Independent Roofing Contractors of California, Inc. v. Department of Industrial Relations

California law requires that workers on public works projects be accorded the same working conditions and wages that prevail in private industry. The California Department of Industrial Relations (Department) is charged with determining what wages are prevailing for specific types of work at any given place and time; its determinations are binding on the parties to public construction contracts. Here, two associations of building contractors bring various constitutional challenges to the Department’s decision to delete a particular wage determination. They complain that the Department’s policies and the statutory scheme effectively allow the parties to private collective bargaining agreements to dictate the wages that will be paid on public projects, regardless whether those wages are actually prevailing. The trial court rejected their contentions. We affirm.

Facts

On October 5, 1989, the business manager of the Craft Tenders Union Local 343 of Vallejo, California, requested that the Department determine prevailing wage rates for craft tender employees. Before the request was made, there had been no such classification for prevailing wage purposes. In support of the…