As expressed by the California labor and workforce development agency all construction projects funded by the Kindergarten-University Public Education Facilities Bond (Acts 2002 - 2004) are required to contain and comply with a labor compliance program. This compliance program became effective as of April 1, 2003.



You may now be thinking: 'Oh well, this is a lot of legal mombo-jombo', but the fact is that these laws were created for a reason. The labor compliance program also referred to as 'LCP' is required to make sure that all workers employed by either contractors or subcontractors be paid or compensated a state-determined prevailing wage. In other words, this program makes sure that workers who execute public work contracts are not being underpaid.

Another goal of this labor compliance program is to keep a competitive bidding process with complete integrity, which will filter monetary aid back into the local community through the public workers thus improving labor relations. The agency which is directly responsible for enforcing prevailing wage laws is the California Department of Industrial Relations also referred to as 'DIR', and even more specific, the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement also known as the 'DLSE' which is a subdivision of the 'DIR' is directly linked to this compliance program.

Furthermore, the work done by the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement has to comply and be consistent with the 8CC 16434 legislation which has provided a statutory system ever since 1989. This particular legislation also allows political subdivisions of the state which provide public work contracts to work and make sure everything is in order directly with the Department of industrial Relations and the Division of Labor Standards Enforcement.

This particular program also applies to school districts. Since funding, implementing and managing a permanent labor compliance program is quite an important and resource consuming task many of the school districts have decided to let a certified third party LCP handle such responsibilities.

Certified third party LCPs are required to handle several tasks during this process, such tasks are: communicating with construction workers and personnel in English and Spanish during on-site labor compliance inspections, keeping proper documentation of prevailing wage language during bid and contract arrangements, instructing and explaining labor compliance responsibilities to contractors and subcontractors during pre-construction convocations, auditing and ensuring the integrity of certified payroll records as well as making corrections if prevailing wage mistakes are found throughout such documents, ensuring and facilitating project completion within the time and budgets established.

As you now understand, keeping and maintaining labor compliance programs is a full time job which must be executed properly and carefully, that is why that not only school districts are outsourcing such responsibilities to certified third party LCPs; housing authorities, developers, contractors, local municipalities, redevelopment agencies and all other organizations which are subject to state regulated prevailing wage requirements, tend to outsource such tasks as well.