Department of “Organized” Labor

The Department of Labor is supposed to protect the 90% of workers who are not members of labor unions, as well as the 10% who are.  But the Secretary of Labor appears to have never gotten the message.  Speaking to the Democratic National Committee, Hilda Solis made it clear she cares only for the unionized workforce.  But even then she doesn’t even speak for the majority of union workers as she opposes giving them the right to choose to be a member of organized labor.  From the Examiner:

The problem is that her DNC remarks made clear that Solis labors under the flawed assumption that she represents only the steadily dwindling sliver of the American work force that is still unionized. As a result, Solis is leaving the other 90 percent of American workers high and dry.

Here’s the key passage from Solis’ remarks at the DNC on public employee protests in Wisconsin and Ohio that points to her fractured understanding of whom she represents: “The fight is on. We work together. We help those embattled states right now where public employees are under assault.” She called members of the protesting public employee unions “our brothers and sisters” and pledged to help them against Republican Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio. With those remarks, Solis effectively put the federal government in the de facto position of aiding protesters opposing governors doing what they were elected to do less than five months ago.

As The Washington Examiner’s Byron York pointed out Monday, the Labor Department’s mission statement says it is supposed to “foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States.” There is nothing in the statement about taking the union side in collective bargaining conflicts, much less about deploying her department’s 17,000-plus civil servants for or against either side in any labor-management compensation dispute, much less one between a sovereign state and its workers.