Another Reason Why Prevailing Wage Laws Suck

From Firehouse.com:  Nearly a month after being dealt a setback by state lawmakers, officials in the Sissonville Volunteer Fire Department said they are scratching their heads over labor rules they must follow in the rebuilding of their main fire station.
Late in the Legislature's recent session, House leadership pulled a bill from the agenda that would have exempted state volunteer fire departments from prevailing wage and labor rules that other public authorities must follow for expansion projects.
"It's the ultimate irony that a volunteer department is compelled to pay prevailing wage," said Tom Miller, a volunteer firefighter and secretary of the department's board of directors.
"I've worked for 27, almost 28 years for my community for free, and now I'm having to pay prevailing wage to build a building," he said.
"I'm not anti-union, but it just boggles me."
Miller said if the bill had passed, it likely would have saved the department about $645,000 in construction costs to rebuild the station, which burned to the ground in October 2010....
"A drywall hanger, which we would have gotten for free (from volunteers), we now have to pay $44.11 per hour," he said.
"We had what we felt was an extremely reasonable bid from a local company to lay cement, and now we're forced to pay 42.62 an hour for that work. That's about $15 or $16 more per hour than what that bid came in at."
Miller said the bill's demise affected 17 other volunteer fire departments with expansion projects.
"Keep in mind, every dollar this is increased is another hot dog I have to sell, another fundraiser we have to conduct," Miller said.
http://www.firehouse.com/news/10669333/labor-rules-complicate-wva-fire-station-rebuild
So,the volunteer fire department, which has many volunteers with many talents in construction, will have to pay over $40 an hour when they could have gotten the work done for free.
That's not right and it shows once again that liberals would rather stick it to volunteer organizations all in the name of unions.
Shame, shame, shame.