Secretary Hilda Solis announced this week that she will resign her post “to begin a new future, and return to the people and places I love and that have inspired and shaped my life.” We will miss Hilda Solis.
All of us should be proud to have a leader like Hilda Solis serving the workers of the United States as our Secretary of Labor. Secretary Solis is a reminder than we won more than a presidential election in 2008 – we won a fighter for working people in the federal department charged with protecting our rights.
When it comes to enforcing the law and winning for working people, we could not ask for better than today’s U.S. Department of Labor. To wit, U.S. DOL has launched a new online tool “to improve public access to and understanding of the department’s enforcement actions.”
From the 1940’s to the 1960’s, when union density was at its height, the middle class in our country thrived. Wages and productivity rose together during that time and we experienced robust growth throughout the economy.
Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis issued the following statement regarding Equal Pay Day, April 12, 2011
The State of the American Worker We are very fortunate to now have in Hilda Solis a Secretary of Labor who actually cares about workers and workers’ rights. The Congress and the White House get most of the media coverage, but it’s the work of the Department of Labor – the rules and regulations, investments [...]
Labor Dept. announces new rules for H-2A U.S. Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis announced tough new regulations on wages and job safety protections for temporary agricultural workers. The new rules, which will go into effect in time for the 2010 growing season, “reflect the Administration’s commitment to providing fair wages and strong labor protections for [...]
Decades of struggle by workers and their unions have resulted in significant improvements in working conditions. However, the threat of going to work healthy and coming home severely injured – or not coming home at all – remains all too real. According to estimates (PDF document)by the International Labor Organization (ILO), worldwide, 1 million workers [...]
This investigation clearly shows that the Department of Labor has left thousands of actual victims of wage theft who sought federal government assistance with nowhere to turn.
That’s the conclusion of an investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a report released this week at a hearing of the House Committee on Education and Labor. The GAO found that the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) is failing in its job to investigate complaints of wage, hour, and child labor violations, essentially giving employers carte blanche to rob their workers blind.
Undercover GAO investigators posed as fictitious complainants and contacted Wage and Hour district offices around the United States to complain about gross violations of the law, including one case where dozens of children were said to be operating dangerous machinery in a meat packing plant during school hours. The GAO later revealed WHD not only didn’t investigate, they didn’t even make a record of the complaint.
In other cases, WHD tried discouraging one undercover investigator from filing a complaint, first by encouraging him to “just have a nice conversation” with his employer, then by suggesting that filing a complaint could get him fired.
In his testimony before Congress, Greg Kutz, Managing Director of Forensic Audits and Special Investigations for GAO said results of this investigation show that the 15 cases brought before the committee last summer were “just the tip of the iceberg”:
I am concerned that thousands of victims of wage theft become frustrated with the complaint intake process and never actually file complaints with Labor. Thousands of others who file complaints find themselves victims of unscrupulous employers who know how to beat the system.
George Miller (D-CA) who chairs the House Committee on Education and Labor, pointed out that failure to investigate overtime, minimum wage, and child labor violations of the law are not trivial:
Those most vulnerable to wage theft are likely bearing the brunt of our nation’s economic crisis. Families where a breadwinner has his or her wages stolen still have rent to pay, mouths to feed, children to clothe, and medicine to buy. They can’t afford to be paid less than what the law says.
Simply put, when a business pockets wages due to its workers, it is theft. And it is illegal.
You may have to listen to the recordings for yourself to believe just how outrageous it is when the very department charged with protecting workers from violations of wage, hour, and child labor laws becomes the prime obstacle to justice for workers:
NC State AFL-CIO
PO Box 10805
Raleigh, NC 27605
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919-833-6678 voice
919-828-2102 fax
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Online at:
