As The Iowa Independent reported in September, the DOL proposed rule change (the first since 1970) is intended to “strengthen the safety requirements for young workers employed in agriculture and related fields” and is expected to bring such occupations more in line with restrictions that already exist for young workers in non-ag-related jobs.

Although the rule continues a current exemption for children working on family-owned farms, a spokesperson from the National Council of Agricultural employers is skeptical. Many family farms have legally moved from a sole proprietorship to a limited liability company, which means the definition used by the exemption may not hold. In essence, youth would not be working directly for their parents or relatives, but for the company.

Branstad and Northey believe the regulations will discourage farmers from engaging young people in agriculture, which has been an ongoing initiative at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and will prevent future farmers from acquiring the skills and experience needed for a career in agriculture.

“These new, over-reaching regulations will prevent young people from learning through supervised hands-on experience and obtaining life-long values,” Branstad said. “The federal government should not construct further employment barriers at a time when there are fewer job opportunities available for young people.”

Northey added, “We need more young farmers in Iowa to carry on our agricultural traditions.”

The pair has asked the DOL to increase the commenting period by 45 days to Jan. 15, 2012.

A copy of the letter is embedded below.

Branstad, Northey correspondence to DOL

Under the agreements, embassies from these nations will work with regional offices of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Wage and Hour Division (WHD) to spread information regarding the minimum wage, overtime pay, child labor rules and other regulations. People from these nations residing in the United States will be able to report workplace abuses to their consulates. Solis also committed the WHD to enforcing labor regulations for immigrant workers in the hospitality, agricultural and other industries with large numbers of low-wage workers.

“This is basically about information,” says Migration Policy Institute (MPI) policy analyst Madeleine Sumption. Because the U.S. labor rights system is based on complaints, she says, migrant workers are faced with language barriers and a lack of knowledge of their rights under U.S. law.

But restrictionist organizations and conservative media have condemned Solis and the administration for signing the agreements, arguing that they benefit undocumented immigrants. The conservative Daily Caller questioned Solis about her intent to “protect illegal workers” at a breakfast event on Wednesday:

“I protect all workers here in this country,” [Solis] told The Daily Caller at a breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor. “I have a vested interest in protecting all workers that work here in the U.S. Period.”

Critics of illegal immigration say Solis’ deals and statements show that she doesn’t value American workers more than foreign workers, and that she’s undercutting U.S. workers’ marketplace clout.

The article also quotes Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and Mark Krikorian, president of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), two of the most prominent restrictionist organizations in Washington. Stein accuses Solis of “pandering to a political ethnic bloc,” and Krikorian says that the administration is “ambivalent about American sovereignty … [and] distinguishing between Americans and foreigners,” and that seeking Hispanic votes is a “practical manifestation of this broader ambivalence.”

Phil Kent, a spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control, tells Fox News that, “Obviously everyone wants workers protected in the workplace, that’s not the issue … The problem is the bending over backwards to help and promote black market labor.”

However, it’s by no means definitive that enforcing labor rights for undocumented migrant workers promotes unauthorized immigration. Failing to promote and protect the same labor regulations for unauthorized immigrants could also undercut legal workers by making migrant workers effectively cheaper and easier to exploit by employers, a view that Sumption calls the “demand side” perspective of immigration enforcement. It stands in contrast to the “supply side” perspective, which she summarized as, “If you make life pleasant for the unauthorized than they will stay.”

“My suspicion is that the demand side will be more important,” Sumption says, pointing out that low-skill immigrant workers, having come a long way for a low-wage job, are probably willing to put up with a lot in terms of labor rights infringement.

A July MPI report (PDF), argues that, “The presence of vulnerable workers, including those without immigration status, influences labor standards compliance, as does the necessity of many businesses to cut cost,” and that, “labor standards abuses occur at high rates in certain industries that employ heavy concentrations of low-wage immigrant workers, including those without immigration status.” This suggests a connection between lax enforcement of labor rights and demand for unauthorized immigrants.

The report calls for increasing the number of federal government personnel devoted to labor rights enforcement, which decreased under the Bush administration and has reverted to 2001 levels under the Obama administration. Ultimately, the attention placed upon the signing ceremony by conservative publications may be unwarranted, as the agreements merely extend the role of the consulates in what is an already ongoing process by the Labor Department to increase its labor rights enforcement efforts.

“I wouldn’t describe it as radical,” Sumption says.

