ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the points to be made with the residential wage determination for Beaver, Fayette, and Washington counties of Pennsylvania, three of the six counties originally surveyed in 2002. The first item asserts one of the silliest aspects of prevailing wage administration, namely that if no prevailing wage can be found to exist for some category of laborer or mechanic, that category of worker will have to be paid some other laborer or mechanic's prevailing wage. Many examples of even more elaborate local union delineations abound throughout prevailing wage determinations. In the original survey, however, cement masons were treated as a separate wage group from plasterers in the same way that carpet layers were treated as a separate wage group from the carpenters' union to which they belonged. The variations in wage rates for ordinary construction workers elaborated in the federal determinations just for the state of Pennsylvania demonstrates how prevailing rates foster anomalies.
