Free Republic

The unemployment rate hasn't topped 10 percent since June 1983, but it could return to that painful level soon — possibly as early as Friday, when the Labor Department issues its monthly jobs report....

Hilda L. Solis often recalls some advice her high school guidance counselor gave her mother: “Your daughter is not college material. Maybe she should follow the career of her older sister and become a secretary.” Telling that story recently at the Hunter College commencement in Manhattan, Ms. Solis roared into the microphone that she, the daughter of immigrants, did become a secretary — the nation’s labor secretary. The crowd thundered with applause. ... Like President Obama and Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose confirmation to the Supreme Court would make her the first Hispanic justice, Ms. Solis, 51, pulled herself up through...

The President’s fiscal year 2010 budget for the federal government was unveiled last Thursday and surprisingly he found one agency that he thinks deserves a 9% budget cut. This agency is the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) in the U.S. Department of Labor. Obama proposed to cut its budget from $45 million in fiscal year 2009 to $41 million in fiscal year 2010. OLMS is the federal agency that investigates financial crimes that occur when union officials steal from their union. OLMS also investigates cases where union officials engage in fraud and other corrupt practices in conducting union officer elections....

As ALG News previously reported, President Obama's payoff to Big Labor for their valuable campaign support started immediately after we was sworn in. First Obama signed several union friendly executive orders that among other things deprived union members of previously mandated information about their rights. Next his Labor Department began work to gut financial and conflicts of interest disclosures required from unions and their officers. Now the controversial enforcement practices in the current work of two of his nominees to run the Department raise serious questions as to whether they should be confirmed to their respective positions. These two nominees...

Some reporters are questioning the White House commitment to transparency. The Washington Times reports the administration is giving up on transparency by the labor unions. The labor Department is allowing union officials to skirt conflict of interest reporting rules. It said bringing enforcement actions against union leaders who violate the law, "would not be a good use of resources."

The markets rose on the news of President-elect Barack Obama's economic policy team Monday, but some labor spirits fell. Obama's team of Treasury secretary and four top economic advisers, introduced as the hands that will steer America's economy, had no particular ties to the labor movement. And Obama's secretary of labor was not introduced as part of that team — a suggestion that that post will retain its second-tier status and quiet voice in matters central to economic policy. "I wish that (the secretary of labor) would have been among them," former Michigan Rep. David Bonior, a labor stalwart and...

The U.S. Labor Department has asked a federal court to overturn the election of all officers at a troubled Los Angeles union local, alleging that the organization made it too difficult for challengers to qualify for the ballot. In a civil complaint against the Service Employees International Union's largest California chapter, the department contends that the March election of local President Tyrone Freeman and his slate of officers violated labor laws. Freeman is the target of a separate criminal investigation into the local's spending practices. The election complaint notes that the local required candidates to collect more than 4,800 nomination...

Labor union trusts that provide a variety of benefits for workers must disclose detailed financial information under new federal rules designed to root out corruption, officials said Monday. In announcing the requirement, the U.S. Labor Department cited several cases in recent years of union officers stealing from trusts established for retirement funds, job training and disaster relief. It was not immediately clear how the rules might apply to a Service Employees International Union local in Los Angeles, whose spending practices are the subject of a criminal investigation. The United Long-Term Care Workers has a related health trust and worker-training charity...

The new Democratic Congress has finally found a government agency whose budget It wants to cut: an obscure Labor Department office that monitors the compliance of unions with federal law. In the past six years, the Office of Labor Management Standards, or OLMS, has helped secure the convictions of 775 corrupt union officials and court-ordered restitution to union members of over $70 million in dues. The House is set to vote Thursday on a proposal to chop 20% from the OLMS budget. Every other Labor Department enforcement agency is due for a budget increase, and overall the Congress has added...

The Labor Department released its September jobs report on Friday, and some wags are calling it the "whoops" report. The "whoops" is a reference to the upward revision of 810,000 previously undetected jobs that Labor now says were created in the U.S. economy in the 12 months through March 2006. So instead of 5.8 million new jobs over the past three years, the U.S. economy has created 6.6 million. That's a lot more than a rounding error, more than the number of workers in the entire state of New Hampshire. What's going on here? Our hypothesis has been that, due...

