Prevailing wage laws were created in the U.S. with the passing of The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931. Thirty-one states including Tennessee have their own “mini” Davis-Bacon laws that set a minimum wage for government projects. This minimum wage is known as the prevailing wage. For both national and Tennessee prevailing wage law, these wages are based on the county and type of work you do (known as “wage scales”).
Prevailing wage rates are established by laws updated each year by the Department of Labor and the Tennessee Department of Labor & Workforce Development. Each state has its own prevailing wage rates to make sure that workers are paid fairly when tax dollars are being used. These tax dollars can be for highway construction or repair, building construction or repair, cleanup or other state-funded work projects.
Prevailing Wage Abuses
Prevailing wages are often much greater than what is paid for work not protected by federal or Tennessee prevailing wage laws. Prevailing wage laws are most often broken by subcontractors’ improperly categorizing workers. Employers do this to skirt employee protections such as workers’ compensation and responsibility for work conditions or so they can reduce their labor costs by reducing your pay.
An unskilled laborer earns between half to a third of what skilled labor makes. If you laid bricks, worked with heavy machinery or did carpentry work, then you should have earned the prevailing wage for your time doing that work.
Because the purpose of prevailing wage laws is to prevent cheap labor from lowering the wages of construction workers, all laborers—even undocumented workers—must earn at least the prevailing wage for their work.
Prevailing Wage for Skilled Labor
Under prevailing wage laws, you must be paid the right wage for your type of labor. Sometimes an employer will call you an employee but still not pay you the legal wages for your labor. They do this by labeling you an unskilled laborer or a general laborer when your work belongs to a higher paying category. If you performed skilled labor, you must be paid the wage for that labor, even if it was for only one day or one hour. Skilled labor includes bricklaying, asbestos removal, operating heavy equipment (cranes, dump trucks, forklifts, etc.), painter, roofer and other work of this kind.
A general laborer should only perform “helper” tasks. This worker also has a minimum wage protected by prevailing wage law for some Tennessee projects and most projects funded by national taxes. A general laborer may move materials at worksites, remove clean up sites (unless you are cleaning up hazardous materials) and perform demolition as well as some light, unskilled construction like putting up scaffoldings.
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The other way bosses break prevailing wage laws is by labeling employees independent subcontractors. An independent subcontractor is not an employee. If you work for another who tells you what time to show up, provides you the tools, what to do at work and pays you by the hour, then you are not an independent subcontractor. You are an employee and you are due the prevailing wage. If you are working on a project that taxes pay for, then you might be due a large amount of back pay (the pay you were not given).
Another good way of judging whether you and your coworkers are not being paid fairly is to note how many people are being called general laborers and how many are being called skilled labor. There should be more skilled laborers at a construction site on any task that requires skilled labor.
Tennessee Prevailing Wage Law
Tennessee Division of Labor Standards is very clear about Tennessee prevailing wage law:
Contractors and subcontractors must pay workers on public works projects no less than the applicable prevailing rate of wage for the type of work they perform. Employees who perform more than one classification of work must be paid the applicable prevailing wage rate for the time spent working in each classification. It is the employer’s responsibility to track separately the hours spent by each employee doing each job classification, and to report them separately on the certified payroll. If this is not done, the employee should be paid for all hours worked at the highest rate the employee earned that week.
The Tennessee Prevailing Wage Act requires all contractors on state-funded projects to post the wage rate in conspicuous places on the jobsite. It also requires payroll records to be kept for one full year after the completion of the Tennessee construction project.
Wage and Hour Expertise for Tennessee Employees
Because of certain legal loopholes and varying pay rates, you need an experienced prevailing wage lawyer. Attorney Higgins has experience with literally hundreds of such cases. Tennessee, like many other states, requires contractors to post a Public Works Bond of 25% of the project costs to cover such prevalent problems as subcontractors not paying their workers what their work is worth. The majority of these prevailing wage cases settle quickly when Higgins Firm attorneys are hard at work for you.
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