Thanksgiving Greetings From Elaine!

Chao, that is. Your Secretary of Labor, and her hubby, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

This was sent today to all Department of Labor employees:

From: Secretary Elaine Chao
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 11:57 AM
Subject: Thanksgiving Message from the Secretary


Happy Thanksgiving to you and your loved ones! I hope you’ll have a relaxing and fun holiday weekend with family, friends and loved ones. Last weekend, I was in my neighborhood grocery and learned that the couple who ran it for decades are facing health challenges. I thought of them as I composed this email and am reminded how grateful we are to have the friends, colleagues, and family who enrich our daily lives. I hope we’ll also remember our men and women in uniform this Thanksgiving. And once again, thank you for your service to our country.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, how could one not respond to that?

From: Jordan Barab
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2006 11:57 PM
Subject: Thanksgiving Message from Confined Space

Happy Thanksgiving to you too and thanks for your note! But I'm afraid I can't figure out what the hell you're talking about!

You say that "Last weekend, I was in my neighborhood grocery and learned that the couple who ran it for decades are facing health challenges."

What the hell does this mean? What's a health "challenge"? Is their health "challenged" or is their ability to pay for their health care challenged?

I'm glad you have friends, colleagues, and family "who enrich our daily lives." Friends, family and colleagues are certainly good things, but when it comes to enriching, I have a feeling a universal single-payer health plan would be far more useful for your grocery couple.

And what's the point of bringing them up in the first place? Are you saying that you're sure glad you're not in their shoes? "Gosh, I sure am glad that Mitch and I aren't health-challenged [as opposed to morally challenged -- see below?]"

And when you say that "we" are grateful to have friends, colleagues, etc., are you implying that your grocery couple doesn't have friends -- unlike you and Senator Mitch, who have lots of friends (particularly Senator Mitch, although he has about 6 fewer friends/colleagues than he had before November 7).

Finally, yes, Elaine, I certainly do remember our men and women in uniform. I mean, how can I forget? I particularly remember the thousands buried in their uniforms, and the tens of thousands permanently disabled -- physically and mentally -- and their families who aren't exactly having a Happy Thanksgiving! And for what?Most of all, I remember that they were sent there for absolutely no reason, thanks to your boss and your husband. In fact, Elaine, in addition to remembering them and thanking them, you should be falling down on your knees and apologizing to them.

(Oh, and by the way, my holiday "weekend" would be more fun and relaxing if I didn't have to work on Friday.)

Happy Thanksgiving To You And Senator Mitch Too!

Chronic Pain, A Hand Like A Claw, And The Lowest Injury & Illness Rates "On Record"

Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao is happy as a clam over a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report that the rate of injuries and illnesses have gone down for the third straight year from to 4.8 cases per 100 workers in 2004 to 4.6 cases per 100 workers in 2005.

According to Chao, all credit goes to

1) compliance assistance; 2) health and safety partnerships with labor, and; 3) targeted, aggressive enforcement against bad actors. (emphasis added)

Now I can't quite tell whether she's joking, or suffering from the same delusional disease affecting the Pentagon, but "health and safety partnerships with labor?" Puleeeze!

Oh, and Elaine, you don't get a reduction in national injury and illnesses number by going after a few "bad actors." You also need to go after all the other "normal actors" who cut a few corners here, rush a few jobs there, and ignore ergonomics and chemical hazards. Oh, and if you really want to address a signficant number of workplace injuries and illnesses, you might want to depend a bit less on the "compliance assistance," and issue a few new standards that address issues like ergonomics and workplace violence which make up for hundreds of thousands of injuries every year.

If the numbers are accurate, this is good news. But, of course, all of this assumes that we even believe these numbers -- and with cases of employers being caught cheating, with "behavioral" incentive programs that discourage employees from reporting injuries and illnesses, one could be forgiven for being a tad bit skeptical.

But most important, these are only numbers, statistics, millions of them. And as famed occupational physician Irving Selikoff once said, “statistics are human beings with the tears wiped away.”

What tears are we talking about? Here's one tragic example, and this one didn't even make it into Chao's statistics:

He lost his apartment two years ago, after losing his job. He lost his job after falling off scaffolding in an unacknowledged industrial accident. The company lawyer does not answer his phone calls. Now he has chronic pain, a hand like a claw and a bed in the homeless shelter.

My patient likes to talk about the apartment he used to have, and the honest satisfactions of a home. He liked taking his shower after work, watching his TV. He had a girlfriend who tidied the place from time to time. He took the bus to and from work and said that whenever someone was missing bus fare, he would reach into a pocket and supply it. It felt good, like buying everyone a round. He was not a drinker, but altruism was something he enjoyed.

He especially liked his apartment key. But no job, no key. At first, he slept in a condemned building; it gave comfort, and the illusion of a home: there were doors to walk through. After the building was demolished, he came to the mental health clinic. He had all the profound symptoms of depression one would expect. He understood that antidepressants take weeks to work, and dutifully accepted that fact. He was willing to be patient.

