Taxpayers Take Another Hit from Obama; Administration Panders Yet Again to Big Labor

Taxpayers will pay billions more due to an executive order signed by President Obama that effectively restricts federal construction contracts to the minority of construction firms whose workers are unionized.  That will encourage them to jack up their prices, by shielding them from having to compete with lower bids from non-union construction firms.

As the Examiner notes, “President Obama signed Executive Order 13502 directing federal agencies taking bids for government construction projects to accept only those from contractors who agree in advance to a project labor agreement that requires a union work force. Obama’s new order applies to all federal construction projects with price tags of $25 million or more, and it means all such contracts will only be awarded to companies with unionized work forces.”

This will exclude the vast majority of contractors from bidding on government contracts: “Barely 15 percent of all construction-industry workers in the United States are union members, while the remaining 85 percent are nonunion.”

Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package also contains pay-offs for Big Labor, like prevailing wage regulations.  Obama claimed the stimulus package was needed to prevent the economy from suffering from “irreversible decline,” but the Congressional Budget Office admitted that the stimulus package would shrink the economy “in the long run.” The stimulus package has since destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and subsidized countless examples of government waste and corruption.  The Obama Administration also pandered to Big Labor by giving ownership of Chrysler to the United Auto Workers Union at the expense of employee pension funds, taxpayers, and banks, in a maneuver that circumvented federal bankruptcy laws.