Obama also defended his record on Hispanic-related issues, in particular on increasing access to a college education and on appointments. The appointments of U.S. Dept. of Labor Sec. Hilda Solis (the first Hispanic woman to serve on the Cabinet) and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor were both referenced multiple times in Obama’s speech.

Calling immigrants “[j]ob creators who came here to seek opportunity and now seek to share opportunity,” Obama argued that the current U.S. immigration system tolerates those who break the rules — undocumented immigrants and businesses that employ them — while punishing legal immigrants.

He defended himself on what Hispanic leaders say is a broken campaign pledge, “La Promesa,” to get comprehensive immigration reform on the congressional agenda. Obama said he supported the DREAM Act — a bill providing a path to citizenship to undocumented youth provided they go to college or serve in the military — and was disappointed when Senate Republicans voted against it in 2010.

“Many of the folks who walked away had previously been sponsors [of the DREAM Act],” Obama pointed out, referring to Republican U.S. senators like Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Richard Lugar (Ind.) who worked with Democrats on immigration legislation in the past but now refuse to support legalization efforts because they say immigration has been politicized by the White House.

However, when Obama stated that he could not use the power of the executive branch alone to prevent people who qualify for the DREAM Act from being deported, the crowd broke into loud cries of “Yes you can! Yes you can.” Many have taken a recent memofrom Immigration and Customs Enforcement director John Morton urging prosecutorial discretion on immigration cases to be a sign that the administration was seeking immigration reform without going through Congress.

But Obama appeared to reject executive-driven immigration reform, telling the chanting conference attendees that he had to follow the laws as written by Congress.

“Feel free to keep the heat on me, and keep the heat on Democrats, but here’s the thing to remember: The Democrats and your president are with you. Remember who it is that we need to move in order to change the laws,” he said.

Earlier in the speech Obama also said he supported putting laid-off construction workers to work building infrastructure and schools, adding that the burden was on Congress to produce such legislation so that he could sign it. He also spent a portion of the speech discussing ongoing deficit talks, restating his belief that new revenue should accompany meaningful spending cuts.

The Government Accountability Office went undercover to investigate how 18 recruiters would respond to questions about how to hire foreign workers, who can be less expensive than native-born workers. Three of them took the bait, recommending the fictional landscape employer dissuade Americans from applying by scheduling job interviews before 7 a.m., requiring drug tests and making applicants “run around the shop carrying a 50-pound bag to determine [if] they were fit for the work.”

For the foreign workers who eventually get jobs under H-2B visas, the GAO found employers sometimes underpay or charge visa workers excessive fees for visa processing, housing or transportation. More than half of the cases reviewed by government investigators involved fees that drastically reduced paychecks for workers, sometimes to as low as $48 in a two-week period.

Labor rights groups say that foreign-born workers are often exploited by employers who rely on their lack of connections or access to resources in the United States. This can be even worse for undocumented workers, who rights groups say suffer frequent wage theft and other workplace abuses because they fear being turned over to immigration authorities.Workers on H-2B visas are in the country legally, but at times it’s through employers who are cheating the system by skipping over qualified American applicants.

For more on workplace exploitation, it’s worth re-reading the Star’s series on trafficking from last year. After the series ended in December, Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said she would begin more work on ending human trafficking, including a campaign launched in July to improve trafficking assistance and awareness programs.

The Labor Department, which also handles the issue, has added investigators to its Wage and Hour Division to audit seasonal H-2B visa workers. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has argued for fair wages for all workers — even undocumented ones — and appeared in advertising this summer telling workers “every worker in America has the right to be paid fairly, whether documented or not.”

A decline in construction jobs in New Orleans has not created a decline in wage theft, workers' rights groups say. (iStock photo)

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 rebuilding the city after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. She once met a man who went to his employer’s house to demand payment for his labor on a construction site after the employer stiffed him of his dues. The man’s boss came at him, swinging a hammer. The worker immediately called the police.

[Immigration1] When they showed up, she says, the first thing they did was ask for his immigration status. “These are the sort of situations that prevent day laborers from asking for help when their wages are denied,” Gonzalez says.

The politics of immigration are thorny, but it is a simple truth that construction companies routinely use day laborers without checking their immigration status: Thousands of those workers have helped and are helping to rebuild New Orleans. But those workers commonly suffer abuse due to their immigration status, including threats of violence and wage theft. Despite the best efforts of workers’ rights groups, five years after the hurricane, advocates say abuse remains rampant. Now, those groups are calling for specific legislation to protect vulnerable workers — documented and not — and to make sure they get their due.

