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Obama to Bush Administration: Pay Theft Is Illegal |
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The Bush administration’s Department of Labor has a clear record of protecting powerful corporate interests at the expense of workers. Sen. Barack Obama is speaking out against this anti-worker record.
In a letter to U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, Obama urges the department to address serious failures in enforcing labor law and demands the Labor Department stop dragging its feet when it comes to protecting workers.
The situation Obama is addressing is a serious one. The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division is launching and completing fewer and fewer investigations of employers refusing to pay minimum wage, overtime or even those alleged to engage in child labor, according to studies by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Another GAO study shows that the Wage and Hour Division isn’t carrying out investigations into wage theft. According to this study, the division has laid off staff, failed to impose civil penalties against bad employers and shut out outside groups from input.
Obama says protecting workers and ensuring that their rights are protected should be the top priority of the Department of Labor. Without proper enforcement, laws protecting workers are meaningless. Writes Obama:
It is important that the department put procedures into place that will lead to improvements in the enforcement of workers’ rights. This is the core mission of the department and failing to adequately enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is unacceptable.
Obama notes that Chao and department officials must address the GAO reports:
GAO’s conclusions about how the department exercises its responsibilities to working Americans raise serious, but addressable, issues. Fixing these problems may require bipartisan cooperation, or in some cases additional funding, but other needed reforms are in the sole discretion of the department, and can be implemented unilaterally.
Chao’s Labor Department has been consistently anti-worker—Chao has even tried to outsource Labor Department staff jobs to nonunion contractors. Bush appointees in the Labor Department have been handsomely rewarded for their lack of concern for workers’ rights, getting cushy jobs at union-busting law firms and corporate lobbying groups. Appointments to federal departments and agencies matter for workers because the people in these jobs have a lot of power to choose how to implement policy. They oversee not just wage and hour protections but also workplace safety, mine safety and a host of other issues.
This fall, voters won’t just be electing a new president—they’ll be electing a new administration whose priorities and interests will affect real people’s lives. The record of the Wage and Hour Division under Bush shows how important this choice is.
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Isn’t the Secy. of Labor the spouse of Senate Minority Leader, McConnell ? That’s a one-two punch against working people and particularly the working poor.
Elaine Chao, wife of Senate Republican leader McConnell, is the longest serving Cabinet member of the Bush Administration. As a husband and wife team inside the Federal government, they play a critical role in harming the middle class and working poor in the last eight years. Most importantly, they have allowed employers to fire American workers and send jobs to China and India.
With Elaine Chao at the helm and her famous anti-worker attitude, it is appropriate to rename the US Department of Labor as the US Department of Chinese Overseas Business Enterprises.
“Without proper enforcement, laws protecting workers are meaningless.”
So true - that is the way it is in Colombia. Even the best written laws written into the FTA are meaningless with the massive corruption in the country. It is good that the Dem’s tabled that FTA over the objections of President Bush and despite the support it has from McCain. We do not want the USA to get into that situation. It is labor laws, unions and the enforcement of those laws that made American great.
Your article clearly points our the very lengths this administration has gone in an attempt to privatize the public sector and further erode workers rights in both the public and private sectors. Now more than ever it is imperative for all workers to collectively organize, work to increase Union membership and to actively support Barack Obama for President of the United States.
Beginning with the Reagan administration, it has been the policy of Republican presidents to permit the number of wage hour investigators to fall without adequate replacement. During the Clinton administration this was remedied to some extent; after that, Bush II came in and the numbers fell again. We now have fewer investigators than when Jimmy Carter was in office. How’s that for federal enforcement? And the chief of the division is the former labor counsel for Wal-Mart.