THE ISSUE:
A proposal to require better wages on more kinds of publicly funded projects fails.
THE STAKES:
When public subsidies benefit as many people as possible, the dividends multiply.
When the public underwrites a project, the public should benefit. One of those benefits should be good wages for the people who work on that project.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo offered a proposal to achieve that in his executive budget by expanding the list of state-supported projects on which employers would be required to pay prevailing wages. Many in the business community didn’t like it, but opposition also came from some rather surprising quarters. In the final budget negotiations, the proposal fell off the table.