After Hurricane Katrina, the number of undocumented workers in New Orleans increased substantially, in part because of a Department of Homeland Security directive to suspend employment immigration enforcement in the area immediately following the storm. The suspension expired quickly, but it created an inviting environment for undocumented immigrants, says Elizabeth Fussell, a professor at Washington State University.

“Conditions were set to attract a labor force of Latino immigrants,” Fussell says. “There was a large population of undocumented immigrants who were coming to do the work that was necessary in the city.”

Though there are no firm numbers on undocumented workers, social scientists point to increases in the Latino population to show the influx of immigrants. The Latino population increased from a 4.4 percent share of the population in 2000 to 6.6 percent last year, according to Census data. Advocacy groups say it is likely higher, about 10 percent.

Thousands of those workers came to work rebuilding New Orleans — clearing debris, fixing roads, building houses, constructing schools. “After Katrina hit, there was much more work and much more wages for people — there were other wages to be found,” Gonzalez says.

And along with the rise of undocumented workers and construction problems came wage theft — to which undocumented immigrants are particularly vulnerable. In a 2007 survey of Mexican migrants at the Mexican mobile consulate in a suburb of New Orleans, Fussell found that 24 percent had experienced situations where an employer did not pay, while about 16 percent had been paid less than they were promised. Nearly 90 percent of those surveyed were working in the country illegally. The Congress of Day Laborers last year found that 80 percent of the workers it represents had been victims of wage theft in the past year.

The consequences are particularly dire for undocumented workers, who do not have access to the same legal and policing resources as other workers. “When you’re not paid for that money, the consequences can be much more serious. It’s the difference between being able to pay rent and being homeless,” says Gonzales.

Nonprofit and advocacy groups stepped in to fill the void, helping undocumented workers regain wages from bosses who stiffed them. The Pro Bono Project and Loyola New Orleans’ School of Law help workers sue their employers, for instance. At the Pro Bono clinic, established in 2007, lawyer Vanessa Spinazola says 90 percent of the workers represented are undocumented. Last year, in a nine-month period, lawyers at the clinic saw 476 workers, filed 365 cases and helped draft 146 demand letters.

Oxfam America funds the Pro Bono clinic, but was forced to discontinue its project on workers’ rights in July due to a lack of funds. Ilana Scherl, a field representative for Oxfam who previously worked on the worker’s rights project, says New Orleans just had too much need and too little funding for the initiative. “I guess a lot of foundations feel like five years later everything should be taken care of,” she says. “The problems are still there but the funds are not.” Spinazola says the clinic has enough funding from Oxfam to operate until July 2011, and she is “writing grants as fast as possible” to find money to continue the clinics.

The clinic is still very much needed, particularly because workers often face violence from employers for demanding their wages, she says. The clinic tells workers to put the address of a clinic P.O. box on their demand letters, so that if employers want to retaliate they won’t have their home addresses. Workers whose employers know their addresses often move before sending the letter. Fear deters some workers from seeking their wages, but others move forward with claims, Spinazola says. “They’re afraid but they need the money or they think they deserve their money — which they do.”

Of course, for illegal immigrants there is also a fear that their employers will call ICE. Spinazola said she suspects that happened a few years ago, when the clinic helped a group of about 40 men who were living and working in an apartment complex to send a letter demanding wages. Most of the men moved out before the letter was sent, but seven were still present when the employer received the demand letter. Two days later, Spinazola said ICE raided the apartments. Three of the men were deported.

Worker’s rights advocates argue that a city ordinance is essential to combating a wage theft problem too big for advocates and undocumented workers to deal with on their own. “The workers need protection, they’re not getting it right now,” Scherl says. “The only way we see to achieve that is to have a policy in place protecting the workers.”

The New Orleans Center for Racial Justice helped develop a policy, but the exact direction of the potential ordinance remains unclear. New Orleans City Councilman Arnie Fielkow has said he would support a wage theft ordinance, and groups are now negotiating the ordinance with the mayor’s office and other officials at city hall.

In New Orleans, some advocates of a wage theft ordinance said they are concerned growing anti-illegal immigrant sentiment will play into their effort to pass the ordinance. But they are hoping the general goodwill many New Orleans residents feel toward the workers who helped rebuild their city will make matters easier.

