By Laura Clawson
– The Obama administration is outraging business lobby groups by doing something sort of novel and unexpected: aggressively enforcing labor law. The National Labor Relations Board is leading the way with a new rule modernizing and streamlining union representation elections, bringing them into the 21st century with electronic filing and cutting down on frivolous litigation and stall tactics. The labor board is also holding McDonald’s accountable for its own labor practices rather than allowing the fast food chain to continue shifting blame onto the franchise operators who are required to follow corporate rules. But it’s not just the NLRB:
Meanwhile, over at the Labor Department, the Wage and Hour Division’s collection of back pay has risen by more than a third under Obama, and man-hours dedicated to enforcement are up by half. A misclassification initiative was launched in response to a 2010 finding by Vice President Joe Biden’s Task Force on the Middle Class that 10 percent to 30 percent of all companies classified as independent contractors who met the legal definition of employees to avoid providing benefits and protections required under federal law. Wage and Hour is also now initiating significantly more of its investigations (as opposed to responding to worker complaints), and identifying violations at a much higher rate.
Much of the impetus for these changes has come from David Weil, a Boston University economist who — first as a consultant to Wage and Hour (initially hired under President George W. Bush) and, since May, Wage and Hour administrator — pressed the division to target enforcement efforts on industry sectors where wage theft is most common: restaurants, hotels, construction, janitorial services, agriculture, retail and manufacturing. Now businesses are bracing themselves for a proposed rule due early next year that is expected to at least partly reverse a long-term decline in the percentage of U.S. workers to whom employers must pay time-and-a-half when they work more than 40 hours a week.
It’s more than a little sad that this is what looks like major progress for workers, since what we’re talking about mostly consists of enforcing existing laws and ratcheting part of the way back to where things were in the 1970s. But that has been the sorry state of labor law in the United States. Even relatively modest actions like enforcing the law or preventing the worst employer abuses of the union representation election process have the potential to level the playing field just enough to give workers a fighting chance, and that’s the last thing groups like the Chamber of Commerce want to see.
Source – http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/22/1353544/-Workers-get-a-boost-as-Obama-administration-brings-labor-law-into-the-21st-century
