The New York Times has a great editorial today about labor policy for the new administration. It is well worth reading for a variety of reasons. I am incredibly pleased to see a major newspaper make the case for greater union density as a means of improving the lives of middle and working class people. They also push for the Obama Administration to put the concerns of labor above those of Wall Street, to which I can only say amen.
I also enjoyed the pointed criticism of the Department of Labor and its manifest failure to protect the safety and interests of workers. As the editorial notes, "in eight years the Labor Department has issued only one new safety rule of its own accord." But what they don't note is that instead of protecting workers, the DOL has devoted a large amount of time and staff to promulgating burdensome and intrusive regulations on unions. Some unions are forced to file annual reports under these regulations that go on for thousands of pages, detailing in the finest minutiae every payment made to every officer, employee, or vendor in a given year.
In the meantime, safety and wage and hour violations of every imaginable kind are occurring with virtually no intervention by DOL. In fact, I had a situation come to my attention where a contractor was blatantly violating the Davis-Bacon Act, the federal law requiring the payment of prevailing wages on federal projects. The contractor in question was not only not paying the prevailing wage but was using undocumented workers and treating them as "subcontractors" rather than employees, meaning no tax withholding, no FICA or FUTA payments, no state unemployment taxes, and no workers compensation coverage. Oh, and where was this work being performed? Naturally, at DOL headquarters here in DC. (This one was embarrassing enough that DOL actually did something about it.) But by and large, Labor Secrtary Mrs. Mitch McConnell has been an unabashed enemy of working people during her tenure of shame at the Department. Frances Perkins, Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor and the person for whom the headquarters building is named (who actually witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, one of the great disasters in American labor history) must be turning over in her grave (while thrilled by the selection of Hilda Solis.)
