Modern News

-By Elaine L. Chao, The Wall Street Journal

When President-elect Barack Obama initially announced his economic team, one important player was conspicuously absent: his pick for secretary of labor.

But America’s work force is central to our economic recovery in the near term and to our sustained prosperity in the long term. Seventy percent of our economy is consumer driven. And most of that consumption depends on workers’ paychecks.

The Labor Department has tremendous resources to protect American workers and help them be more competitive in the world-wide economy. The department also has the power to harm American worker competitiveness through misguided regulations and punitive policies that would cause jobs to go overseas or disappear entirely.

Over the past eight years, the Labor Department has worked hard to ensure that labor regulations protect workers, without needlessly making it harder to create and keep jobs in America.

And our record speaks for itself. Today we have record-low workplace injury, illness and fatality rates. The department set new records in the number of workers recovering back wages owed to them through effectively targeted enforcement and our compliance assistance program. To meet the needs of workers in our knowledge-based economy we launched new programs to bring employers, workers, unions and educators together for new training and new career opportunities. The department also secured record monetary recoveries for workers’ pension plans…

Read the rest at Wall Street Journal.