Good Wages Are Racist?
Topic: CNSNews.com
A Sept. 9 CNSNews.com article by Susan Jones plays the race card to support President Bush's executive order to rescind the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires the government to pay prevailing local wages to construction workers, in hurricane-damaged areas.

After quoting House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi saying that the Davis-Bacon Act sprang from the Great Depression - "at a time when scurrilous employers were taking advantage of the desperation of American workers to care for their families," Jones writes:

But according to a report by the Cato Institute, Congress passed the Davis-Bacon Act in 1931 to benefit white-only unions at the expense of non-unionized black workers.

According to the Cato report, "Davis-Bacon was designed explicitly to keep black construction workers from working on Depression-era public works projects."

Those discriminatory effects continue today, the report says - "by favoring disproportionately white, skilled and unionized construction workers over disproportionately black, unskilled and non-unionized construction workers."

Here is the report Jones is quoting.