Gov. Terry Branstad and Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey have asked the U.S. Department of Labor to extend the commenting period on new child labor laws that could impact family farming operations in Iowa and throughout the nation.
On Monday, U.S. Department of Labor Sec. Hilda Solis, together with the ambassadors of Costa Rica, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic, signed agreements guaranteeing the labor rights of workers from those countries residing within the United States. The ambassadors of Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua, countries which already have More…
Addressing the National Council of La Raza’s annual conference, President Barack Obama argued that there was little he could do on crucial issues such as immigration reform and lowering unemployment without the support of congressional Republicans.
Obama also defended his record on Hispanic-related issues, in particular on increasing access to More…
Via the Kansas City Star, a government report released this week found that foreign workers are at times abused and exploited under the H-2B visa program, which allows companies to hire foreign workers for temporary jobs they can’t fill with Americans. The Government Accountability Office found that some More…
This week, The Washington Independent is featuring a series of investigative stories on the rebuilding of New Orleans, five years after Hurricane Katrina. Find all of them here.
Jacinta Gonzalez, an organizer with the Congress of Day Laborers in New Orleans, tells a story about the abuse of workers More…
Speaking at a labor conference in Washington today, Hilda Solis went after Massey Energy for the company’s role in the explosion that killed 29 miners in Montcoal, W.Va., earlier this month. But the Labor secretary also laid some of the blame for that tragedy on federal regulators and policymakers for More…
This morning, it was President Obama blaming Massey Energy (among others) for not doing more to prevent last week’s deadly mining blast in West Virginia. This afternoon, it was Hilda Solis.
In an interview with MSNBC, the Labor secretary said that while all mining companies have experienced safety More…
White House officials today will begin their investigation of the horrific explosion that killed 29 miners in southern West Virginia a week ago. But, as in similar cases in the past, most of this process will almost certainly be closed to the public, even as Massey lawyers More…
The short answer is yes — the Mining Health and Safety Administration (a branch of the Labor Department) has the power to close mines and hike penalties if officials can identify a “pattern of violations.” Yet, as new MSHA data show (reported here and here), the More…
The federal investigators readying their probe into the massive explosion that killed at least 25 West Virginia coal miners this week might take note: The dozens of other active tunnel mines owned by the same energy company have run up thousands of safety violations this year alone, according to a More…
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