The Labor Dept. under Hilda Solis gives us a glimpse of how this administration could be working

"Without left pressure from below, the Obama presidency will end up looking more like Carter's or Clinton's than Roosevelt's or Johnson's."

-- Harold Meyerson, in his column yesterday (see below)

by Ken

The "Under the Radar" item in Tuesday's Progress Report from Think Progress tipped us off to a New Year's Day AP Business Week report that began:

Labor moves quickly on job safety, workers' rights

By SAM HANANEL

WASHINGTON -- Soon after she became the nation's labor secretary, Hilda Solis warned corporate America there was "a new sheriff in town." Less than a year into her tenure, that figurative badge of authority is unmistakable.

Her aggressive moves to boost enforcement and crack down on businesses that violate workplace safety rules have sent employers scrambling to make sure they are following the rules.

The changes are a departure from the policies of Solis' predecessor, Elaine Chao. They follow through on President Barack Obama's campaign promise to boost funding for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, increase enforcement and safeguard workers in dangerous industries.

Solis made a splash in October when OSHA slapped the largest fine in its history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery.

Garnering less attention, she just finished hiring 250 new investigators to protect workers from being cheated out of wage and overtime pay. She also started a new program that scrutinizes business records to make sure worker injury and illness reports are accurate. And she is proposing new standards to protect workers from industrial dust explosions -- an effort the Bush administration had long resisted.

Some business groups say they prefer a more cooperative approach between government and businesses -- what the Bush administration called "compliance assistance." . . .

These are, of course, the "business groups" that can be counted on to let out a wounded roar anytime they don't get their way, which is their definition of being "anti-business." Which just goes to show that they haven't learned even the First Lesson of August 2008: that anyone who gives "business groups" everything they want can expect big-time trouble. These people are like children -- especially whiny and, it has to be said, thuggish children -- the kiddies from Lord of the Flies, say. They are incapable of checking their truly insatiable greed, and are prepared to destroy any number of economies in its pursuit.

Put the Republicans in charge of the economy, and it's just a matter of when and how bad the meltdown is going to be. They talk a lot about some mythical "free market," but of course the last thing they want is a truly free market. It's government's job to pave the way for, and grind into dust anyone who opposes, the free expression of their limitless greed. You know, the way the Bush regimistas did so spendidly.

One key component of the scheme is making sure you've always got your heel on the throat of labor. Corporations, you see, must have all the rights -- and none of the obligations -- of humans, but humans, if they happen to be working stiffs, have no rights, or at least none that they don't have to fight for tooth and claw.

And so in Republican administrations, the ideal -- hard to obtain but worth striving for -- is to derail the Department of Labor from its mandated function of protecting the labor force to its opposite, turning it into a functional Anti-Labor Department, the wedge of the organized effort to protect management from any rights mere laborers may try to claim. Previous administrations have striven for this anti-labor nirvana; I don't believe any has achieved it to anything like the degree that the Bush Anti-Labor Department under Elaine Chao did.

The philosophy apparently goes something like this: We value our workforce so much that we are prepared to continue paying them -- the absolute minimum possible, of course -- until they fall, and then goodness knows there are plenty more laborers where that poor sod came from. Probably the Bush regime's most successful area of job creation was the ones that opened up as a result of the Labor Department's "reluctance," to put it mildly, to enforce safety regulations. Hey, every miner who died opened up an available mining job.

If we can believe the AP report on the functioning of the Labor Department under Secretary Hilda Solis, for once it's clear that we had an election in 2008 in which people voted for change. Here's more of the Think Progress Report:

In many ways, Solis has reversed the course of the Labor Department that was set by her Bush-era predecessor, Elaine Chao. Solis' crackdown has business lobbyists yearning for the days when Chao ran the show. "Our members are concerned that the department is shifting its focus from compliance assistance back to more of the 'gotcha' or aggressive enforcement first approach," Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business' small business legal center, told BusinessWeek. Keith Smith, a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, explained that his organizations wants "to build upon [Chao's] progress and recognize what's working." The business lobbyists' reaction to Solis' tenure is unsurprising, given the fact that her predecessor's Labor Department spent eight years "walking away from its regulatory function across a range of issues, including wage and hour law and workplace safety." The Government Accountability Office found that under Chao, the agency "did an inadequate job of investigating complaints by low-wage workers who alleged that their employers were stiffing them for overtime, or failing to pay the minimum wage." In one survey, 68 percent of low-income workers reported a pay violation in the previous week alone. Solis, meanwhile, has "slapped the largest fine in [Department] history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery."

[Note: The original text is studded with links.]

