MAJOR Milestone Comes...and Goes...for MCAA's Year of the Intern 

Forget the Year of the Intern's stated goal of doubling the number of interns funded and placed with MCAA members in 2015...how about tripling that number!! That's exactly what happened last week when the Mechanical Contracting Education & Research Foundation (MCERF) received and approved its 249th Student Internship Grant for 2015, tripling the 2014 total of 83! The lucky intern, Bryce Wilson from Purdue University, will be spending his summer internship with Ferguson (a Wolseley Company) in its Chicago office. The jubilation of the moment didn't last long, however, as even more grant requests followed the milestone applicant, a total of 19 grants totaling $28,550 for the week. To date, MCAA's 2015 - Year of the Intern initiative has funded 259 internship grants for a grand total of $388,500! The rationale behind the Year of the Intern effort is that MCAA members' best recruiting and retention tool is an internship that allows the student to fully experience the professionalism and lifestyle of an MCAA member. If this thesis is true, MCAA is doing something profound to affect the professional workforce shortage our members are experiencing. The Year of the Intern continues to roll. If your company has hired an intern for this summer and you have not applied for a Student Internship Grant, go to www.mcerf.org/internships for information about the grant and an application. Questions? Please contact Ann Mattheis (amattheis@mcaa.org). 

Proposed FAR Regulations Issued on Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order (EO13673) 

The regulations (80 FR 30548, 5/28/15) require prime contractors and subcontractors with contracts of $500,000 or more to certify legal compliance with a wide variety of federal and state labor, employment and safety laws as a condition of prime contract or subcontract eligibility on direct federal construction projects. Under the rules, the prime contractor would be required to submit a certification of legal compliance to the awarding agency and its Labor Compliance Advisor (LCA) in the pre-award responsibility determination process. If the prime contractor is judged to have a satisfactory record of legal compliance, then the prime is judged responsible under the business ethics and legal compliance elements of the responsibility determination criteria. Each subcontractor would then undergo a similar legal compliance review by the prime contractors. MCAA worked with its covered procurement task force last year in commenting on ways to make the EO procedures more equitable for prime contractors and subcontractors. As part of that effort, MCAA also worked with the UA in commenting on the procedures in development, calling for safeguards in the prime contractor flow-down evaluation of subcontractors to guard against misapplication of the criteria, post-award price renegotiations, late ineligibility determinations, and consequent claims and disputes relating to added costs and project delays. MCAA and the UA suggested, for example, that the procedures be changed to allow for legal compliance evaluations to be performed on the prime contractor and all major subcontractors by the agency contracting officer and LCA in the pre-award responsibility determination process, thereby limiting the possibility of inequitable, unfair or misapplied criteria by the prime contractor. Also, MCAA and the Quality Construction Alliance submitted a statement to that effect at a hearing before the House Education and Workforce Committee in late February. The proposed regulations in fact granted a concession to that aspect of the procedures by allowing the prime contractor to have the option of submitting the subcontractor's compliance certifications to the agency for its evaluation and recommendation to the prime contractor. MCAA will continue providing input to the regulators on the matter. The regulations are open for comment for 60 days; interim or final rules will then take effect. At the same time as the proposed regulations were issued, the Labor Department published proposed guidance for federal agencies on how to evaluate contractor and subcontractor legal compliance records to guide decisions about which violations are serious, willful, repeated or otherwise egregious enough to warrant a non-responsibility determination and denial of award of the prime contract or subcontract. The document is also open for public comment for 60 days. 

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