He got thrown out of the shelter, and built himself a nice lean-to in the woods, "using tree stumps and branches, and his one good arm."

He says he lies in it and can see the stars in the roofless sky. There is no heat or electricity, of course, and the house is not structurally safe, but he doesn’t mind. He looks up, and hours pass. In the dark, lying on the floor looking up, he begins to feel the absence of grief, of anger. He feels the blessing of no feelings at all.

The medication is still not working. It won’t work, when his need is for a key. He has begun to talk about train tracks and the uselessness of life. He says one day he may not return to the clinic. He won’t tell me where his house in the woods is, though for now he continues to visit it. It offers respite from the anxiety, rage and heartbreak he faces in the shelter.

Feeling nothing, he says thoughtfully, is almost like feeling peace.

4.6 per 100. I feel much better now.

Who's Sleeping With The Secretary Of Labor?

John Cheves at the Lexington Herald Leader has an fascinating article about Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao and the man she sleeps with, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who also happens to be her husband. Most of it has been reported before (much of it on Confined Space), but Cheves manages to pull it all together in a devastating package.

How does this relationship work in practice?

Millionaire coal magnate Bob Murray knew the name to drop in September 2002, when Mine Safety Health Administration inspectors confronted him about safety problems at his mines: Sen. Mitch McConnell.

Murray, a large man with a fierce temper, is a huge donor to Republican senators. McConnell, R-Ky., rose through the ranks by raising money for those senators. And McConnell is married to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, whose agency oversees MSHA.

Shouting at a table full of MSHA officials at their district office in Morgantown, W.Va., Murray said: "Mitch McConnell calls me one of the five finest men in America, and the last I checked, he was sleeping with your boss," according to notes of the meeting. "They," Murray added, pointing at two MSHA men, "are gone."

Murray, in a recent interview, denied that he referred to McConnell "sleeping with" Chao.

But nobody disputes that district manager Tim Thompson, at one end of Murray's jabbing finger and the man whose notes recorded the meeting, was transferred to another region, away from Murray's mines. He appealed the transfer for three years until he grudgingly took retirement in January. Labor Department officials refuse to discuss his transfer.

"The ironic part is, I'm a Republican," said Thompson, now a private mine-safety consultant. "But I don't think you should bring up politics at a meeting like that, involving safety."

Probably not, but it was obviously effective.

The Chao-McConnell relationship is of particular interest for workers, particularly mineworkers and farmworkers:

When it comes to workplace-related issues such as mine safety, the McConnell-Chao marriage presents an intriguing target for industry donors. At the Labor Department, Chao has taken what some reports say is a relaxed attitude toward the regulation of coal mines and an approach that labor unions perceive as hostile.

Sometimes Chao achieves what her husband cannot in the Senate, such as a wage freeze her department instituted on certain farmworkers.

And her job has been a perfect vehicle to put her conservative political philosphy into action:

Chao is staunchly conservative. Speaking at a Washington event in May, she said, "Often, people come into public service with a zeal to take immediate action. But, sometimes it's not what you do but what you refrain from doing that is important."

And we've certainly seen plenty of "refraining" from doing anything over at OSHA and MSHA during her reign. But the important people are happy.

Few industries were happier to see Chao bring that philosophy to the Labor Department than mining, which has given more than $400,000 to McConnell's Senate campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In early 2001, industry magazine Coal Age listed the various mining executives invited to shape the agency's agenda and wrote that they were "benefitting from high-level access to policymakers in the new administration."

At the Mine Safety and Health Administration, Chao named Utah coal operator David Lauriski as director, assisted by former McConnell aide Andrew Rajec. (Lauriski resigned in 2004, citing family concerns, after the Labor Department's inspector general questioned no-bid MSHA contracts that went to firms connected to him.)

His deputies for policy and operations, John Caylor and John Correll, had been executives at Cyprus Amax Minerals Co. of Englewood, Colo. The company's PAC gave $17,000 to McConnell and $15,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee while McConnell and Law, now Chao's deputy, ran it.

"They stacked MSHA with executives who came straight from the coal and mining companies," said Tom Kiley, a Democratic aide to the House Education and Workforce Committee. "Sure, it's good to have some expertise, but there was no effort to balance that with people from the workers' side. It's totally the fox guarding the henhouse over there."

Other "accomplishments" of the dynamic duo?

The Food Marketing Institute lobbied the Senate and the Labor Department after President Bush took office in 2001 to kill the mandatory ergonomics rules that President Clinton had intended to protect workers from repetitive-stress injuries. The institute says it represents 26,000 grocery stores.

At the urging of the institute and other business groups, in 2001 McConnell and the GOP Senate narrowly approved a resolution declaring that Clinton's safety rules "shall have no force or effect."

But it was Chao, after the food institute's officials approached her, who sealed the deal by replacing Clinton's safety rules with "voluntary guidelines," the institute told its members in a newsletter.

"The proposed voluntary guidelines will give our member companies helpful suggestions," the group's chief executive, Tim Hammonds, said in a statement thanking Chao for "the new spirit of cooperation."

