Dale Belman and Paula B. Voos, Prepared for the Institute for Wisconsin's Future, October 1995.
The Davis-Bacon Act, established to protect local wage levels on publicly-funded construction projects, is being challenged in Congress. Attempts to repeal Davis-Bacon and weaken state prevailing wage laws are based on the claim that repeal will bolster state and federal budgets. However, in the nine states in which prevailing wage laws were repealed in the 1980's, state budgets and taxpayers did not benefit. In fact, repeal of these regulations actually resulted in a loss to state budgets and had a negative impact on state economies...

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