The Wall Street Journal has a short feature story today about the Obama administration’s plans for tougher labor regulation, including the Department of Labor hiring 670 new investigators (something I wrote about two months ago).
The WSJ article is largely told from the perspective of the Fortune 500, with U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims about supposed “heavy-handed enforcement” going largely unchallenged. (Naive question: How can there be heavy-handed enforcement if they just started hiring the people and making appointments?)
In a perfect world, the argument would be about where to find the money to protect individual workers from being exploited by (some small percentage of) companies. But this story follows the Beltway framing of the issue: big unions versus big business. The reporting even mentions a decision to refrain from requiring financial disclosure from unions, something with only a tenuous connection to the issue at hand. At least in this case, I don’t know what major corporations have to fear (if they’re not breaking the law). But I do know that their worries on regulation are, at best, overblown, given that the Obama administration change are thus far aren’t even bringing enforcement staff numbers up to Clinton-era levels.
The story does note two key department appointments:
- M. Patricia Smith, the nominee to be the department’s top lawyer, is commissioner for New York State’s labor department, and is known as a tough regulator who has stepped up worker protection.
- Mr. Obama’s nominee to head OSHA, David Michaels, is an epidemiologist and research professor at George Washington University known for studies on the health effects of occupational exposure to toxic chemicals.
Filed under: Uncategorized, big business, department of labor, hilda solis, labor regulation, wage and hour division, wall street journal
