President George W. Bush's Sept. 8 decision to suspend the payment of prevailing wages to construction workers rebuilding the hurricane-stricken Gulf region was roundly criticized by union officials and one of the nation's leading newspapers.

"We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action," Bush said after Katrina hit. Yet his first decisive act was to issue an executive order taking wage protections away from construction workers who will rebuild the Gulf Coast.

Bush's action to rescind the payment of prevailing wages - which he is allowed to do as an "emergency" measure - effectively dooms those local construction workers to rock-bottom wages. Many of those workers are homeless and jobless, and a few dollars per hour increase in their wages could make a real difference in their lives.

"By any standard of human decency, condemning many already poor and now bereft people to sub-par wages - thus perpetuating their poverty - is unacceptable," said a New York Times editorial on Sept. 10, under the headline, "A shameful proclamation." The Times continued, "It is also bad for the economy. Without the law, called the Davis-Bacon Act, contractors will be able to pay less, but they'll also get less, as lower wages inevitably mean lower productivity."

Bush's rationale for repealing the prevailing wage during the Gulf clean-up and rebuilding is ideological and political. Many Republicans - but not all - feel that federal and state prevailing wage laws waste taxpayer dollars by artificially increasing wages. In addition, the anti-union Associated Builders and Contractors hate the idea of prevailing wages being foisted upon their contractors, and they are major contributors to Republican lawmakers.

Supporters of prevailing wage cite numerous academic studies that have found where prevailing wage laws have been repealed, school districts and municipalities have not realized savings because contractors don't lower their bids. The law works: if it didn't, Republicans who controls all the levers of power in Congress would have rescinded it years ago, but they haven't had the votes.

"The administration that was unprepared to respond to Hurricane Katrina is moving with astonishing speed to use this human crisis to push an anti-worker, right-wing agenda that it has been unable to move otherwise," said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. "The flood waters had barely begun to recede when Bush took wage protections from construction workers who will rebuild the Gulf Coast."

Building Trades Department President Edward C. Sullivan called Bush's order "legalized looting" of the workers "while favored contractors rake in huge profits" from reconstruction.

Laborers President Terry O'Sullivan said the Davis-Bacon Act, which Bush overturned, "protects communities from fly-by-night contractors who drive down community living standards with taxpayers' money."

Sheet Metal Workers President Michael J. Sullivan reiterated those points and added that when Bush's father suspended Davis-Bacon in southern Florida after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the fly-by-nighters "preyed on residents and businesses" by demanding "upfront money for work they never began."

And "lowering wages will not provide incentives for workers to move back to New Orleans" to help reconstruct it, he added. Skilled construction workers from elsewhere will also not travel to the devastated area to face the low wages as well as lack of housing and health problems in the Gulf Coast, Sullivan said.