The U.S. Labor Department’s Misplaced Priorities

by Mike Hall, Jun 13, 2006

Deep within the nearly $11 billion appropriations bill for the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education departments, two items illustrate the spending priorities of the Bush administration and the congressional Republican leaders.

One of the Department of Labor’s most important roles is the enforcement of the nation’s wage and hour laws—making sure employers don’t cheat workers out of their wages, and if they do, recovering those lost wages.

The House Appropriations subcommittee that put together the numbers last week cut by $10.2 million President Bush’s already low request of $176 million for wage and hour enforcement in fiscal year 2007. If the cut makes it through the long appropriations process, it will mean that in FY 2007, the money available to enforce wage and hour laws will be 6.1 percent less in real dollars than when Bush took office.

It’s not likely there has been a similar dip in the number of unscrupulous employers.

While money for wage-and-hour enforcement has shrunk since Bush took office, funding for the  Office of Labor Management Standards (OLMS) soared. The OLMS enforces the administration’s new financial reporting and disclosures rules for unions big and small, local and national.

The Bush administration requested, and the subcommittee granted, a 12.1 percent increase in OLMS funding for fiscal 2007. The request for $52.4 million not only is a 12.1 percent increase from the previous year, but also represents a 49.6 percent increases from fiscal 2001 funding.

The new rules required unions to spend millions of dollars in new software and other expenses. Further, union leaders have been forced to spend time plowing through reporting requirements that track the smallest of expenditures, leaving them less time to serve current members and to assist prospective new members in organizing.

Meanwhile, reports continue to surface about workers being forced to work off the clock and being denied lunch and other breaks, about employers underpaying immigrant workers and about companies paying women less than men for the same job.

The Bush administration has decided it’s more important to make sure unions spend hundreds of hours doing the bureaucratic paperwork of the new reporting requirements than making sure workers are paid what they are owed.

The full House Appropriations Committee will take up the Labor, HHS and Education spending bill this week, and we will give you a more detailed look at the overall bill as it wends its way through the process. You can click here to read about how the spending bill shortchanges college students; click here for a look at Bush’s budget request for vital working family programs.

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