NY’s $51.71-an-hour summer job! (Great pay for Clearing debris and lifting heavy objects)

New York Post ^ | 06/21/2012 | Russell Sykes

[SeekAndFind]

The small Hudson Valley city of Poughkeepsie is now home to some of the best-paying summer jobs ever: $51.71 an hour.

That’s right: $51.71 an hour.

The project started off as perfectly sensible. The work involves restoring Fallkill Creek, damaged in last summer’s post-Hurricane Irene flooding. To get the job done and put up to 150 unemployed young people to work, the state Labor Department tapped a federal storm-cleanup grant.

So far, so good: There’s work that needs to be done, people who need work and a way to pay for it all. But $51.71 an hour?

Clearing debris and lifting heavy objects isn’t easy, but why pay temporary manual laborers the same hourly rate as a skilled employee in a $100,000-a-year full-time job?

The story of how a simple and necessary public works project became a full-blown boondoggle is a classic tale of government excess and regulatory insanity.

The ultimate source of funding for the Fallkill cleanup is a federal National Emergency Grant, whose terms require paying wages at the highest of the federal, state or local minimum wage or at the comparable rates of pay for individuals employed in similar occupations by the same employer.

The state Labor Department decided that this meant the prevailing wage for public-works projects. But “prevailing wage” is a term of art that actually means a pay rate based on collective-bargaining agreements between labor unions and private employers.

For the Mid-Hudson region, the prevailing hourly rate for laborers comes to $51.71 — $30.71 in wages plus $21 in benefits. But the temporary workers on the Fallkill won’t be union members, so they’ll get the entire amount as a wage, the Labor Department ruled.

Another string on the grant: Total wages paid to a worker can’t exceed $12,000, excluding fringe benefits —

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It gets worse. This situation is extreme, but hardly unique: The prevailing wage has been an increasingly costly headache all over New York. But the unions push for it, and the pols are only too happy to oblige.

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[Vendome]

If I lived there I’d take that job.

[publius911]

NY’s $51.71-an-hour summer job! (Great pay for Clearing debris and lifting heavy objects)

This is the mental deficient politicians' strategy to justify outrageous payback-to-the-unions salaries for menial no-skill union government jobs.

SAY WHAT??!!??

[hattend]

If I could get a summer sabbatical, I'd be down there lining up for a job.