WASHINGTON (AP) The Labor Department says employers added 128,000 jobs in August, pushing the national unemployment rate down a notch to 4.7 percent.

Early reports show the AFL-CIO spent $49 million (27 percent of its total annual budget) on political and lobbying activities but only $30 million (or 16.5 percent) to represent its members. That gap contributed to the breakaway from the AFL-CIO of the Teamsters, the Service Employees and other unions.

Last year was a record for the nation's home building industry . The Commerce Department reported Thursday that construction of single-family homes and apartments totaled 2.065 million units last year. The increase of 5.6 percent over 2004 pushed overall residential construction to the second highest level on record, exceeded only by 2.357 million units built in 1972. Meanwhile, single-family home construction hit an all-time high for the third straight year, rising to 1.714 million units, up 6.4 percent from the previous record of 1.611 million homes built in 2004. The record-setting performance came despite the fact that housing activity dropped...

The Labor Department reported that its Producer Price Index, which measures price pressures before they reach the consumer, rose 0.9 percent in December, the biggest increase since a 1.7 percent jump in September. For all of 2005, wholesale prices rose by 5.4 percent. That was the biggest increase since a 5.7 percent increase in 1990... However, core inflation, excluding energy and food, was up a more moderate 1.7 percent in 2005... Retail sales posted a weaker-than-expected 0.7 percent increase in December, the Commerce Department reported, after rising by 0.8 percent in November. "Retailers continue to report good sales momentum in...

Spanish-speaking manufacturing workers who lose their jobs because of trade agreements could soon benefit from improved job-retraining programs. That's the outcome of a settlement announced Wednesday by the Labor Department and the Association of Border Workers in El Paso. The Labor Department agreed to pay $6.5 million to retrain hundreds of workers in El Paso who didn't receive vocational training after losing their jobs because of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

ATLANTA - Officials with the U.S. Department of Labor and Mexico's Foreign Ministry pledged Monday to protect the rights - especially fair pay and safe working conditions - of immigrant workers, whether they are in the United States legally or not. "It's not the policy of the Department of Labor to penalize and expose workers," said Peter Accolla of the department's Office of Trade Agreement Implementation. "We want to protect them regardless their status." Accolla joined Bosco Marti, Mexico's Foreign Relations Department's point man on North American affairs, and Mexican consuls from across the United States to review progress made...

WASHINGTON - The mounting deaths and injuries to civilian contractors in Iraq could cost the federal government millions of dollars for hundreds of workers' compensation claims. Federal law requires all U.S. government contractors and subcontractors to obtain workers' compensation insurance for civilian employees who work overseas. If an injury or death claim is related to a "war-risk hazard," the War Hazards Compensation Act provides for government reimbursement to insurance carriers. Nearly half the 771 injury claims filed by U.S. contractors so far this year occurred in Iraq — 345. Of the 66 deaths reported as of last week, all but...

New Union Finance Rules Delayed Until July Friday, January 23, 2004; Page A08 The Labor Department must wait until July -- six months later than it planned -- to impose new rules that require unions to provide more extensive reporting on their finances, a federal judge ruled yesterday. U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler agreed with the AFL-CIO that its member unions and others deserved more than two months' notice to comply with the new rules, but she found that Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao had not been arbitrary or capricious in adopting the new standards.

The federal agency that insures pension plans said yesterday that its deficit had grown from $3.6 billion to $11.2 billion in just a year and that it would try to deal with the escalating problem by overhauling its own investments, among other measures. The agency, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, said that two consecutive years of record failures by corporate pension plans and continuing adverse market conditions left it with a shortfall much greater than a year earlier, which had been the previous low point in the agency's 30-year history. People briefed on the new investment plan say the agency...

<p>The Labor Department is giving employers tips on how to avoid paying overtime to some of the 1.3 million low-income workers who would become eligible under new rules expected to be finalized early this year.</p> <p>The department's advice comes even as it touts the $895 million in increased wages that it says those workers would be guaranteed from the reforms.</p>