Now clearly none of this could be happening against the wishes of the Oval Office, but we have to give credit to Secretary Solis herself for (a) understanding her job very differently from the way her predecessor did, and (b) turning the wreckage of her department around and making it function in the interest of working people. It was shocking to read once again in Mary Jean Collins's DWT post last night, "Happy(?) Anniversary, Dawn Johnsen!," how casual the Obama administration remains about getting the Justice Department staffed and working.

We can't say we're surprised by the job Secretary Solis is doing. Because of Howie's nearness to her old congressional district, he's had a lot of opportunity to observe her at work, and she's remained a proud, committed progressive. It's why Blue America included her in our endorsements. It's not that her reelection was ever in doubt in her safely Democratic district, but that we hoped to add to her visibility and clout in Congress, or as Howie puts it, "to help her increase her profile so she would one day be a contender for a governorship, Senate seat-- or cabinet position." Another budding progressive powerhouse, Florida Rep. Alan Grayson, is the first endorsee of Blue America '10, and we hope you'll keep checking the Blue America '10 page to see the candidates we and our friends at Digby's Hullabaloo and Crooks and Liars are satisfied are worthy of progressive support.


POSTSCRIPT: HAROLD MEYERSON POINTS OUT
TODAY'S LACK OF A PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

"Every Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson -- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- has raised the hope that he would bring with him a new era of progressive reform," Harold Meyerson began his Washington Post column yesterday ("Without a movement, progressives can't aid Obama's agenda"), and that sure got my attention. "The legislative torrents of the New Deal and the Great Society -- a few brief years in the 1930s and the '60s that fundamentally reshaped the nation's economy and society -- are the templates that fire the liberal imagination."

[Liberals] have responded to the election of every Democratic president since LBJ -- each of whom entered office with a substantial Democratic majority in Congress -- with the hope that this time would be different, that a new burst of progressivism was at hand.

And each time, they have been disappointed. While Carter and Clinton could both point to progressive legislation enacted during their terms, many of their most significant achievements -- the deregulation of transportation, the consolidation and deregulation of finance, the abolition of welfare, the enactment of trade agreements with low-wage nations -- actually eroded the economic security that Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson and their congressional contemporaries had worked to hard to create.

And even though Obama "took office at a moment when the intellectual force of laissez-faire economics was plainly spent," and came in with a reform agenda that "was nothing if not ambitious,"

as the first anniversary of his inauguration approaches, it's clear that despite the impending enactment of a genuinely epochal expansion of health care, a progressive era has not burst forth. Major legislation languishes or is watered down. Right-wing pseudo-populism stalks the land. The liberal base is demobilized. The '30s or the '60s it ain't.

Meyerson notes some of the "reasons for the stillbirth of the new progressive era": "the death of liberal and moderate Republicanism, the reluctance of some administration officials and congressional Democrats to challenge the banks, the ever-larger role of money in politics (see reluctance to challenge banks, above), the weakness of labor, the dysfunctionality of the Senate." But, he says, "if there's a common feature to the political landscapes in which Carter, Clinton and now Obama were compelled to work, it's the absence of a vibrant left movement."

He looks back at "the America over which FDR presided" and sees "mass organizations of the unemployed," farmers' groups, militant unions, communiss and democratic socialists who "were enough of a presence in America to help shape these movements, generating so much street heat in so many congressional districts that Democrats were compelled to look leftward as they crafted their response to the Depression." In LBJ's time, the civil rights movement "provided a new generation of street heat that both compelled and abetted the president and Congress to enact fundamental reforms."

In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism's left fringe. No such movements were around during Carter and Clinton's presidencies. For his part, Obama won election with something new under the political sun: a list of 13 million people who had supported his campaign. But he has consistently declined to activate his activists to help him win legislative battles by pressuring, for instance, those Democratic members of Congress who have weakened or blocked his major bills. To be sure, loosing the activists would have brought problems of its own: Unlike Roosevelt or Johnson, who benefited from autonomous movements, Obama would be answerable for every loopy tactic his followers employed. But in the absence of both a free-standing movement and a legion of loyalists, Congress isn't feeling much pressure from the left to move Obama's agenda.

The construction of social movements is always a bit of a mystery. The right has had great success over the past year in building a movement that isn't really for anything but that has channeled anew the fears and loathings of millions of Americans. If Glenn Beck can help do that for the right, can't, say, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann help build a movement against the banks or for jobs programs? It might well be too little too late, but without left pressure from below, the Obama presidency will end up looking more like Carter's or Clinton's than Roosevelt's or Johnson's.

The most exciting political development of recent times has been the emergence of the progressive blogosphere. We know there's a lot of support out there for progressive principles, with a lot of heat behind it. The question then is, how do we translate that passion to the kind of force that moves the likes of Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer and Harry Reid?

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