“In this climate, the fear of opposition is always there,” Gonzalez says. “But New Orleans is a city that recognizes that day laborers did participate and did come to the rescue in terms of reconstruction.”

“The science is there, the technology is there. But it’s about the employer,” Solis said at the Fairfax hotel near D.C.’s Dupont Circle. “And yes, it’s also about the regulations and the enforcement.”

Here we are in the 21st Century, and these things are still going on. … We have to have teeth that will encourage people to take care of employees in the work place.

After the speech, a handler whisked Solis away before I could ask any questions about what teeth she had in mind.

In an interview with MSNBC, the Labor secretary said that while all mining companies have experienced safety violations, Massey’s record indicates a particularly egregious offender.

“This particular mining group or operator has managed to kind of skirt the system and get away with making sure that they got off the bad list in time so that we would not have the ability to close them down,” Solis said. “This doesn’t typically happen in most of the other mines. There are other mines that operate with larger numbers of people and have a larger operation, but are not found in the same pattern of violation as this one mine — the Massey Upper Big Branch Mine.”

Several investigative teams this week have launched probes into the blast, which killed 29 coal miners working about 30 miles south of Charleston.

Congress is also poised to examine the nation’s mining safety laws, with lawmakers in both the House and Senate preparing hearings on the topic.

Of note, Solis — a Democrat who represented California in the House before becoming Labor secretary — voted against the 2006 MINER Act, which was the last major mining safety reform bill to become law. Those reforms, Solis thought, were too weak to prevent accidents and protect miners.

All of the secrecy might make sense, if MSHA and state officials didn’t almost always allow coal company lawyers to sit in on the interviews. The only good argument for secrecy in these interviews is that allowing openness tips off the company to the direction investigators are headed, allowing them to thwart things like potential criminal prosecution down the road.

But if the company lawyers are in the room, well, what’s the point of the secrecy?

Good question. Still waiting for the Obama administration’s answer.

Why not? Well, it’s tough to say. MSHA officials insist that they did everything they could to ensure the Upper Big Branch was safe. Aside from the thousands of hours they spent inspecting the mine (2,999 hours in 2009 and 803 hours in 2010, according to The Washington Post), they also closed down parts of the operation more than 60 times since the start of 2009, according to the Labor Department. And they’re pushing back hard against claims that those efforts weren’t enough.

“We issued citations for every hazard we identified,” Greg Wagner, a top MSHA deputy, told The Charleston Gazette yesterday. “We held the operator accountable for correcting the problems that were cited. … We can’t be in the mine all the time in every place.”

Yet those 60+ closings came in the form of so-called withdrawal orders, which are temporary actions to pull miners from unsafe sections of the project until the danger is eliminated. That strategy is different from shuttering the operation for longer stretches in response to “a continuing hazard.” That move would require a judge’s approval and proof of a “pattern of violations.”

And here’s where the mining companies have discovered a loophole. Knowing that MSHA can’t establish a “pattern of violations” on citations that haven’t been finalized, the companies are protesting more and more of the violations. (After all, how can you determine a pattern if hundreds of citations remain in dispute?) In 2005, mine operators protested just 6 percent of violations, a MSHA official told House lawmakers in February. In 2009, they protested 27 percent. The trend has led to an enormous backlog for the few judges examining the appeals. Indeed, as of February, the backlog consisted of 16,000 cases involving 82,000 separate violations.

There are currently 10 judges wading through the appeals, with funding already allocated for four more, who are somewhere in the nomination hiring process. Additionally, President Obama’s 2011 budget calls for another four, bringing the total to 18 (assuming Congress provides the funding). But Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, says there need to be at least 22 such judges to eliminate the backlog of appeals.

A 2008 bill, passed by the House, would have altered the “pattern of violation” language in order to make it easier for MSHA officials to close mines known to be habitual offenders. Republicans at the time said it would “saddle employers with burdensome new costs that could put critical American jobs in jeopardy,” in the words of Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio).

In the wake of Monday’s blast, however, lawmakers have the appeals loophole back on their radars. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) told MSNBC yesterday that it’s up to Congress to step in and close the loophole. “It’s simply playing with the lives of coal miners in a very cynical way,” he said. “And yet, it’s our fault in Congress that we have not foreseen that loophole.”

Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship gives an interview on Tuesday after an explosion at Massey's Upper Big Branch Mine killed at least 25 people. (Xinhua/ZUMApress.com)

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 review of federal records by TWI. Hundreds of those citations target the same problems with ventilation and methane buildup that many suspect sparked the West Virginia disaster.

