Before Mike Pence was Donald Trump’s lapdog, he was the unpopular governor of Indiana. His policies are still playing out there—and a new study shows that one Pence-backed attack on workers is only half working as planned. But it’s the important part to Republicans like Pence: the law hurt workers, but didn’t achieve the taxpayer savings Republicans promised.
In 2015, Pence signed a repeal of Indiana’s common construction wage statute, a law calling for construction workers on publicly funded projects to be paid the local prevailing wage. Pence and Republicans claimed that the repeal would save the government money but not cost workers. That second part is an obvious lie—the plan was clearly, as it usually is when Republicans are involved, to hurt workers, and especially union members. But if Republicans really believed it would save the government money, well … wrong.
Following the law, public works projects got about the same number of bids from contractors, a new report from the Midwest Economic Policy Institute finds. They were about as likely (slightly more, in fact) to go to union contractors. And costs didn’t go down significantly. But Indiana workers really took it on the chin:
The study found that construction wages fell in Indiana by an average of 8.5 percent following repeal of the common construction wage, with the lowest-paid workers seeing their paychecks drop by 15 percent.
Over the same period, construction wages in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio — which retained their prevailing wage laws — grew a combined 2.8 percent, according to the report.
Not only that, but productivity in Indiana fell behind neighboring states, which means that the slightly lowered cost of public projects was offset by the comparatively low productivity.
Hurting workers is a feature of Republican policy, not a bug, but remember this the next time a Republican politician explains that they don’t want to raise the minimum wage because no one should be making the minimum wage, anyway. Or tells you that it’s those pesky unions keeping construction costs high. Or claims that removing regulations will spur productivity. They just want to make workers vulnerable and desperate and shift money to the wealthy. Everything else is to cover for that.