country Republicans have snuggled up to labor leaders
and pretended that they cared about working people. They have pretended
in the back-slapping kind of manner, in the one-on-one friendships,
they pretended to be friends of labor.
It is Admiral Yamamoto, the spirit of Admiral Yamamoto has been there
and wooing labor into an ambush. That is what Pearl Harbor was. They
ambushed our forces on a Sunday morning. Admiral Yamamoto had gone to
Harvard. He knew the habits of Americans. So he knew very well that a
Sunday morning attack, when Americans like to sleep late and they enjoy
Saturday night, et cetera, he knew the habits.
So we have a group of leaders in the Republican majority who have
been very friendly with labor in the past. They knew the habits. They
wooed labor. Even Members who belong to unions voted
uncharacteristically in large numbers for Members of the Republican
party.
Mr. Speaker, the shift over the years has been away from working
class people voting almost 90 percent or 85 percent Democratic to a
gradual shift led by Ronald Reagan where working class people have
voted in much larger numbers for Members of the Republican majority.
They have wooed the working class vote very well, but now the sneak
attack has come. In an overwhelming force it has come down for the
first half of the 104th Congress and we have beat it back. We have
stopped them on Davis-Bacon. They have not yet succeeded in repealing
Davis-Bacon although a bill was introduced very early to repeal Davis-
Bacon, just repeal it outright, wipe it out. No reform of Davis-Bacon,
no adjustment of Davis-Bacon, wipe it out; that was the cry, wipe out
Davis-Bacon.
The same legislation called for wiping out the national service
contract. The service contract is a companion bill, companion act to
Davis-Bacon, which came along late which protects workers in Federal
installations, the actual people who do the janitorial work, and the
cleaning ladies. Various people at the very lowest rungs are protected
by also applying the principle of paying the prevailing wage to those
people as well as paying prevailing wages to the people who work on
construction on Federal contracts.
Mr. Speaker, it was quite surprising, but an all-out attack has
happened. The friends of Davis-Bacon, both on the workers side, the
labor side, as well as on the business side, and there are thousands of
contractors who support Davis-Bacon as a reasonable, rational piece of
Federal legislation, Federal protection. It protects not only workers.
It protects the quality of life and the standard of living in certain
areas. It protects contractors from the assault that they are
constantly under from unscrupulous contractors who do not want to pay
their workers decent wages, unscrupulous contractors who do not want to
pay fringe benefits, unscrupulous contractors who will cut corners and
do shoddy work in order to do the job cheaper, employ workers who did
not do the job with the same kind of skills and place at risk the
entire job. They are constantly fighting against those. So there are
people on the management side, the contractors, the owners of
construction industries who support Davis-Bacon as well as the
construction workers themselves who support Davis-Bacon.
So the attack is on them, too. Admiral Yamamoto has attacked not only
the workers, he has attacked businessmen who have been doing a good job
of carrying out the process of constructing Federal buildings, at the
same time providing decent wages for their workers.
Mr. Speaker, let us take a look at the history of Davis-Bacon. It is
far from being a radical piece of liberal legislation, concocted by
wild-eyed radicals, not at all. Davis-Bacon is a piece of legislation
which was designed to protect the wages and the standard of living of
middle class workers. Probably most of them were Republicans that they
were protecting. But certainly the originators of the Davis-Bacon Act
were Republicans. Who was Davis, who was Bacon? Representative Robert
Bacon was a Republican from New York. New York, my home State, is
always associated with radicals and liberals, and nothing for the
middle class, nothing for the working population comes out of New York,
if you accept the kind of stereotype that has been painted of New York
by certain people. But out of New York came a bill to protect
construction workers.

Robert Bacon, Representative Robert Bacon of New York was a
Republican. Senator James Davis of Pennsylvania, another east coast
State, not with a radical reputation like New York, but it is on the
east coast, and you might say that that is where the liberals live,
that is where progressives live. That is where the people who gave us
the New Deal and the Great Society, all came from the east coast. No,
Senator James Davis was a Republican from Pennsylvania, and
Representative Robert Bacon was a Republican from New York.
Senator James Davis had served as Secretary of Labor in the Cabinets
of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Listen, Senator James
Davis had been Secretary of Labor in the Cabinets of Presidents
Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The act was adopted, the Davis-Bacon Act
was adopted in 1931 at the urging of Herbert Hoover.
Let me repeat that. Two Republicans, Representative Robert Bacon of
New York and Senator James Davis of Pennsylvania, two Republicans,
created, authored the Davis-Bacon Act. The act was adopted in the
Hoover administration, Herbert Hoover was President, in 1931. This
Davis-Bacon Act requires that Federal construction contracts specify
the minimum wage rates to be paid to the various classes of laborers
working under those contracts. Minimum wages are defined as those rates
of pay found by the Secretary of Labor to be prevailing, prevailing in
the locality of the project, prevailing for similar crafts and skills
on comparable construction work.
It does not say that they must pay union wages that have been
negotiated in a collective bargaining process. It does not. It says
whatever the wages are, the prevailing wages, if the area has low
prevailing wages. As we will see later on in the discussion, it can
sometimes drag down the prevailing wage. Prevailing wages are very
close to minimum wages in some instances because the prevailing wage in
the Davis-Bacon wage is very close to minimum wage because that is the
prevailing wage in the area.
Mr. Speaker, the act does not require that collectively bargained
union wages be paid unless such wages happen to be prevailing in the
locality where the work takes place. It is most unfortunate; I wish the
act had required that collective bargaining rates have some role in
guiding the level of the Davis-Bacon wages, but they do not.

So Davis-Bacon is under attack. The Republican created Davis-Bacon
Act, the Davis-Bacon Act signed by President Herbert Hoover, a
Republican President, under attack. And even later, the Republicans
showed their support for Davis-Bacon under the most popular Republican
President probably in history, save since Abraham Lincoln: Ronald
Reagan. Under Ronald Reagan Davis-Bacon was reinforced. Ronald Reagan
said he did not want the Davis-Bacon Act tampered with.
He wrote a letter in September 1981 to Mr. Robert Georgine, President
of Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO. Ronald
Reagan wrote a letter which says:

Dear Bob, I want to acknowledge the Building and
Construction Trades Department letter of September 11
concerning efforts to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act. I have

[[Page H5373]]

asked the Secretary of Labor to respond directly, but I want
to assure you and your general president that I will continue
to support my campaign pledge to not seek repeal of the act.
With best wishes, very sincerely, Ronald Reagan.

So here we have a history, not ancient history, but recent history,
and Ronald Reagan is in support of Davis-Bacon. If you look at the
records of the House of Representatives, you will find the last time a
vote was taken on Davis-Bacon on the floor of the House it was
bipartisan. There were democrats and Republicans voting for it, and
Democrats and Republicans voted against it. Always bipartisan. So why
did we wake up following the victory of the Republican majority and
have Admiral Yamamoto-style Pearl Harbor secret attack on working
people in general and Davis-Bacon in particular? Why?
Mr. Speaker, the attack now has become very well orchestrated. As I
said before, Pearl Harbor was an open onslaught. Pearl Harbor was not
guerilla warfare. That was direct attack. They threw everything they
had from the air on Pearl Harbor. They did not succeed in winning the
war in the Pacific. They did not succeed in winning the war. Warfare of
that kind is seldom now. From that point on, after World War II, with
the defeat of Nazi Germany and the defeat of the Japanese, very seldom
has anybody contemplated, except the Soviet Union, an all-out war
directly being waged on the United States of America. But we have
suffered greatly in guerilla warfare type actions. Vietnam was guerilla
warfare, not a direct onslaught. They did not come out and face
American military power head on but guerilla warfare.
Now we have the guerilla warfare against Davis-Bacon and other
workplace protection legislation. The guerilla warfare is deadly. It is
poisonous. Most of all, it takes advantage of the fact that now there
is an atmosphere of optimism, of an optimism that is not justified.
There is an atmosphere of optimism which is seeping over the
progressive Democrat friendly to labor forces in this Congress.

