Getting the Lowdown on Builders Who Low-Ball Their Laborers

It was just before 11 a.m. on a recent Monday, and Ed Heskett, who watches construction projects for a living, took a bead on an unfinished elementary school.

A handful of laborers, their leather tool belts advertising them as carpenters, were scrambling around the periphery of the facility.

Squinting through a pair of binoculars, Heskett fumbled for his tape recorder and muttered into it: “I see three carpenters putting in curbing, working with one laborer. Three more carpenters, for a total of six.”

With that, Heskett lowered the tools of his trade, put the car in gear and moved on to the next vantage point. There he jotted down license plate numbers of laborers working on the site, adding them to his growing log of information about this construction project.

Precise and detailed, Heskett’s notes--along with the jottings of his colleagues on a local carpenters/contractors cooperation committee--provide the core of the state’s cases against contractors accused of failing to pay the state-required prevailing wage on public works.

The log will establish how many workers were on the site on any particular day. By checking Heskett’s notes against the contractor’s payroll records, state officials will be able to determine whether the contractor is employing the number of people he reports. If there are more laborers on the job than on the official payroll, that gives investigators the hint of impropriety they need to justify asking project workers how much money they actually receive for their labor.

If the surveys turn up evidence that laborers are being shortchanged, the state can levy fines. And in cases where it can establish a pattern of knowing or willful fraud, it can push for felony charges to be filed.

But while punishing the contractors is a responsibility for the state, budget cuts and an ever-growing number of the cases have left the front line to the cooperation committees and their investigators.

“They’re very helpful, and they’re the only ones out there who are actively monitoring these projects,” said Roger Miller, regional manager of the enforcement bureau of the state Division of Labor Standards. “Generally, they’re the ones that file the majority of our cases.”

The committees and Center for Contract Compliance, another monitoring group, were formed by contractors angry about losing jobs to what they consider unscrupulous low bidders and about laborers put out of work by low-priced workers, many of whom do not know they are entitled to receive the state-mandated prevailing wage on public works projects.

To build a case against the contractors who shortchange those workers takes time and, occasionally, subterfuge.

Heskett spends much of his time watching from across a street or a nearby park, but when he needs to take a closer look, he will don a jogging suit and sidle up to the fence. Wearing headphones and pretending to listen to a tape in his hand-held recorder, he will quietly dictate his observations and transcribe them later.