In what may be a 12-round bout, AGC has scored another victory on the path to expunging President Obama’s Blacklisting Executive Order. On May 19, the House of Representatives approved legislation that includes an AGC-backed provision to the National Defense Authorization Act—a bill that has been annually enacted into law for 54 consecutive years—that ensures the EO would not apply to Department of Defense and National Nuclear Security Administration contracts. AGC will work with Congress to limit the Executive Order.
Under the EO, both prime and subcontractors must report violations and alleged violations of 14 federal labor laws and “equivalent” state labor laws—which have not been articulated yet—during the previous three years, and again every six months, on federal contracts over $500,000. Prime contractors would also be responsible for evaluating the labor law violations of their subcontractors at all tiers during both contract solicitation and contract performance. A single violation, or a combination of multiple violations, could lead a contracting officer to either (1) deny a prime contractor the right to compete for a federal contract; or (2) remove a prime contractor or subcontractor from an ongoing project. Such determinations would be made on an individual contracting officer basis with assistance from newly-created agency labor law compliance advisers.
For more information, please contact Jimmy Christianson at christiansonj@agc.org or (703) 837-5325.