WASHINGTON - By popular demand, prevailing wage rules are making a return engagement to the Gulf Coast region.

A few days following Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, President Bush - as he is allowed to do during a national emergency - rescinded federal rules which required that contractors pay prevailing wages to workers on federally-sponsored rebuilding work.

But the president, bowing to enormous political pressure, reversed himself on Oct. 26, and restored the federal prevailing wage (or Davis-Bacon Act) for taxpayer-funded projects.

"Thousands and thousands of letters, e-mails and calls from trade union members and their families were generated calling for reinstating these critical worker wage protections," said AFL-CIO Building Trades Department President Edward Sullivan. "The resulting bi-partisan congressional effort to pressure Bush to reinstate Davis-Bacon achieved success. This is great news for workers and their families in the devastated Gulf Coast."

The practical effect of Bush's new order will be to restore a base level of wages for construction workers toiling on projects - from highways to bridges to buildings to levees to airports - needed to rebuild damaged areas of the Gulf, especially devastated New Orleans. The payment of prevailing wages resumed effective Nov. 8.

Bush, who yanked Davis-Bacon on Sept. 8, did not make his restoration retroactive, and his order still left politically favored contractors, such as Halliburton, and the low-wage, out-of-state, non-union workers - some of them illegals - in place.

Pressure on Bush mounted after a group of 37 moderate Republican lawmakers signed a letter urging the president to rescind his anti-prevailing wage order.

The Bush Administration originally maintained that the Davis-Bacon suspension would reduce rebuilding costs and eliminate red tape. But unions and their allies in Congress argued that rescinding prevailing wage wasn't anti-union, it was anti-worker. Unions are extremely weak in the Gulf region, and among some trades, the prevailing wage is less than $10 per hour. Taking away even that paltry wage, unions argued, was morally reprehensible for newly homeless workers in the area looking to get back on their feet.

Regarding the revocation of prevailing wage, White House spokesman Trent Duffy said, "it was always intended for it to be temporary," although the Bush Administration left the matter open-ended when the Davis-Bacon Act was rescinded. Democrats charged that leaving the repeal open-ended was the first step in the total repeal of prevailing wage.

Ohio Republican Congressman Steven LaTourette, a leader in writing the letter to Bush asking for prevailing wage to be reinstated, said the White House acknowledged that the suspension of Davis Bacon was not saving the federal government billions of dollars, as conservatives promised.

As usual, if the Wall Street Journal's editorial page doesn't like something, it's usually good for organized labor. Under the headline "Davis-Bacon flip-flop," the Journal called Bush's decision "an act of unprincipled political calculation" and "a special disappointment."

But LaTourette justified Bush's flip by telling a Cleveland newspaper, "There are thousands of skilled Gulf Coast workers who should be working to rebuild their communities, and it sickens me that companies are passing them by and hiring cheap unskilled illegal workers to beef up their bottom line."