The History of the Davis-Bacon Act Prior to the enactment of the Davis-Bacon Act, the construction industry afforded tremendous opportunities to blacks, especially in the South. In at least six southern cities, more than 80 percent of unskilled construction workers were black. Blacks also represented a disproportionate number of unskilled construction workers in the North and constituted a sizable portion of the skilled labor force throughout the country.
This was so despite the fact that most of the major unions that represented construction workers excluded blacks, and that blacks faced widespread discrimination in occupational licensing and vocational training. These unions felt seriously threatened by the competition from blacks, and favored any attempt to restrict such competi-tion.
The co-author of the Davis-Bacon Act, Rep. Robert Bacon, represented a congressional district in Long Island. Bacon's opinions on issues like immigration demonstrate the extent to which his views were patently racist. For example, in 1927, the same year he introduced the Davis-Bacon Act, he submitted the following statement from 34 university professors concerning a new immigration law into the Congressional Record:
We urge the extension of the quota system to all countries of North and South America from which we have substantial immigration and in which the population is not predominantly of the white race. . . . Only by this method can that large proportion of our population which is descended from the colonists . . . have their proper racial representation. . . . Congress wisely concluded that only by such a system of proportional representa-tion . . . could the racial status quo be maintained.
In 1927, Bacon submitted H.R. 17069, "A Bill to Require Contractors and Subcontractors Engaged on Public Works of the United States to Comply With State Laws Relating to Hours of Labor and Wages of Employees on State Public Works." This action was a response to the building of a Veterans' Bureau Hospital in Bacon's district by a contractor from Alabama, who employed only black laborers.
Representative William Upshaw, understanding the racial implications of Bacon's proposal, stated: "You will not think that a southern man is more than human if he smiles over the fact of your reaction to that real problem you are confronted with in any community with a superabundance or large aggregation of Negro labor."
In the course of the next four years, Bacon submitted 13 more bills to regulate labor on federal public works con-tracts. Finally, the bill submitted by Bacon and Senator James Davis was passed in 1931, at the height of the Depression, with the support of the American Federation of Labor. The Act required that contractors working on federally funded public works projects over $5000 pay their employees the "prevailing wage."
The Act was amended in 1935, reducing the minimum to $2000 and delegating the power of determining the "prevailing wage" to the Department of Labor. The Department of Labor responded by promulgating regulations governing the determination of wages that remained basically unchanged until 1983. Under these regulations, the prevailing wage was equated with the union wage in any area that was at least 30 percent unionized. In practice, however, the "prevailing wage" was almost universally determined to be the same as the union wage.
The comments made by various congressmen during the debate over the different bills submitted by Bacon betrayed the racial animus that motivated the passage of the law. Representative John Cochran stated, "I have received numerous complaints in recent months about southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South." Representative Clayton Allgood similarly complained, "That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country."
Other derogatory comments were made about the use of "cheap labor," "cheap, imported labor," "transient labor," and "unattached migratory workmen." Thus, while the sponsors and supporters of the Act also intended it to disadvantage immigrant workers of other races, these thinly veiled references make it clear that the Act was primarily intended to discriminate against blacks.
The statements made by many Congressmen during the debates over the various prevailing wage bills were also replete with anti-capitalist rhetoric, with the representa-tives railing against "unfair contractors." In reality, such contractors wanted only to establish a national market in labor and pay their workers the actual market value of their services. Representative McCormack said of Davis-Bacon, "It will force the contractor who heretofore has used cheap, imported labor to submit bids based upon the 'prevailing wage scale' to those employed. It compels the unfair competitor to enter into the field of fair competition."...
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