Progress Illinois

Following two damning GAO reports and the testimony of Chicago's own Kim Bobo, Barack Obama sent a letter (pdf) Friday to U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao calling on her to address her department's mishandling of overtime and minimum-wage complaints and to instigate investigations into hundreds of additional cases:

It is important that the department put procedures into place that will lead to improvements in the enforcement of workers’ rights. This is the core mission of the department and failing to adequately enforce the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is unacceptable.

Unfortunately, the department's lax enforcement of wage theft -- a problem the affects millions of workers (pdf) -- is not its only transgression. As AFL-CIO blogger Seth Michael documents, the agency has long stood in the way of workers rights:

Chao’s Labor Department has been consistently anti-worker—Chao has even tried to outsource Labor Department staff jobs to nonunion contractors. Bush appointees in the Labor Department have been handsomely rewarded for their lack of concern for workers’ rights, getting cushy jobs at union-busting law firms and corporate lobbying groups. Appointments to federal departments and agencies matter for workers because the people in these jobs have a lot of power to choose how to implement policy. They oversee not just wage and hour protections but also workplace safety, mine safety and a host of other issues.