The Department of Labor: A Damage Assessment

Labor Day is a time to reflect on the achievements of the American worker and our nation's commitment to helping all families pursue the American Dream. But for millions of Americans there is little cause for celebration. While workers' wages have fallen, the cost of living has skyrocketed, the unemployment rate has soared, fewer workers have health coverage, and good retirement plans are increasingly scarce.

Nearly a century ago, Congress established the federal Department of Labor to be the advocate and champion for working Americans. Specifically, the department was created to advance three core goals: "to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners of the United States, to improve their working conditions, and to advance their opportunities for profitable employment."

However, under the Bush Presidency, these goals -- and the interests of workers -- have been under direct assault.

From day one, Bush's Department of Labor has actively worked to undermine workers' rights to organize, to fair pay and decent benefits, and to safe working conditions -- rights that are essential to growing and sustaining a strong middle class. U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and other high-level appointees came to their posts determined to weaken the agency.

Under Chao's leadership, the department has repeatedly torpedoed rules designed to help workers. One of her first actions was supporting the repeal of a rule that would have protected workers against repetitive motion injuries, the leading cause of workplace injuries.

Chao went on to severely weaken the department's Wage and Hour Division -- which enforces overtime, minimum wage, and child labor laws. Wage theft has skyrocketed at the hands of this administration: An ongoing U.S. Government Accountability Office investigation has uncovered repeated cases where the agency refused to go after scofflaw employers who admittedly owed their workers back wages.

Chao also consistently refused to support increasing the minimum wage, allowing it to erode to its lowest value in fifty years. It wasn't until Democrats took over Congress in 2006 that the minimum wage was finally raised for the first time in ten years.

Time and again, Chao has proven her loyalty to a different constituency. She has expended boundless energy making sure unscrupulous employers have a ready supply of exploitable labor. Just recently the department proposed new regulations that will cut the prevailing wage rates for agricultural guest workers and make it easier for employers to hire cheaper, temporary guest workers from overseas instead of qualified, available American workers.

And while the administration dragged its feet to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina, it moved quickly to slash wages for Gulf Coast workers in the hurricane's aftermath.

After President Bush tapped a mine executive to lead the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration, the agency immediately set about withdrawing vital proposed health and safety rules. By the time a slew of mining accidents hit in 2006, nearly 200 staffers had been cut from the coal mine safety enforcement division alone -- a move that helped cripple the agency. When Congress finally acted in the wake of many tragic miner deaths, MSHA acted with little urgency to implement the law. More recently, when the House of Representatives passed additional much-needed mine safety protections, the administration threatened a veto.

It's the same story with Chao's U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Remarkably, the agency has not approved a single new health standard for workers in eight years, aside from one that was ordered by a court. Even in the face of solid scientific evidence documenting workplace dangers, Chao has turned a blind eye to growing health and safety risks.

Take, for example, the department's failure to address hazardous combustible dust. In 2006, the Chemical Safety Board -- an independent government agency that investigates industrial chemical accidents -- reported that a string of deadly explosions caused by combustible dust are a serious and preventable national problem. Although the CSB urged OSHA to quickly issue a new safety standard, Chao refused -- and continued to refuse even after a sugar dust explosion killed 13 workers last February.

The tragic results of the department's fatal failure to act continue to mount -- on crane and construction safety, popcorn lung disease, silica, beryllium and more.
And in one of its most telling -- and insulting -- moves to date, the department is now rushing to enact last minute "secret rules" that would make it even harder for health and safety agencies to issue future protections for workers and that would jeopardize workers' retirement savings.

Our nation's workers, battered by unfair global competition, stagnant wages, declining benefits, and poor employer compliance with labor laws, deserve a Department of Labor that lives up to its name, led by individuals who believe in its mission.

A Secretary of Labor that actually fights to help and protect hard working Americans - now that would be a reason to celebrate.

