Wednesday, March 25, 2009

The war against workers

According to a recent undercover investigation, the Labor Department was also part and parcel of the "obstruction caucus" against workers' rights:

In a report scheduled to be released Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office found that the agency, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, had mishandled 9 of the 10 cases brought by a team of undercover agents posing as aggrieved workers.

In one case, the division failed to investigate a complaint that under-age children in Modesto, Calif., were working during school hours at a meatpacking plant with dangerous machinery, the G.A.O., the nonpartisan auditing arm of Congress, found.

When an undercover agent posing as a dishwasher called four times to complain about not being paid overtime for 19 weeks, the division’s office in Miami failed to return his calls for four months, and when it did, the report said, an official told him it would take 8 to 10 months to begin investigating his case.

Seems to me that now would be a good time to make it clear which public officials support workers, and which don't.

2 comments:

maria said...

are you following the debate on the worker freedom bill? may have just been killed by specter, who i actually like.

i didn't know about that report. thanks for sharing. i hope it's getting attention.

blackink said...

I have actually been following some of the scuttlebutt surrounding the EFCA.

I think Specter might have actually driven the nail into his re-election hopes. Maybe he'll make it through the primary. But in the general election, I imagine union groups will be working against him hard. Not a good look in Pennsylvania.