{time} 2130

All too early we have declared that the Republicans have lost and the
American people understand clearly what is at issue here and that the
Democrats are going to roll to victory, working people need not fear,
the legislation will not be wiped out, they will be saved. It is a
premature declaration of victory because now that the Yamamoto Pearl
Harbor-style attack, only it was not a sneak attack, it was still a
direct attack, has failed, they are pursuing guerrilla warfare, and the
guerrilla warfare means that in every possible way they will be
attacking labor from behind the lines, from the side, from underneath.
We had a housing bill on the floor a little more than 2 weeks ago,
and in the bill which dealt with public housing, the part of the bill
that dealt with public housing, the construction of public housing with
Federal funds, there was a clause written in there which said that
Davis-Bacon would not apply to housing units, to housing, which has
less than 12 units. If you had a certain number of units, below that
number you did not have to apply Davis-Bacon.
That was just sneaked into the legislation and caught everybody by
surprise. It was a guerrilla warfare tactic, and by the time the forces
that want to see Davis-Bacon continue recovered, I am afraid they were
too dizzy, too shaken, to really reason straight because there was a
compromise made, and that is part of the law now. Public housing units;
I think 10 or 12 or 20, I do not remember exactly; if it is below that
number of units, then Davis-Bacon does not apply. We do not know what
dollar figure is related. For constructing public housing in certain
parts of the country, you may be talking about $5 million or $6 million
for that number of units. We do not know how that translates. We do not
know whether when you start talking about units in public housing,
later on it is going to be other kinds of units applying to office
buildings that are being constructed by Federal money by construction
workers.
It is a guerrilla warfare tactic that paid off, in my opinion. There
is some that think it is not difficult, did not do that much damage,
but it is indicative of the kind of guerrilla warfare tactics that are
being waged, the kind of tactic that we are going to see take place on
the floor of the House this week where they are proposing to put the
minimum-wage law, an increase in the minimum wage, will be placed on
the floor some time this week, and that increase in the minimum wage
which is proposed by the Democrats to be 90 cents over a 2-year period,
it may be more or less as the Republicans put it on the floor, but that
increase that they are proposing will be tied to another guerrilla
warfare attack on workers.

The Team Act is going to be part of it, or it may have the Team Act
and the Porter Act. What is the Porter Act. It is a small matter
relating to the requirement that when you are asked by your employer to
take care of a vehicle overnight, and you may take it home with you,
whatever, it is necessary to take care of it, you do that, and you may
be required to do some other things like check or take it by the
station to check the oil, various other things, or you may be required
instead of going home to make a stop on the way. Instead of coming
straight from the home to the job, you may be required to drive an
extra amount of miles to some other location. Whenever there is that
extra requirement which means that you are doing labor for your
employer, you have to be paid for it under the law.
But now they are proposing a change which would require that that
never apply. If you are taking it overnight, the employer can dictate
the terms and not pay for your extra work and your extra time and the
extra travel miles that you may put in. That may be attached to the
minimum wage. You may have two items, two attacks guerrilla warfare-
style, on workers in the minimum wage bill.
Puts everybody on the spot. You all want a minimum wage increase. The
fact it is coming on the bill means that the Republican majority is
finally not treating the American public with contempt. They are
finally going to bow to the wisdom and bow to the common sense of the
American people.
You know more than 74 percent of the American people say that we need
to raise the minimum wage at this point, that nobody can live on $8,400
a year. Even if you put in all of those 40 hours every week for 52
weeks, that is all you get, $8,400 a year. Now, know by Republican
standards we have heard certain spokesmen, spokespersons, on the floor
who are Republicans who talked about, you know, middle class starts at
$100,000, so they have lost their sense of perspective as to what
people need to live on, and they just do not believe that it is true
that there are people out there who only make $8,400 a year under the
minimum wage. Minimum wage is $4.25 an hour; that is what it comes out
to. Well, it is not going to be more than about a thousand dollars more
once you get the 90 cent increase that the Democrats are proposing, but
at least it is going forward.

A family that is very poor can certainly use another thousand dollars
to buy some groceries, some shoes for the kids, and a thousand dollars
goes a long way when you are poor.
I will have you know that my father was very skilled in the furniture
making business, in the mill department, highly praised by his foremen
and his bosses when they brought in new machinery and he figured out
how to make it work, and only he could make it work and not have the
boards burning. And they, one time they got angry with him for some
reason, they laid him off, and so many boards were burning in the mill
department until they came to get him a few days later so that he could
get the assembly line started again and stop the boards from burning.
There was a little trick that he had that he told me about, about how
you slap a little glue on the end of the boards as they are going out,
and it keeps the boards from burning, that he never told them about.
But at any rate, with all that kind of basic, fundamental skill in
what was called an entry-level, nonskilled job, but really required
some skill and some know-how and some common sense, he never made more
than the minimum wage. They never paid the workers at the Memphis
Furniture Factory more than the minimum wage, and only when the minimum
wage went up did he get an increase.
So there are jobs in this country still like that where you do not
get more

