text: Labor-management troubles occurred throughout construction of the initial seven buildings in the Federal Triangle complex in the 1920s and 1930s. Much of Washington, D.C.'s, construction workforce was unionized many years before the project began. All the building contractors employed by the federal government signed three-year contracts with the major labor unions representing their workers in September 1929, in the hope that this would eliminate any disruptions during the building program. But this hope proved false.
  The first problem occurred in July 1930, when the lathers union went on strike to win a $2 per day (16.7 percent) pay increase, halting work for a short period of time on the Archives, Interstate Commerce, Justice, Labor, and Post Office sites. A second strike occurred in late summer 1931 over a new federal wage law. The Davis–Bacon Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Hoover on March 3, 1931. On August 4, 1931, painters working on the Internal Revenue building went on strike, arguing that out-of-town workers were being imported into the city to work on the building and being paid $5-to-$7 a day rather than the prevailing local wage rate of $11 a day. Both the Treasury and Labor Departments stepped in to arbitrate the strike. The dispute was settled a few days later when the Labor Department found that the contractor had paid the correct wages, and that no workers were being paid overtime.