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I'm told that Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis will step aside soon, making her the five member of the administration to leave the cabinet (or announce her deparature) since the election. Only two of these departures -- Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner -- are white and male. Lisa Jackson, who's leaving the EPA, is African-American, and Solis was the first Hispanic woman to take charge of Labor.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The damage caused by Hurricane Sandy sent U.S. jobless claims soaring by 78,000 in the week ended Nov. 10 to an 18-month high of 439,000, according to the latest government figures. A Labor Department official on Thursday said claims surged in the eastern parts of the country that laid in the path of the storm....

America’s rich are not interested in seeing their taxes go down, United States Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis claimed before a large crowd of college students in Washington DC late last month. “The Republicans in the Senate blocked a vote so we can tax the higher income people, who really don’t even want a tax break,” Solis said, speaking at the annual Campus Progress conference. Solis was referring to a piece of legislation Democrats have repeatedly brought up in the Senate this year that would ensure that income earned through capital gains would be taxed at least 30 percent. So...

In today's episode of "My Government Scares The Crap Out Of Me", let's take a look at the Department of Labor's "environmental justice" program. First, before we get started, I thought it would be really, really swell to hear from an expert on "environmental justice". So, without further ado, I bring you Chairman Obama's former "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones. Take it away, Vannie! *********************************** "Mother Jones: Can you briefly explain what 'environmental justice' means to you? Van Jones: Environmental justice is the movement to ensure that no community suffers disproportionate environmental burdens or goes without enjoying fair environmental benefits."...

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A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district members of Congress. But now it’s attracting barbs from farm kids themselves. The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land. Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.” “Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read,...

Unrest is simmering in some quarters of the Washington news universe regarding changes in the way the Department of Labor (DOL) manages its pre-release media “lockups” on sensitive data like weekly jobless benefits and unemployment. For years, journalists participating in the lockups have shown up at DOL at the appointed time, then entered a limited-access area to receive the new data and prepare news stories for release as soon as official embargoes end. The system insures that major news organizations get the data as soon as possible and allows journalists covering the release get a jump on providing analyses and...

Government-financed political propaganda at the Department of Labor is causing discomfort for some employees. Signs posted in at least 20 DOL elevators depict Secretary Hilda Solis carrying a bullhorn and rallying alongside the Rev. Al Sharpton, the Free Beacon has learned. Next to the pictures is a quote from Solis that reads in part: “We all march in our own way.” “Whether we take to the streets or simply do our work with integrity and commitment here at the U.S. Department of Labor… we are all marching toward the same goals: safe workplaces, fair pay, dignity of the job, secure...

Let’s establish this right out of the gate so as not to confuse issues: It is wrong when corporations use child labor. Forgetting the law for a moment, whether it is here in the U.S. or overseas, children are children, and corporations should not exploit children. Got it? With that said, this is not about corporations, this is about families and farms. More specifically, family farms and the overreach of the federal government. For centuries, even before there was Willie Nelson and FarmAid, farming throughout the world (including here in the United States) has largely been a family affair. That...

The Labor Department today announced that it had approved Trade Adjustment Assistance for the former employees of the bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra. That means all of the firm’s 1,100 ex-employees are eligible for federal aid packages, including job retraining and income assistance. The department has valued packages at about $13,000 a head.

It's not as if we haven't already learned what a failure Barack Obama's green-tech stimulus has been in creating jobs. Solyndra collapsed with over a half-billion in taxpayer money out the door, wiping out a thousand jobs with it. After spending $17.2 billion of the $38.6 billion allocated for green-jobs stimulation, the programs have created a total of just over 3500 jobs, for a price tag of $4.85 million each. Now the Inspector General at the Department of Labor has recommended the shutdown of a green-jobs training program that has only placed 15% of its participants: A $500 million green...

America’s Job Creators Are About To Be Sucker Punched & You Have Until Wednesday To Comment September 19th 2011   ·   You need to act before Wednesday. At a time when the Obama Administration is clamoring to save or create jobs, his Department of Labor is about to sucker punch America’s job creators with an unprecedented regulatory overreach—all to curry more favor with union bosses.On Wednesday, the public comment period will be closing on a Department of Labor proposal that the majority of America knows nothing about and even fewer understand. If enacted as drafted, the union cronies within the...

They're known derisively as "union busters." But the consultants who advise employers on how to avert union organizing or collective bargaining demands soon may have to reveal a good deal more about themselves and their operations. This past Tuesday, June 21, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), to the delight of labor officials, published a proposal in the Federal Register to expand the circumstances forcing companies to disclose information about their advisers. Because the rule change would not apply to union consultants, it appears to be motivated heavily by politics. The proposal, whose public comment period ends August 22, was...

The Daily Caller has obtained two photographs from inside the Department of Labor (DOL) elevators where Obama administration employees have again defaced photos equating gay rights with civil rights. A worker or group of workers in the DOL ripped off a portion of these posters that compared gay rights to African American civil rights.Pictured prominently on the poster is Bayard Rustin, an openly gay civil rights advocate and labor leader. Next to Rustin’s photo is a quote from him: “To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true.” Underneath Rustin’s quote is a description of him:...

As the Department of Labor's top cop, Paul Tiao would have been uncomfortably close to the unions he would investigate. That's why he didn't get the job. Last Monday on May 9 President Obama withdrew Tiao's name from consideration as DOL Inspector General (IG) rather than subject him to a Senate Judiciary Committee grilling or install him via one-year recess appointment. Critics had noted that Tiao, though an experienced federal and state prosecutor and most recently special counsel to FBI Director Robert Mueller, was more an ethnic politician than an efficiency manager. More than a decade ago he co-founded...

  When Department of Labor Solicitor M. Patricia "Trisha" Smith testified at a Senate confirmation hearing more than a year and a half ago, her track record as New York State Commissioner of Labor, and her comments about it, prompted leading Republicans to postpone action for several months. Their fears in hindsight appear well-founded. An article appearing in last Friday's Wall Street Journal reported that DOL staff, under Smith's supervision, a couple months earlier had issued a draft "operating plan" to dramatically step up enforcement against private-sector employers likely to have committed unfair labor practices. The details of the...

  The abrupt departure by Andrew Stern this spring as president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), after 14 years on the job, blindsided a lot of observers. After all, he was a shadow cabinet member of the Obama administration. Reported ongoing federal investigations into two unrelated, and possibly illegal, financial arrangements may shed light on his motives. The Associated Press ran a story last Tuesday stating the FBI and the Department of Labor have been interviewing persons potentially knowledgeable about the possibility that Stern: 1) received unauthorized funds from a book he'd authored several years ago; and...

Yet more proof that the DOJ doesn't want whites and Asians, when they are the discriminated-against minority, to be protected under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. On July 13, the Department of Justice blew an opportunity to put to rest the issue of whether they are willing to enforce the Voting Rights Act in a race-neutral fashion by objecting to a request by a proven discriminator to further discriminate. I wrote about this pending request at Pajamas Media. At the time I noted: Bottom line, if this Justice Department was truly interested in enforcing the law in a...

Most Americans are in favor of enforcing the law, but the Obama administration only wants to enforce the laws they agree with. Why won't they enforce the law that says undocumented workers can't work or live here? In this video ad, Obama's DOL Secretary Hilda L. Solis says, "Every worker in America has the right to be paid fairly whether documented or not"... The ad displays a telephone number which Solis touts as "free and confidential." The video is here.

Article at Link: http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20100424/NEWS03/4240368/-1/rss