Sometimes, you're just lucky. My good fortune, not the only one, but I savor it, is that I live two doors up the street from one of Hilda Solis's many sisters. Another one used to live two doors further down, but she and her husband managed to sell their house just before the real estate market went belly up here in Los Angeles. That good fortune has meant I've gotten to rub elbows with Solis at a few private parties. I won't reveal any secrets. Everybody already knows she's smart, tough, and the most liberal member of President Obama's Cabinet. A friend of working Americans since before she was appointed Secretary of Labor. A friend of labor unions before she was a Congresswoman. A working-class woman from a working-class immigrant family who has neither forgotten nor forsaken her roots.
If the Chamber of Commerce and its biggest right-wing pals in the Senate had had their way, she wouldn't be where she is. Her open support for the Employee Free Choice Act was something that stuck in their craw. The prospect of that becoming law was what the CEO of Home Depot once called the "demise of civilization." Her foes managed to delay her appointment for nearly two months before finally surrendering.
They were not eager to see Solis heading what might as well have been renamed the Crush Labor Department under her Republican predecessor, Elaine Chao, who is married to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, named one of the 15 most corrupt members of Congress in 2009.
They were right to worry. Although EFCA stands little chance of passage in the near future, ever since Solis was confirmed, she's been putting working men and women into many of the federal regulatory positions that under the Cheney-Bush administration were assigned to union-busting foes of regulation.
Esther Kaplan writes:
Now, for the first time in its history, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), a division of the Department of Labor (DoL), is headed by a union man, Joe Main. Main began his working life as a teenager in 1967, doing the precarious work of sinking a coal mine shaft in West Virginia. By 19 he was a mine safety committeeman, later joining the United Mine Workers' health and safety department, where he worked for decades. He was working for the union at the time of the Wilberg fire and rushed to the scene. He recalls spending four or five days there during the grueling rescue and recovery operation. "It took us a year to recover the last miner," he recalls, "and I dealt with the families a lot during that time. It's something that's stayed with me my whole life." Main was confirmed by the Senate in late October; six weeks later he launched a major national initiative to end black lung disease.
During the Bush years, the Department of Labor became a cautionary tale about what happens when foxes are asked to guard the henhouse. But since California Congresswoman Hilda Solis became labor secretary last winter, she has brought on board a team of lifelong advocates for working people--some of whom come from the ranks of organized labor--and has hired hundreds of new investigators and enforcers.
President Obama calls Solis part of his economic team, but the truth is she's not part of the daily huddle at the White House with Summers and Geithner and Orszag. She's tapped instead as a lead voice in the "jobs, jobs, jobs" choir, advocating for Obama's latest stimulus package. She has tiptoed into the realm of financial regulation, organizing a joint hearing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on the abysmal performance of target date retirement funds during the market crash, and she doles out hundreds of millions of dollars in job training funds, a decent chunk of which she has used to shape policy by channeling it to green industries. But Solis understands that her real influence lies in her power to enforce the nation's labor laws--the primary mission of the DoL. It's a role she embraced with relish at her swearing-in, where she announced with a grin, "To those who have for too long abused workers, put them in harm's way, denied them fair pay, let me be clear: there is a new sheriff in town."
The deputies are a sight for sore eyes. Besides Joe Main and his policy director Greg Wagner, a physician who has treated miners with respiratory illnesses, there is Labor Solicitor Patricia Smith, former New York state labor commissioner, and heading the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is epidemiologist David Michaels, along with OSHA chief of staff Deborah Berkowitz, formerly of the United Food and Commercial Workers.
As Kaplan says:
Yes, capital may reign at Government Sachs, where the shrunken paychecks of working people are tithed to subsidize the very Wall Street institutions that forced the country into recession. But in one forgotten corner of the administration, over on C Street and Constitution, at a department whose entire $1.5 billion enforcement budget couldn't pay for a single B-2 bomber, Solis has formed a rump group that's fighting on the right side of the class war.
The business world will, of course, not be happy with the once toothless Department of Labor's new emphasis on enforcing safety regulations and taking on cases of wage and hour rip-offs. That's so even though when the laws are enforced, as Cheney-Bush calculatingly failed to do, the penalties are ridiculously low. The Protecting America’s Workers Act would help remedy that situation and add shields for whistleblowers. Introduced nearly a year ago by Rep. Lynn Woolsey, the act, H.R. 2067, got its first hearings recently.
That law should be just the beginning, however. The regulations themselves need serious upgrading. But as long as unemployment remains so high - and that appears likely for another year or two at least - the administration is unlikely to unleash Solis in this matter because of the barrage of flak it would inevitably encounter from those who would call any stiffening of the rules "job killers." Getting killed on the job they don't view with such alarm.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2005:
If you have been paying attention to cable coverage of the Schiavo case, you will see two major themes repeated over and over. First, the repeated bookings of and citings of "witnesses" and "experts" that have previously been debunked, claiming that among other things Ms. Schiavo is "alert and oriented". A neurologist who touts himself as a nominee for "The Nobel Peace Prize in Medicine", an utterly false claim regarding an award that does not exist, has been given apparent run of the airwaves in order to repeatedly assert that Ms. Schiavo is "not that bad", and would be able to "communicate verbally" and "use her arms and legs" under his treatment plan -- a miraculous treatment plan for which, according to Judge Greer, he has been able to offer "no names, no case studies, no videos and no test results". We have even, as many have pointed out, been treated to "psychic" John Edward asserting he was in contact with Terri Schiavo.
Against this background of exploitation and misinformation, the usual bevy of archconservative media pundits has in the last several days begun to increasingly endorse a premise that is, to any rational mind, remarkable: the notion that because the courts have ruled in this particular fashion, it is now time for individuals and government figures to disregard the courts, and take matters into their own hands.