There is a loophole and they are using it against honest people. They own their own corporations. Payments were made to their corporation by my corp. yet they are suing my Corp as individuals. Invoices were on Corp stationary & all payments were made to their corporations. They say they were employees yet months would go by without any conversations between us. I have done nothing improper. They really are sub contractors. My financial life is being ruined after a life time of work.

If someone reads this and wants to help please contact me at the following email.

mustgotobeach@gmail.com

This is highway robbery!

I have less than 25 days ts to respond to a summons- I really need help- Please

The email I am using hides my identity from this suing me. Please help

The winning bidder was $48,000 total. When the other bidders point out this bid is not in compliance, we are told that to protest the award we have to put up 20% of our bid ($23,000) and the city will investigate. If the city finds no problem then we forfeit the $23,000. I have never paid, would you? If they won’t do the math then they won’t do the investigation. They will just keep my $23K.

This makes it impossible to follow the law and win a bid.

So if you are willing to sign papers with the city to say you follow all their regulations, then they are protected and can claim innocence if investigated. The whole point of contracting out for labor is that they don’t have the budget to pay prevailing wages themselves. They reject detailed invoices and so don’t really want to know what you pay your workers.

If the Prevailing Wage laws weren’t in place then this is how it should work.

But if you want to win a bid today you have to accept liability, ignore the law and put your company at risk.

I can attest that the term prevailing wage and davis bacon are part of the problem we face when dealing with unions and governments. Neither is productive and both costs taxpayers billions each year in overcompensated work classifications.

Forklift operator on our project was paid 22.00/hour. With Davis Bacon, it went to 51.51 per hour.

These are facts that cannot be disputed. Getting bonded to operate a forklift takes two hours.

Next topic about how unions and government have ruined this country / state.

1. In 1992, the California Supreme Court (in Lusardi Construction Co. v. Aubry) summarized the purpose of the state’s prevailing wage laws. Notice how this bizarre system is meant to benefit unions and establish a wage rate that relates to the circumstances of public employees:

“The overall purpose of the prevailing wage law, as noted earlier, is to benefit and protect employees on public works projects. This general objective subsumes within it a number of specific goals: to protect employees from substandard wages that might be paid if contractors could recruit labor from distant cheap-labor areas; to permit union contractors to compete with nonunion contractors; to benefit the public through the superior efficiency of well-paid employees; and to compensate nonpublic employees with higher wages for the absence of job security and employment benefits enjoyed by public employees.”

2. A 2009 decision of the Director of the California Department of Industrial Relations shows the ambiguity in this classification of work. The decision upheld a labor compliance program’s withholding of payment from a contractor because it did not pay the $45/hour wage rate to workers for “specified cleaning services, including vacuuming, dusting, cleaning and polishing windows, walls and floors.” The contractor argued that such work in this somewhat exceptional circumstance would fall under a “janitorial exception” that “only applies to contracts let solely for maintenance work.” The Director determined that because the cleaning work was performed as a requirement of a broader public works contract, the contractor had to pay the state-mandated wage rate for construction cleanup.

http://www.dir.ca.gov/OPRL/1742decisions/09-0095-CPR.pdf

3. The only local governments in the state that can circumvent state-mandated construction wage rates for certain taxpayer-funded projects are the state’s 121 charter cities. The number of new charter cities has increased significantly in the past several years as prevailing wage laws and public works definitions have become more absurd. In response, construction unions campaigned aggressively in 2011 and 2012 to defeat proposed city charters in Rancho Palos Verdes, Auburn, Costa Mesa, and Grover Beach.

This is one of the few opportunities for local governments and beleaguered taxpayers to escape the clutches of the state legislature. To find out more about charter cities exercising local authority over wage rates for construction contractors on purely municipal projects, see this guide entitled Are Charter Cities Taking Advantage of State-Mandated Construction Wage Rate (“Prevailing Wage”) Exemptions?

http://www.caccg.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/09/CCCG-CharterCitiesReportSummer2012.pdf