U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), is the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee

Follow Rep. George Miller on Twitter: www.twitter.com/askgeorge

Comments

[Herrington]

Karl Marx was not advocating a movement with Das Kapital, he was describing a force of human nature. When the lives of working people become too severe, they become socialists.

Maybe the fall of the U.S.S.R. led western capitalists to think they had defeated socialism, but that is simply not possible. Under well understood conditions, socialism will always be the way dissatisfaction with unfair treatment, either by employers or by kings, is expressed. You can't eradicate socialism anymore than you can hurricanes.

The Roosevelts knew this. They saved the west from communism by being equitable with labor. It is difficult to see why people with extreme views continue to act as if imbalance in the benefits of commerce does not matter. It does and will always foster most the opposite of their ideology.

But then it has never been about sound principles of government. It has been about greed, immediate, unrelenting, insatiable greed, regardless of the consequences.

[WorkingClass]

Rep George Miller. Thank you sir for acknowledging our existence on labor day and for highlighting the class war waged against us the last eight years. The largest group of people in this county by far, the working class, has no representation in government or media. We are the invisible majority. There is no solution to our nations ills that has any chance of success if it fails to consider the needs and the will of the working people. What we need more than anything is democracy. If voting mattered, we would wield tremendous influence. We are powerless because we are poor in a country where money decides everything.

Solidarity.

[MidwestBlue]

Ah, Chao. Wife of Mitch McConnell, and a hater of labor. My question is: why hasn't this woman been called up before various committees about her actions during this administration? The mining disasters, her advocacy for big business, and so on. Now she wants to change the rules by which OSHA assesses workers' risks to harmful contaminants. Bring her up and question her on this!!!!!
I can't stand this woman. She's a threat to workers all over America.
As far as jobs leaving this country, let's be fair: Democrats had no problem voting for "Free Trade Deals," as recently as the Peru Free Trade deal. Both parties are guilty of giving the shaft to American workers.

[oogabooga]

In my town, teens compete with older adults for the same minimum wage jobs. It's sad.

[mcostello]

I follow the news and vote and I am semi-active in my community.
Is it television that makes my fellow countrymen not take to the streets. We have had it so good for so long that no one can see that the bridge is out ahead. And we are going fast.

[BubbaC33]

Do you think it will change after Obama wins?

[Rosie2]

YES!

[LeftRight]

I certainly have hope. Of course, that's a four letter word to you!

[racom]

Thanks George Miller for keeping the many labor issues posted. While I'm not surprised by the record, typical republican administration, I'm continueing to be surprised by the apathy displayed by our citizens toward their own working rights. Thankfully I have finished my years of labor, I am not directly affected by the abuses in work today. Still, what is happening to our workers bodes a bleak future for our nation. As the article points out, the abuse throughout is devestating the middle class, just the lowered income has forced millions to turn to 2 or even 3 income sources to get by. Even then they are falling behind, losing any hope to work their way out of increasing debt.
I hope we will see a big change in Nov. I have learned to not get too excited with the dems in the majority, maybe Obama means it when he says he brings change.

[Diana]

Another horrific example of the corportist agenda that puts profits above everything else. What's most horrifying, however, is the fact that people remain ignorant of the disintegration of their protections, their rights.

Imagine if even 10% of this sort of nastiness against the working class were reported, why, the republicans would never be elected to office again! But of course, that's what the MSM is for these days, to KEEP the news from the people.

Thank you Congressman for being one of the very few voices standing up for the working class, for America.

[LeftRight]

From an acquaintance with the Federal Aviation Administration:

Bush's appointees who led the FAA and DOT have systematically gutted the agency which oversees aviation in America. Included in this is the removal of aviation safety inspectors, the "contract" with the air traffic controllers (which was simply imposed by the agency) to the lack of proper staffing levels of the technicians who maintain the equipment used.

This is continuing proof of the bush administration's plans to not only weaken the workers, but to weaken protections for ALL Americans. Anything that will reduce perceived costs to corporations while increasing the handouts of taxpayer money to those same corporations!