Quote Originally Posted by 3beansalad View Post
This is a very interesting comment to me. As a 30 year civilian construction subcontractor, the cost of labor is dictated by the federal government. For a typical commercial project being bid on the Front Range, our field 'mechanics' are paid $28 per hour plus benefits and $15 per day for fuel. A federal contract on the Front Range can range from $43 to $51 per hour for the same scope. We still provide the same benefits/ fuel stipend to our employees.
Our overhead and profit is the same no matter what we bid/ build. In fact, we are required to provide the labor and material breakdowns to prove it we don't exceed Federal standards on overhead and profit. I have always made more profit on private jobs than federal. We can complete the work faster with far less bureaucracy. Quality is often impacted negatively by the gov't requirements. The federal standards are based on 50 year old requirements for our scope. Materials have come a long way since then, and can be installed faster with less waste than the COE allows.
We are also required to produce weekly documentation that proves we pay the required wage. I'm sure there have been contractors that don't, but I've never seen one. And the risk of not paying your employees per the mandated Davis-Bacon schedule is more than small contractors ($1-10M per year) could absorb and stay in business.

We don't "get" to charge the government more, they mandate it.
All true. For the SCA side, it's substantially the same. Even minimum benefits are spelled out. County-by-county, wage assessments and benefits. If a individual employee doesn't take health insurance, the company nevertheless still has to obtain the same benefit amount from the gov't. E.g. company is spending 0.25/h on benefits for employee A, is reimbursed the same 4.85/h (or whatever the counties grade is). I'm not saying fed contracting is lucrative business, I'm just illustrating that between federal employees and contractors, the loser is usually the employee, there is not a cost saving going private realized by the taxpayer.

(I'll clarify too - I am not a fed, nobody should infer self interest).