A proposed reinterpretation of a federal law that would have had potentially harmful job killing and inflationary effects on the commercial modular industry and its U.S. membership has been stopped through the dogged efforts of the Modular Building Institute and several of its member companies.
On August 8, the U.S. Department of Labor published its final rule aimed at revising and expanding the 90-year-old Davis-Bacon Act. The initial proposal would have expanded the Act which mandates prevailing union wage rates to include “secondary sites” such as modular factories on federally funded projects. Through an extensive year-and-a-half long lobbying effort by the Modular Building Institute (MBI) and its members, the Department of Labor published its final rule without the proposed expansion to include the modular building industry.
MBI executive director Tom Hardiman expressed just how significant this decision was and gave credit to the collective support of the associations membership stating, “In my twenty years with MBI, this is by far the biggest win for our industry. The MBI and our members were able to delay this rule’s implementation for over a year and ultimately prevailed in getting the anti-industry language removed.”
You can read more about the MBI’s successful effort in stopping the reinterpretation of the Davis-Bacon Act here.
