Obama to Bush Administration: Pay Theft Is Illegal

[Coexist]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/07/28/obama-to-bush-administration-pay-theft-is-illegal/

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..

Cool tools from the AFL-CIO:

Meet Barack Obama
http://www.aflcio.org/issues/politics/obama.cfm

The Real McCain
http://www.aflcio.org/issues/politics/mccain.cfm?source=mccainrevealed

[Lugnut]

1. K&R n/t

[Coexist]

2. thanks.