[Environment1] Massey Energy — the Virginia-based coal giant that owns the Upper Big Branch mine, the site of Monday’s tragedy — also controls 41 other underground coal mines currently active in Appalachia. Investigators have cited those projects for 2,074 violations since the start of the year, according to federal documents. The citations run a spectrum, but hundreds charge mine operators with failing to maintain air quality detectors, failing to ensure proper ventilation, allowing combustible material to accumulate, and a host of other infractions related to miner safety.

At the Upper Big Branch — where rescue teams were still searching Wednesday night for four missing miners — investigators had cited 124 similar safety violations this year. More than 50 of them were issued in March alone.

On Wednesday, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, a branch of the Labor Department, sent a team to Upper Big Branch to begin investigating whether the conditions cited in those violations sparked the explosion.

“The very best way we can honor [the miners] is to do our job,” Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said in a statement announcing the team.

But as those officials prepare to look backwards in search of what went wrong at Upper Big Branch, a growing chorus of voices is urging policymakers to examine also the corporate culture that, they say, has led companies like Massey to disregard worker safety in the name of profit-making.

“This incident isn’t just a matter of happenstance, but rather the inevitable result of a profit-driven system and reckless corporate conduct,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. “Many mining companies have given too little attention to safety over the years and too much to the bottom line.”

As far as recent safety violations go, the Upper Big Branch mine has plenty of company. In fact, it doesn’t even rank first among the Massey-owned underground mines with the most safety violations this year. That distinction goes to Freedom Mine #1, in Pike County, Ky., which tallied 187 such citations, according to documents posted by the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Among the infractions, investigators cited accumulations of combustible materials and a failure to maintain escapeways. A man answering the phone Wednesday at Freedom Energy Company — the Kentucky-based Massey subsidiary that operates the mine — hung up on a reporter.

Other notable Massey-controlled mines currently in operation include:

• The Justice # 1 Mine in Boone County, W.Va. Operated by the Independence Coal Company, the project has been hit with 115 safety violations this year, including citations surrounding air-quality detectors and ventilation plans. (A woman answering the phone for Independence Wednesday said the company doesn’t talk to reporters.)
• The Alloy Powellton Mine in Fayette County, W.Va. Run for Massey by the Mammoth Coal Company, the operation has received 80 citations this year, including those targeting its plan to control methane buildup. (No one answered the phone at Mammoth Wednesday.)
• The Slip Ridge Cedar Grove Mine in Martin County, Ky., which has attracted 40 citations this year, including problems with combustible material found too close to ventilation fans. (The Marfork Coal Company, which runs Slip Ridge, referred questions to Massey. Massey didn’t return calls for comment.)

Outside of coal country, the infractions have flown largely under the radar. But in the wake of Monday’s explosion — the worst mining tragedy in at least 26 years — there are new calls, on and off Capitol Hill, for better enforcement of the nation’s mining safety regulations. And Massey, no stranger to controversy, will be the center of attention.

Indeed, Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) — a long-time defender of the coal industry who represents the miners killed at Upper Big Branch — told CNN Wednesday that it’s “valid” to question Massey’s dedication to worker safety. “Something’s fishy,” he said. “This company has a rather maverick reputation.”

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) also took a shot at Massey, issuing a statement maintaining that miners “deserve … an employer who respects and values their safety.”

Massey did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday. But CEO Don Blankenship this week has defended the company’s performance, telling the West Virginia MetroNews that safety violations are “a normal part of the mining process.” Massey’s safety operations, he told CNN Wednesday, “are typically in better shape than others.”

For Massey, the scrutiny is hardly new. And the outspoken Blankenship has only stoked the coals of criticism. In a now infamous 2005 memo, for example, Blankenship instructed his deep mine superintendents to ignore any requests unrelated to coal production.

“If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e. – build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever) you need to ignore them and run coal,” the memo said. “This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that coal pays the bills.”

In another telling episode, a young Blankenship outlined his business philosophy in a 1984 interview.

“Unions, communities, people — everybody’s gonna have to accept that, in the United States, we have a capitalist society,” Blankenship said. “And that capitalism, from a business viewpoint, is survival of the most productive.”

With congressional leaders already calling for hearings on Monday’s explosion, Blankenship will almost certainly have a chance to tell lawmakers that himself.