Dive Brief:

• Indiana’s decision to scrap its long-standing common construction wage law has rippled into other Midwestern states, where conservative legislators want to do away with the practice of paying contractors on government-funded projects a “prevailing wage.”

• Republican lawmakers in Michigan and Wisconsin are attempting to abolish their statutes, which require state and local governments to pay the going local rate and benefits, often determined by union scale, on public projects like road work and school construction. So-called prevailing wage statutes are in place in 31 states. Unions support the laws, while opponents say they inflate wages and burden taxpayers.

• “There’s a national agenda coming after the building trades unions,” Patrick “Shorty” Gleason, legislative director for the Michigan Building and Construction Trades Council union, told The Washington Post. “They do it under a false pretense that they’re going to save hundreds of millions of dollars for the taxpayers. It’s a race to the bottom that’s going to end up nowhere.”

Dive Insight:

States started adopting common construction wage laws during the Depression in an effort to protect local contractors from losing government jobs to out-of-state construction firms that were willing to work for less than the usual pay. The federal government follows a similar practice for its construction bids.

As more state Legislatures have come under GOP control over the past few years, efforts to repeal the laws have picked up steam. The Post reported that opponents of the law spent more than $350,000 on TV ads as Indiana considered whether to repeal its statute.