Administration Scraps Local-Hiring Plan for Public Works

The Trump administration is abandoning another Obama-era regulatory initiative, killing a plan to allow cities to set aside work for local residents on federally funded public works projects.

The provision, proposed in 2015, has been winding its way through the approvals process since then but never took effect.

No reason was given for the Transportation Department’s withdrawal of the plan, set to take effect on Friday.

The fate of a related pilot program, which gave case-by-case approval for local hiring provisions on selected transportation and construction projects, is now in doubt. The experiment began soon after the rule was proposed and was intended to test the economic effects of preferential employment for projects backed by the federal highway and transit administrations.

Researchers hoped to learn whether local-hiring targets could be achieved without reducing competition or raising prices and putting qualified workers from outside the area at an undue disadvantage.

The program was tested in states like New York, California, Texas, Illinois and Pennsylvania and involved viaduct construction, pavement rehabilitation and highway development projects. The study was extended for five years in January, just before President Trump took office.

A Transportation Department spokesman told The New York Times this month that “the prior administration’s proposed rule and proposed long-term extensions of pilot programs is under review.”

Preferential hiring on public projects has been repeatedly stymied. Some federal agencies argue that the practice makes bidding for contracts unfair. Tennessee and Ohio have tried to ban it outright, while the Supreme Court has said it is unconstitutional for employers in one state to discriminate against residents from another.

Critics say moving local workers to the front of the line can break up construction crews, pile extra costs on out-of-state businesses and even pose a safety risk in areas without enough experts capable of operating specialized machinery or performing dangerous tasks.

“This all sounds very good, hiring locally where projects are being built, but when you dig down deeper, there are a lot of unintended consequences,” said Nick Goldstein, vice president for environmental and regulatory affairs at the American Road & Transportation Builders Association. “The problems with this program outweigh the benefits.”

But advocates of local employment allowances say hiring from the neighborhood helps offset longstanding racial and gender imbalances in the construction industry. Local workers can also benefit from the on-site vocational training that many struggle to find elsewhere, they say.

“These huge public investments are an opportunity to create new pathways for people to gain skills and have jobs that aren’t minimum wage, that don’t require skills and don’t have a future,” said Madeline Janis, executive director of Jobs to Move America, a coalition of faith, labor and other groups that wants such projects to benefit local communities. “Eliminate local hiring programs and you cut off this huge potential method of dealing with the crisis we’re facing of low-wage jobs and inequality.”

 

Source: The New York Times