[[Page H5374]]

than the minimum wage in certain parts of the country, so the fact that
there are large numbers of workers who make above the minimum wage,
there are a great percentage of workers in America who make above the
minimum wage, does not mean that the 20 million or more out are on
minimum wage cannot use an increase.
So I applaud the wisdom, the common sense, of American people who in
the polls keep saying you need to give a minimum wage increase. I
applaud that. We are going to have it on the floor because the
Republican majority has finally bowed to the wisdom of the American
people.
But in that package there will be a guerrilla war poison pill. There
will be a land mine, a couple of land mines maybe, but at least one.
They are going to wage that kind of guerrilla war fare, and Davis-
Bacon, of course, is one of the victims.
One of the things that have decided to do is to go after Davis-Bacon
by undermining the basic concept in terms of it is an effort to keep
the level of wages in a given community at the level of the wages in
that community by not having a Federal project come in and pay less and
undermine that wage structure. Instead, the Federal project is governed
by what is prevailing already, and unfortunately I would like to see
Federal projects raise the level of wages but unfortunately they do not
do that. What they do is merely seek not to undermine the level of
wages.
So Davis-Bacon is not going to be allowed to do that if the Republic
guerrilla tactics could work. What they are saying is first is costs
the American people too much; second, and I will not go into all of the
particular guerrilla warfare attaches that are being staged at this
point, we will just talk about one today and maybe we will pick up on
some of the others later.
Today I would like to talk about the charge that Davis-Bacon is
racist. Now, stop for a moment and consider the fact that the
Republican majority of this 104th Congress is now waging a guerrilla
attack on Davis-Bacon, and its tactic, one of its tactics, is to accuse
the Davis-Bacon Act of being a racist act, the Davis-Bacon program of
being a racist program. All of a sudden, you know, all of a sudden, we
have a great concern about racism being manifested from the Republican
majority side of the aisle. All of a sudden there is a concern with
racism.
We have suffered from the Republican majority's attacks on
affirmative action all year long, ever since they came to power in the
104th Congress, November of 1994, one attack after another on
affirmative action. on set-asides, on the Voting Rights Act. You name
it, anything related to trying to give some relief from the horror of
racism, from the disadvantages of racism, from the long history of
racism, from the effects of 232 years of slavery and a hundred years of
de facto oppression that went on in certain parts of the country, the
rampant discrimination that prevailed throughout the Nation.
You know, no relief will the majority, Republican majority, allow.
They want to roll back all of the laws and all of the provisions that
have been made which proposed to give relief to people who have
suffered from racism, particularly the African-American community, and
I say ``particularly'' because the African-American community is a
special community among the minority groups. The African-American
community is unique because the African-American community is made up
of the descendants of slaves. The descendants of slaves are people who
were brought here, not as immigrants; they did not come voluntarily.
They were brought against their will. The descendants of people who
were brought against their will here, the descendants of slaves, were
made to suffer for 232 years.
Immigrants come, and they have difficult, hard times for a couple of
generations, maybe. But nobody else in the fabric of American life has
been made, no other group has been made, to suffer 232 years of legal
slavery, legal enslavement, and then, after that, all kinds of forms of
subslavery and oppression. So we are unique.
The Republican majority has refused to provide any relief. They have
offered nothing new, and they have attacked everything that exists that
was generated by the New Deal, the Great Society, the civil rights
movement. Everything is under attack related to discrimination and
racist relief from discrimination and relief from racism. But the same
people who placed it under attack are now saying that they do not like
Davis-Bacon, they want Davis-Bacon to be repealed, destroyed, because
it is racist.
How great can the degree of hypocrisy become? You cannot surpass that
in terms of the hypocrisy. That is unabashed, blatant: ``Davis-Bacon is
bad because it is racist.''
Even if it were true, one could just dismiss the Republican
majority's utilization of that as a ploy because they cannot be about
relieving anybody from the scourges of racism. But it is not true. It
is a big lie that is being generated, and they are going to try to use
the big lie technique, like Herman Goebbels under Hitler: If you say it
often enough and keep saying it, then people begin to believe it is
true. So over and over again you hear that Davis-Bacon is racist,
Davis-Bacon is racist.
What is the germ of truth there that they are utilizing? One germ of
truth there is that when Mr. Davis and Mr. Bacon, Senator Davis and
Representative Bacon, two Republicans, when they developed the Davis-
Bacon Act, they were trying to protect local workers in neighborhoods
throughout the country, mainly those neighborhoods in the Northeast
that has higher standards of living than other parts of the country.
And what was happening is that unscrupulous contractors, people who
have the same mentality as the plantation owners, were taking advantage
of the fact that was 1931, a period where people were desperate for
work; all over the country workers were desperate for work.

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