Tom Goodson is the definition of Tea Party chic. He is their posterboy from head to toe, white hair, bushy mustache, and armed with a voting record that places him to the right of the political spectrum from most conservatives. He’s a good old boy, a throwback to a different time. A time when you were lucky to get paid by the boss man and you didn’t dare complain about mistreatment. That is why Tom Goodson is so anti-worker, because workers would never vote for him anyway. He is a middle aged white man’s luke warm cup of tea.
Goodson’s latest work, House Bill 609, is a shining example of Tea Party Austerity in that it actually blocks local anit-wage theft ordinances. The bill has passed Goodson’s Florida subcommittee and will now be voted on by the Florida House. Still under control of Republicans swept in by the same Tea Party wave that gave the nation Rick Scott, the Florida GOP is likely to get this bill through. He is the rich man’s champion, looking out for their leisure time that they would rather spend at the country club than making sure their workers are being paid probably. As he told the Florida Independent earlier this year,
“I’m a businessman with four companies,” Goodson told The Florida Independent. “I work in four different counties — Brevard, Orange, Volusia and Indian River — and I don’t need four local wage theft ordinances to deal with.”
Goodson said that because state and federal laws supersede local ordinances, he doesn’t “see the purpose” in municipal rules, adding that his legislation, House Bill 241, would benefit businessmen and “everybody who has a payroll.”
Talk about a champion of small government. Why do things at the state and local level when they can be done by the federal government, right?
What about those who work for these businesses? There are 35 workers today alone in Miami Lakes right now using the current ordinances in place to try to receive payment for work they have done and not been paid for. According to the Florida Independent,
Luis, a worker, tells the Independent that his coworkers are owed anywhere from $400 to $1,400 for two to three weeks of work. Luis himself has not been paid since Nov. 21 and is owed $1,175.
Rick Colandreo of CB Constructors — a subsidiary of Current Builders, a member of Associated Builders Contractors and the general contractor at the Lake Houses project — tells the Independent that CB Structures, a subsidiary of CB Constructors, sub-contracted with J&B Construction Services “to do the work that is in question.” They have “apparently have not paid a number of their employees,” Colandreo says.
According to Colandreo, the issue came to the attention of CB Constructors late Monday.
“What Current Builders is trying to do is verify these guys in fact did work at the site,” Colandreo says. “We will need to verify their ID and make certain these guys get paid. You know, these are laborers, doing their job, and just looking for their weekly wage.”
He says workers will get paid: “Realistically, I would say the earliest would be Friday; more realistic might be Monday of next week.”
Colandreo says J&B will not be doing any more work for CB, adding that if workers are undocumented and “cannot come forward with accurate identification, then we would have to defer to our legal counsel to see what we’re obligated to do. We want to make sure that everybody that should legitimately be paid gets paid.”
Why would Tom Goodson sponsor and fight for a bill that is blatantly anti-worker? Because before the Tea Party favorite narrowly won the Republican primary in the 2010 elections and then went unopposed in the predominantly right leaning district 29 he was a road contractor working on huge construction projects. Goodwin Paving employs between 50 to 100 people at all times and makes close to $20 million in annual revenue. He used his successful business to give him Tea Party credibility and then used his new found Tea Party power to do what was best for him and change laws to make less oversight for other rich men like him who don’t want to feel bothered by government oversights. This isn’t even an issue of him thinking workers get paid too much; this is an issue of getting paid on time and fairly no matter your wage.
As expected local unions are coming out against the bill which they see as ineffective and unnecessary.
Dwight Mattingly of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1577 said, “We oppose this bill because it does not fix the problem, but continues to allow unscrupulous employers who are failing to pay workers to get away with that, without penalty. There is mention of provisions in federal law — that takes forever if Department of Labor gets to those.”
Rich Templin of the Florida AFL-CIO said during today’s House hearing that the Department of Labor “documented 9,000 cases of wage theft totaling $28 million in Florida for a two-year period ending Jan. 1 of this year.”
“By the Department of Labor’s own modeling, that represents one third of what probably actually happened in Florida,” Templin said, “Because they acknowledge that the federal guidelines and federal process for resolving these issues is very weak.”
Templin said that under current law, “when this happens to workers, they are forced” to go to the federal government. “We’ve heard so much about the perils of big government,” Templin said. “Yet local governments are trying to deal with this problem and now you are smacking them down.”
Templin makes an excellent point, Tea Party Republicans want everything to be run by state and local governments until the realize that the inefficiencies of such a system can become a huge hindrance. As much as they believe in a small government ideology what they really believe is that they should only look out for themselves. Because after all, historically as Americans, which is more important to us: the rich millionaire not having to be bothered with paperwork or the man working long days to provide food for his family’s right to be paid fairly and on time?