Sunday, May 02, 2004
SOMETIMES in Sacramento, the simplest things have a way of becoming horribly complicated.
A few weeks ago I wrote about problems cropping up throughout California because the state has decided that a law originally meant to protect union wages now prohibits people from volunteering their time to help on public projects.
The issue first surfaced in Redding, where some college students got class credit instead of pay when they helped a local group clear a brush-choked streambed. A union rep complained, and the state responded by fining the nonprofit group involved for violations of labor laws.
Now it turns out that creek restoration projects up and down the state are on hold because many of them rely on grants that, the state says, require them to pay everyone who works on the project a wage set by state regulators. No volunteering allowed.
And this might not end with streambeds. Redding is also struggling with the labor bureaucracy in its effort to build a new city park, in part with volunteer help. A member of a Sonoma County library advisory board tells me that his group fears local Rotary Club members won't be allowed to landscape the library's grounds. And it's possible that groups such as Habitat for Humanity, which use volunteer labor to build homes for the poor, could be swept up by the same regulation.
This sounds absurd, I know, and legislators and members of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration swear they want to fix it. But so far, their attempts to do so have run into a thicket of conflicting interests and byzantine legal interpretations.
You would think lawmakers would just repeal whatever law is blocking volunteerism, or pass a new law that explicitly allows it. That shouldn't be difficult if everyone wants it, right? Wrong.
The law in question, known as the prevailing wage standard, was first adopted in the 1930s to prevent nonunion contractors from winning bids on public works projects. Any company or group that does work financed by tax dollars has to pay trades people whatever the "prevailing wage" is for that community. As defined in regulations, that usually turns out to be the union wage.
In 2001, the state expanded the definition of a public project to include pretty much anything that gets a dollar of taxpayer money, thus applying the prevailing wage standard to a lot of projects that previously had not been affected. Along the way, the state labor agency also decided that older laws regulating volunteerism on public projects were covered by the same change. The result: no volunteers on anything that could remotely be considered a public work.
The easiest fix would be the simplest: a new law that says people who want to volunteer their time can do so. And if they are getting paid, they get paid the prevailing wage.
But it's not easy in the Capitol.
Hans Hemann, an aide to Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, the Berkeley Democrat who has taken over the issue in the Legislature, says his boss so far hasn't been able to get labor leaders and environmentalists to agree on a fix.
The questions, Hemann says, are endless. What, exactly, is a volunteer? What about people who volunteer one day but are on the payroll the next? What about volunteers who do jobs that skilled trades people could otherwise be paid for doing? Should the change apply only to environmental projects, or to all public works? Should projects below a certain dollar threshold be exempted?
Jim Lewis, spokesman for a coalition of state trade unions, says his group is happy to work out a solution. But simply allowing volunteers to volunteer, whenever they want and wherever they are needed? Nope.
"We are working with Loni and the other parties involved to make sure if there is work that requires the use of skilled labor, heavy equipment and so on, that that work is reimbursed under the prevailing wage law, as it has been for the last 70 years," Lewis told me. "If there is work that is legitimate volunteer work, that is possible as well."
But what is legitimate volunteer work, other than work that a citizen agrees to do for free, without coercion, out of a desire to benefit his or her community? Whether it's picking weeds, moving brush or using my personal grader to level a playing field, I ought to be able to do it without fear of running afoul of labor laws.
So far, Schwarzenegger's people have been trying to finesse this issue, which is unfortunate. Rick Rice, assistant secretary for the state labor agency and the governor's point person on the matter, says the administration wants to strike a balance between protecting the prevailing wage standard, where appropriate, and promoting volunteerism.
The governor has a lot on his plate these days. But this is one of those issues that strikes a chord with the public and that is in dire need of a common-sense solution that cuts through all the usual Capitol nonsense. Isn't that just the kind of leadership Schwarzenegger was elected to provide?
Daniel Weintraub writes for the Sacramento Bee.