An excerpt.
Efforts to restore watershed habitats throughout California, including several in the Bay Area, are threatened because the state is using a largely unknown law to force nonprofit groups to pay prevailing wages to volunteers on their publicly funded projects.
"This serves as a de facto prohibition on volunteerism as perhaps every community project in these dire fiscal times uses some level of volunteer assistance,'' Michael Wellborn, president of the California Watershed Network, wrote in a recent letter to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The issue came to a boil after the state Department of Industrial Relations, responding to a labor union's complaint, ordered a Redding environmental organization last year to pay $50,000 in fines and back wages for using student volunteers on a publicly funded restoration project. The Sacramento Watersheds Action Group is appealing that ruling.
State officials say they must enforce a provision of the state labor code that legislators expanded in 2001, even though the author of the change says he never intended to limit volunteer work on watersheds. The law requires that all workers on a public works project be paid the prevailing wages for those jobs in that area if even one person is paid for work on the project.
"We're tied by what the law tells us to do,'' said Rick Rice, assistant secretary of the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, which includes the Department of Industrial Relations. In fact, Rice said state officials think volunteers may have to be paid on other kinds of publicly funded programs, including one in which youths build low-income housing.
Pretty silly.
