by Mike Hall, Feb 8, 2008

Looks like the former Wal-Mart attorney who has argued against laws protecting workers’ overtime pay no longer is in charge of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division.

Paul DeCamp has taken his anti-worker ideology to one of the nation’s most notorious union-busting law firms, Jackson Lewis. The firm’s slogan, “Preventive Strategies and Positive Workplace Solutions,” sounds harmless—unless you’re one of the workers on the receiving end of the firm’s multifarious tactics meant to harass and intimidate workers seeking to form a union.

DeCamp never won Senate confirmation for the Wage and Hour post, so in August 2006, President  Bush circumvented the Senate and used a recess appointment to put him in the job. It’s the same tactic he’s used for other controversial nominees, including Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) chief Richard Stickler.

The recess appointment expired in December and with no hope of confirmation, Bush this week officially withdrew DeCamp’s nomination.

DeCamp’s record includes support for weakening overtime pay standards under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). He even has argued for changing the overtime law to prevent millions of workers from becoming eligible for overtime pay. He also has said it would not be “in the interest” of the employees to obtain overtime eligibility.

He was senior policy adviser to the Labor Department’s Employment Standards Administration, when the division’s failure to stop rampant wage theft involving wage-and-hour violations by employers engaged in Gulf Coast recovery work after Hurricane Katrina.

During DeCamp’s confirmation hearing before the Senate in August 2006, AFL-CIO Legislative Director Bill Samuel testified that DeCamp’s long legal career has been spent:

defending employers against workers in a wide range of employment matters, including FLSA collective actions and sexual harassment individual and class actions, and he has served as counsel to Wal-Mart appealing the certification of a nationwide class of 1.6 million women alleging systematic gender discrimination in pay and promotions.

The Wage and Hour Division is charged with protecting workers from employer violations of the minimum wage, child labor laws, the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act and prevailing wage requirements under the Davis-Bacon Act and the Service Contract Act.

Bush has a long record of dipping into the ranks of industry and lobbyists for key positions regulating their former colleagues. Stickler is a former coal company executive. And then there’s Michael Baroody, the senior lobbyist and executive vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), who Bush tapped in 2007 to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

At the time of Baroody’s appointment, The New York Times wrote:

He is the latest in a line of industry officials and lobbyists to be given senior jobs by Mr. Bush at federal safety agencies that oversee matters like workplace and mine safety and transportation as the administration has sought to roll back hundreds of regulations that businesses viewed as excessive.

The combination of a $150,000 severance payment Baroody received from NAM, the fact that he would be investigating and possibly penalizing some of the same NAM members with whom he had longtime relationships and his lobbying efforts against several proposed consumer rules while at NAM, raised red flags with consumer groups. Several U.S. senators also said they would oppose Baroody’s nomination. He withdrew his name before Bush could usher him in though the back door like Stickler and DeCamp.

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