Free Republic

Another staffer is departing the White House after less than a year at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as approval ratings for President Biden continue to dive. Emma Riley, the White House communications chief of staff, announced in a Friday tweet that she is leaving the West Wing and will be joining the Labor Department. ...In addition to Riley's departure from the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris' communications director resigned on Thursday amid reports of turmoil within the East Wing.

Asset managers like BlackRock are pushing to create ESG 401(k) funds in part because they can charge higher fees. According to Morningstar, the asset-weighted average expense ratio of U.S. "sustainable" funds was 0.61% in 2020 compared to 0.41% for all open-ended mutual and exchange-traded funds and 0.12% for passive funds. This difference can reduce retirement savings by tens of thousands of dollars over a few decades. (snip) All of this amounts to a backdoor rewrite of Erisa, one of the better laws of the last 50 years. Progressives are moving across the Biden administration to steer private capital to implement...

When I became Secretary of Labor I took an oath to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office.” Whether my cabinet colleagues and I have done so is ultimately for the American people to judge: one of the privileges of being an American is the ability to hold executive and legislative branch officials accountable at the ballot box. This accountability is often undermined, though, by officials tasked with a job who pass it off to someone else, to avoid responsibility for how it gets done. The result in some cases has been to transform government of, by, and...

The Labor Department’s recent proposal to revamp the Obama administration’s so-called “joint employer rule” is being lauded by Republicans and the business community. The long overdue proposed rule would limit businesses' joint legal liability with franchisees or contractors for workplace violations, revamping harmful economic regulations from the Obama administration.However, praise for the proposal comes with an important qualifier: “long overdue.” With the two-year anniversary of Labor Secretary Alex Acosta’s confirmation approaching, it is hard not to wonder: why is this Obama-era regulation only now being rolled back? Unfortunately, the same question applies to other policy areas that desperately need Secretary...

A 25-year-old woman three years out of college earns a modest, but livable, salary in a professional position where she oversees the work of several other young people. She works eight-to-ten hours every weekday -- then goes home and takes a three-mile walk. When she is walking, she sometimes thinks about her job and how she can make those she supervises more productive. One night on her walk, she has a brilliant idea, which she starts implementing at work the next day. This idea makes the jobs of her subordinates easier, more enjoyable and more productive. It makes the family-owned...

Labor Department adds 'transgender status, gender identity' to workplace discrimination listThe Department of Labor is seeking to remove the terms "he" and "she" from a regulation prohibiting discrimination in the workforce in an effort to "avoid the gender binary." The agency is also adding "sex stereotyping, transgender status, and gender identity" to the list of types of employment discrimination banned under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. If adopted, the regulation would cost job training centers millions of dollars to change their equal employment opportunity posters to include "gender identity."

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez has given American businesses a short reprieve from a controversial proposed rule that, if promulgated, will restrict business’ ability to obtain legal counsel and other labor relations advice potentially leading to a dearth in labor counseling. Perez told an audience at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week that the new rule was “not going to happen” this November, as the Department of Labor had originally planned. While the Department has received over 9,000 comments on its proposal and considering the negative impact it will have on American businesses, it surprisingly hasn’t received much media...

President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to head the Labor Department has close ties to U.S. communist and socialist organizations and has sent representatives to functions organized by national parties for both ideologies. The pick of Rep. Hilda L. Solis, D-Calif., a Congressional Hispanic Caucus leader considered to be one of the most reliably pro-union voices in the House, was hailed as a victory by communist and socialist leaders.

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,...

NEW YORK – A labor group affiliated with the nation's largest union is giving its highest prize for journalism to a writer from the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA. President Obama's labor secretary, Hilda Solis, will be on hand for the awards dinner this week to lead a special session on how to respond to "expected" attacks from the new Republican-led House. The International Labor Communications Association, or ILCA, a national coalition of labor organizers, is bestowing its media award to John Wojcik, the labor editor for People's World, the official Communist Party USA publication. He will receive...

Obama Makes Tough Budget Cuts On Backs Of Social Security Recipients by Daniel T. Zanoza, Executive Director It seems President Barack Obama has decided to demonstrate fiscal restraint, but his turn towards less federal spending has come at the expense of Social Security recipients in 2010 and, as recently announced, in 2011. Those who receive Social Security benefits will not receive a Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) in their monthly checks for the second year in a row. According to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), whose data is compiled under the auspices of the U.S. Dept. of Labor, there has...

PORT HUDSON, La. - A literacy test used to screen Georgia-Pacific Corp. applicants discriminated against blacks because blacks were far more likely than whites to fail the test, the federal Labor Department said. Utility workers at a paper mill don't need to read well, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Georgia Pacific disagrees, but has stopped using the nationally standardized Test of Adult Basic Education's literacy exam and will pay $749,076 in back pay and interest to 399 black people who applied over the past two years, spokeswoman Patty Prats-Swanson said Wednesday. "We may not agree but we have...

DOL Planning Stepped-up Audits of Union Finances The U.S. Dept. of Labor aims to increase sharply the number of financial audits of individual unions, reports Dan Roberts of the London Financial Times. DOL officials say the measures are necessary to make unions more accountable to their members and to root out any corruption. Despite declining membership, unions continue to be a thorn in the side of big business, orchestrating campaigns against companies such as Wal-Mart and using their influence over pension funds to press for corporate governance reform. The Bush administration is turning the tables on these critics. New proposals...

<p>The Bush administration, under fire for its handling of the economy, has quietly killed off a Labor Department program that tracked mass layoffs by U.S. companies.</p> <p>The statistic, which had been issued monthly and was closely watched by hard-hit Silicon Valley, served as a pulse reading of corporate America's financial health.</p>