By Mike Matejka

With Governor Rauner’s agenda, there are some terms showing up in the news that might be worth a refresher.

The first term is Collective Bargaining. Collective bargaining is where workers sit down with management and negotiate a contract.   When workers vote, through a supervised and democratic process, to join a union, they then enjoy the right to negotiate a contract.   Workers then elect their leaders. Those leaders then sit down with management and discuss wages, hours, conditions and other employment issues. Once they tentatively reach an agreement, the elected union leadership then has to bring that proposal back to the membership for a vote. Throughout this process, workers have multiple points and opportunities to raise issues and concerns.

The second term is Prevailing Wage. Believe it or, and Governor Rauner might not believe this, the Prevailing Wage was Republican initiated legislation. During the 1930s Hoover Administration, federal funds were released for post offices, roads and other public improvements. A controversy developed in the northeast, because companies from the South bid the projects at wages lower than the area. The local Congress members were embarrassed – here it is the Great Depression, they bring federal funds to town, but then nobody local gets a job.

So Senator James Davis of Pennsylvania and Representative Robert Bacon of New York introduced legislation that said that if federal taxpayer money was being spent, construction workers on that project had to be paid the prevailing wage in that area. Republican President Herbert Hoover signed the Davis-Bacon Act on March 3, 1931. Illinois soon followed with its own prevailing wage law, which said that any governmental construction projects in Illinois had to pay area standard wages, or in other words, the wage that prevailed in that locality.

This was as much a protection for government as it was for labor.  Rather than simply have to accept the lowest bidder and see potentially less skilled, out of state contractors winning local jobs, the prevailing wage law helps insure that local workers are employed on local tax-funded projects. This not only boosts local employment, it also protects government from potentially shoddy practices.

Collective bargaining and prevailing wages are both historic terms. Both terms are heard in the media more frequently in the past year.   A little refresher on the origins of these concepts is hopefully worth hearing.

Mike Matejka is the Governmental Affairs director for the Great Plains Laborers District Council, covering 11,000 union Laborers in northern Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. He lives in Bloomington with his wife and daughter and their two dogs. He served on the Bloomington City Council for 18 years, is a past president of the McLean County Historical Society and Vice-President of the Illinois Labor History Society.

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