WISCONSIN — Tom Tiffany has spent years talking about taxpayers, government waste and the cost of doing business.
But there is another part of his Wisconsin record that deserves considerably more attention because actions speak louder than words:
Tom Tiffany helped dismantle the wage protections that Wisconsin construction workers had relied on for decades.
This wasn’t some obscure vote buried in a massive piece of legislation. Tiffany was a vocal advocate for repealing Wisconsin’s prevailing-wage law while serving in the state Senate. In 2015, Republicans fought over whether to scale back or eliminate the law, which established minimum wage standards for workers on publicly funded construction projects.
The eventual compromise was a partial repeal. Under the 2015 budget, prevailing-wage requirements were eliminated for local government construction projects while remaining in place for state projects. The issue had been contentious enough to hold up the state budget for weeks.
That wasn’t the end of it.
Two years later, Wisconsin Republicans went back and eliminated prevailing-wage requirements for state construction projects as well. By then, Tiffany’s position was clear: he supported taking away the wage standards.
And what happened next?
Construction workers made less money.
A study by the Midwest Economic Policy Institute, reported by Wisconsin Public Radio, found that after Wisconsin repealed prevailing-wage laws, average annual income for full-time construction and extraction workers fell from roughly $49,000 to just over $46,000. After accounting for factors such as age and education, researchers calculated that construction workers’ incomes were approximately 6% lower than before repeal.
That’s important because supporters of repeal had promised something else.
The argument was that prevailing wage artificially inflated construction costs, hurt taxpayers and reduced competition. Republicans argued that eliminating the requirements would make public construction cheaper.
But the MEPI study found no statistically significant reduction in the cost of public construction projects following repeal. Researchers also found that the number of bids from Wisconsin contractors on state transportation projects fell substantially.
So the promised bargain looks considerably different in retrospect.
Workers lost ground on their paychecks. The research found no statistically significant savings on public construction. And Wisconsin saw fewer bids from Wisconsin-based contractors on transportation projects.
There is another reason Tiffany’s record deserves attention.
He wasn’t simply someone who reluctantly went along with his party.
Years later, after moving from the state Legislature to Congress, Tiffany continued to defend the same position. During his 2019 congressional campaign, he explicitly supported repealing the federal Davis-Bacon prevailing-wage law and pointed to Wisconsin’s repeal as an example.
That makes this more than a story about one vote in one state budget.
It is a consistent position.
Tom Tiffany believes government-funded construction should not require prevailing-wage standards.
The practical question is what that means for the people who actually do the work.
A prevailing-wage requirement doesn’t make a construction worker rich. It establishes a floor for compensation on publicly funded projects — the roads, schools, bridges and public buildings paid for by taxpayers.
Wisconsin removed that floor.
And according to the research that followed, construction workers’ earnings fell by about 6%.
That’s the part of Tiffany’s record that shouldn’t get lost in the usual arguments about taxes, spending or government regulation.
When politicians talk about “working families,” voters should look at what happened when they had the power to set the rules governing workers’ pay.
In Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany had that power.
He used it to support repealing the prevailing wage.
And the workers who build Wisconsin’s public infrastructure ended up making less.
The bottom line is that Tom Tiffany’s record is one of smaller paychecks for Wisconsin construction workers.
