WASHINGTON – It’s a new day at the U.S. Department of Labor, which was criticized during the Bush years as a lapdog for the business community rather than a guard dog for the interests of American workers.

By an 80-17 margin on Feb. 24, the Senate confirmed Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif., as President Barack Obama’s Labor Secretary. The final vote for Solis was delayed for several weeks, during which Senate Republicans dropped a filibuster threat. Meanwhile, President Obama has also sought more money in the Labor Department budget, and has pledged better workplace safety enforcement.

“Finally Americans will have a Secretary of Labor who represents working people, not wealthy CEOs,” said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.

Solis, whose father was a Teamster and whose mother was also a union member, is the successor to Elaine Chao, who under the Bush Administration drew the scorn of organized labor. Chao supervised: a department that stopped rules to prevent debilitating repetitive-motion injuries for workers, sought to prevent employees of the new Homeland Security Department from unionizing, and reclassified hundreds of thousands of American workers as “supervisors” to prevent them from unionizing.

Solis has supported labor’s No. 1 legislative priority, the Employee Free Choice Act. And she chose an IBEW training center in Miama to make one of her first official appearances. “It’s a demonstration of our commitment to help inspire people who may have been laid off or are in dead-end jobs,” she said. “These are jobs” at the IBEW center “with an average starting salary of $28 an hour. I hope to see these programs expand with stimulus funding,”

Enforcement is Solis’ other key priority for workers. “We want to protect workers’ rights and protect them in workplaces,” she told TV cameras before the walking tour. “The first priority is jobs and job creation,” she said later. “That goes hand-in-hand with enforcement. There’ll be a lot of federal contracting and we’ll be looking at how standards should be set” in wages, benefits and working conditions for federal contractors to meet, “and getting the best data” for the tasks, Solis said.

In that area, Obama has partially sped ahead of his own Labor Secretary, with a January executive order favoring project labor agreements on federal construction contracts and another order banning contractors’ use of federal dollars for or against union organizing drives at their worksites. Contractors could still use their own money.

“We’ll be putting back investigators into the Wage and Hour Division and OSHA
(the Occupational Safety and Health Administration). Any good semblance on investigating and monitoring in those areas has been eroded over the last eight years. We’ve put more priority on enforcing laws against unions than against employers who abuse their workers,” Solis added.

Sweeney praised a 4.7% increase for the Labor Department’s budget, saying it provides “much-needed funds” for “shoring up our unemployment insurance program, better enforcement of workplace health and safety and wage and hour laws, and new training initiatives, among other things.”

“The Department of Labor will once again stand up for working families and be an advocate for everyday people,” Obama said.

(Reporting by Mark Gruenberg, PAI Staff Writer)