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Department of Labor Protects Management, not Workers |
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In speeches Barack Obama has become fond of saying that we need a President that understands it is the Department of Labor, not the Department of Management. Though it may be a great applause line when speaker before a union audience, it also has an element of truth as the Bush Administration has neutered the role of the Department when it comes to protecting the Labor force in this country. They do not protect the worker and they ignore abuses by management. Cases in point:
Thomas Frank has written about the case of AgriProcessors in Iowa, which was where the largest immigration bust of all time was made in May. Sounds there like the government is doing its job, as the agents found over 20 underage workers, some as young as 13, working 17 hour days, six days a week. Because they were illegals, the workers had no bargaining position with the meat packing company. So what happened to the management of AgriProcessors?
The fines levied against AgriProcessors, however, were eventually reduced to $42,750 from $182,000. The same pattern holds true in the case of the only federal Labor Department fines against the company that I have been able to discover, which were levied in 2006, and which set the company back a grand total of $2,250.
Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, obviously doesn’t think that punishing management for illegal activity is a duty of the Department. Here is an egregious case in which a company got a slap on the wrist instead of actual punishment. Why did AgriProcessors act in the way they did?
“The reason AgriProcessors employed 13-year-old children was because they could,” Mark Lauritsen of the United Food and Commercial Workers, which has tried to organize the company’s workers, told me. “Because they knew the federal Department of Labor would never come down on them.”
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently issued a report that found that Labor’s Wage and Hour division was not doing its job. It delayed investigating hundreds of cases each year and didn’t focus on the low-wage industries that are most affected by the relevant regulations. The New York Times reporter, Steven Greenhouse, cited a couple of horrific examples:
The accountability office, the investigative arm of Congress, singled out a case in which a truck driver for an alcohol distributor complained that he was not paid overtime even though he worked 55 hours a week. The Wage and Hour Division waited 17 months before assigning an investigator, the office found, and the investigator dropped the case six months later — after doing virtually no investigating — having concluded that the two-year statute of limitations was about to expire.
The office cited another case in which a gas station cashier earning $7.50 an hour complained about not receiving her final paycheck. One of the owners acknowledged that to the wage investigator and said to call back in five days when his partner returned. The investigator did call five days later, but after the gas station did not return several calls, the investigator dropped the case.
These investigators, just like the management of many businesses in the country, know that they do not have to be serious about the rights of workers and the standards of Labor for a simple reason. The White House doesn’t give a damn about workers.
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