If you're a construction worker, truck driver or laborer thinking about working in Joplin, hold on to your wallet. As you seek employment in helping the southwest Missouri city — and maybe yourself — recover from the worst natural disaster in state history, some state Republicans are trying to whack your wages.

This month, a House committee led by Rep. Shane Schoeller, R-Willard, released a report from hearings last summer examining Missouri's year of natural disasters, including flooding on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and tornadoes from Joplin to St. Louis.

One of the key recommendations — as Mr. Schoeller predicted before he had held a single hearing — is to suspend prevailing wage rates in disaster areas.

Even before the winds started to blow, Mr. Schoeller and other Republicans had been seeking to get rid of the prevailing wage law, which requires builders using public funds to pay reasonable wages. So their pious proclamations of simply trying to maximize rebuilding efforts in Joplin are bogus.

As we noted before Mr. Schoeller's committee got to work, economic studies show that the benefits of lower wages are minimal at best, especially compared with long-term costs created by the shoddier construction that comes from less-skilled employees. Former President George W. Bush learned that lesson the hard way when he hastily retreated from a similar proposal after Hurricane Katrina.

But beyond the historical record, the rush to punish Joplin's workforce by asking its workers to accept wages lower than those in adjacent counties is appalling because the dishonesty of the anti-prevailing wage campaign.

Mr. Schoeller is not alone in this quest. Sen. Rob Mayer, R-Dexter, the president pro tem of the Missouri Senate, has filed a bill that would accomplish the same feat. And Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder also has called for such a proposal, claiming that new federal prevailing wage rates have skyrocketed.

Indeed, the federal government, after having not updated its prevailing wage rates for years, did so this fall. So the published prevailing wage rate — which is a bare minimum — for a carpenter in Jasper or Newton counties, for instance, rose from $7.98 an hour to $21.47.

Yes, that looks like it would increase construction costs enormously. But the numbers are a mirage. Nobody is paying $7.98 per hour for a carpenter in Joplin, unless, perhaps, he's employing undocumented immigrant workers. Is that what Missouri Republicans want?

The more accurate comparison is the state prevailing wage, which is updated yearly. The prevailing wage for a carpenter in Joplin this year is $21.74 per hour. And that rate is down — yes, down — from last year's rate of $21.89.

What's at play here is that a small group of developers — the same ones who profit enormously from the tax credits handed out by the Missouri Housing Development Commission for low-income housing — now want an extra gift from the state. They want to build their multi-million-dollar projects with cheaper labor.

Already benefiting from government goodies, they want to pocket even more profits. Missouri Republicans, who do those developers' bidding and reap their campaign contributions, are rushing to help.

As for those Joplin workers who already make less than workers in any other section of the state? Too bad. For Mr. Schoeller and his cronies, they're just in the way.