The institute, which had contributed at least $13,000 to McConnell in the 1990s, upped its donations, giving him nearly $13,000 more during Chao's first two years as labor secretary. Officials of the institute declined to comment

And then there's the firing of Jack Spadaro for blowing the whistle on Massey energy due to a massive coal slurry spill in Kentucky. (We've written about that before, here and here.)

The Chao/McConnell Team's philosophy even affects the front line workers who are supposed to be protecting workers' health and safety:

Some MSHA officials talk of being pressured to go soft even when they uncover serious problems.

In April, MSHA inspector Danny Woods told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that colleagues wanted to shut down part of a Massey coal mine in West Virginia in January because spilled coal and dust had accumulated along a belt line, raising the risk of a fire. The request was denied. Woods said inspectors were told "to back off and let them run coal, that there was too much demand for coal."

Days later, on Jan. 19, a fire in that part of the mine killed two miners. MSHA spokeswoman Amy Louviere recently said MSHA is investigating Woods' allegation, so she cannot discuss it.

And like any good marriage, when one partner drops the ball, the other one is there to pick it up and run:

Sometimes Chao picks up the ball and runs with it at the Labor Department when McConnell fails to reach a similar goal in the Senate.

For example, McConnell filed legislation for three years, starting in 1998, to curb the mandatory annual raise in wages of legal immigrant farmworkers under the government's H2A program. By 2001, the wage in Kentucky was $6.60 an hour, which struck some agricultural businesses as too high. (Agribusinesses have given McConnell more than $1 million for his campaigns -- out of $21 million from all donors over 22 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.) But the bills kept failing.

In 2001, Chao ordered an indefinite delay in the release of an annual Labor Department wage report that triggered the farmworker raise. It was an insider move, not noticed by most Americans, but praised by McConnell's Republican congressional colleagues and business groups in letters obtained from Chao's office.

Farmworker Justice sued Chao on behalf of immigrant workers, and in 2002, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ordered her to resume publishing the wage report in a timely fashion.

And it's always a pleasure to see couples working together toward a shared goal:

In 2002, McConnell filed an amendment to a corporate ethics bill that would force unions -- whom McConnell criticizes for supporting Democrats over Republicans -- to file far more detailed public reports on their spending. His amendment drew protest from unions, and four Republicans joined with Democrats to defeat it.

The next year, Chao announced stricter rules on unions' expense disclosures through the Labor Department's mandatory reporting system. Unions now must itemize every expense of $5,000 or more. The unions protested, but her order was upheld.

What a team. Although Chao and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are Bush's only two original cabinet members, Chao is generally thought to be his least effective Cabinet secretary. But it helps to be married to the right people. McConnell is generally thought to be the next Senate Majority Leader when Bill Frist retires in January.

MSHA Nominee Richard Stickler: Chao's Puppet?

As you're probably all aware, President Bush has renominated Richard Stickler to head the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Stickler's nomination had been returned to the White House after a vote on his nomination was cancelled due to widespread dissatisfaction with his lackluster corporate background and his perceived lack of committment to strengthen the agency's regulations and enforcement capabilities.

Mine safety expert Sandy Krumholtz knows Stickler. I thought her opinion on Stickler's nomination might be of interest:

I don't think that Stickler is a bad choice to head MSHA, given his background. The man that I have seen over the years, and at conferences, is a compassionate, seemingly honest man who has tried to do the best job that he can do. Keep in mind that no one is perfect.

I believe that we do need someone with mining experience (not necessarily underground coal experience) to head MSHA. You just can't "get it" until you have been underground day-after-day. On the other hand, there are people who are not miners, like Tony Oppegard, who have been underground and have their miner's certificate, and do understand what happens when the law is not enforced. He would make a good Assistant Secretary, but that will never happen, no matter who is in power.

What upsets me about Stickler is that I do not think he is the man to stand up to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, should there be differences on how the laws are enforced. The "Stickler" I saw in the Senate hearing is not the "Stickler" that I've seen in the past. At the Senate hearing, I saw a man who appeared to be an Elaine Chao mouthpiece (albeit not as nasty or conniving as Chao is), versus a man who was speaking his own convictions. He was obviously torn between what he wanted to say, versus what he was told say.

I think that if Stickler were left to his own devices to do his job, he would be a very good Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health. That said, I do not think Elaine Chao will leave anyone alone to do what they do best, and she would certainly meddle on behalf of the coal industry, making Stickler into the puppet that we saw at the hearing.

Elaine Chao Goes To The Senate

Nathan Newman blogs about Labor Secretary Elaine Chao's appropriations hearing yesterday to discuss the FY 2006 budget. Hot topics were DOL's sweetheart deal with Wal-Mart and major cuts in DOL's International Labor Affairs Bureau.

Bottom line:

Put these facts together and you have an administration that doesn't care about child labor abroad-- thereby helping to feed cheap manufactured goods to companies like Wal-Mart -- or child labor at home, to help Wal-Mart and other low-wage shops staff their stores.