SEARCH
Labor Department Lies |
The Bush administration hasn’t even packed its bags, and already we hear the first of what undoubtedly will be an ongoing string of revelations about how U.S. workers and taxpayers have been deceived over the past eight years by the Bush Labor Department.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released yesterday finds the Labor Department gave Congress false numbers on cost savings it supposedly was incurring by hiring outside contractors.
As TobyWollin at Firedoglake writes:
President George W. Bush’s Labor Department misled Congress in an effort to prove outsourcing jobs to private companies was more efficient than assigning the jobs to government employees, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday.
This from today’s Washington Post:
“DOL’s savings reports are not reliable: A sample of three reports contained inaccuracies, and others used projections when actual numbers were available, which sometimes resulted in overstated savings,” the GAO report said. “Because of these and other weaknesses, DOL is hindered in its ability to determine if services are being provided more efficiently as a result of competitive sourcing.”
Kudos to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), chairmen of the Senate and House appropriations subcommittees with jurisdiction over the Labor Department, who asked for the report. According to the Post, Harkin and Obey urged Congress not to fund the competition program until the GAO provided the answers. Here’s what they had to say in a statement yesterday:
“Under the direction of this White House, the Department of Labor has increasingly attempted to move work performed by Federal employees to private contractors” and, in so doing, hurt workers’ morale and “grossly overstated savings,” they wrote. “We look forward to working with the Obama Administration to strengthen the Department of Labor as it undertakes the critical missions of making sure our workplaces are safe; protecting employee pensions, health benefits and rights; and providing workers with the skills they need to compete successfully in the 21st century economy.
So do we.
5 Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Elaine Chao was a horrible pick for Sec. of Labor, and look at her track record. Very anti-worker, pro-privatization. Thank God her job ends in Jan. Good riddance madam Chao!
To paraphrase an important saying “If you have no knowledge of the past, you will never understand the present.”
If you think Bush appointees were “anti-worker”, just take a look at what Obama is doing! And to think the AFL-CIO put such effort and money in support of the Democrats and Obama. What a waste!
Here is yet another article link from WSWS revealing the truth to all seeking an understanding of WHY we are all being destroyed first by Bush and now Obama.
Who is Paul Volcker? Obama appoints a longtime enemy of the working class
By Patrick Martin
29 November 2008
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/nov2008/volc-n29.shtml
“…But it is the selection of Volcker that is the sharpest warning to the working class. No other individual in modern US history is so closely identified with the deliberate creation of mass unemployment to drive down wages and smash the organized resistance of the working class to the demands of corporate America. He put into motion policies that led to the destruction of large sections of industry and the explosive growth of financial speculation in the US economy.”
I do not particularly like the decision of Volcker either. However, by considering that he has an inside perspective of the Federal Reserve Board by being a former chairman, and therefore having intimate knowledge of what goes on there, he may very well be an asset. How better to make necessary changes within an organization than to have someone with first hand knowledge of that organization. Volcker was picked to help “stabilize the financial markets”. It certainly makes sense to employ the advice of someone with the knowledge of what went wrong in the first place. This is just a guess, but I was encouraged by Obama’s speech concerning his economic appointments and that he wants to get input from the best and the brightest minds out there. He made it very clear that the decisions he makes will be his own.
The leson learned for 30 years of De-Regulation and Privatization is that Corporate America should not be in the business of Government. No more private paramilitary, private no-bid-contractors doing military or other government work. No more government funding of Non-Union charter or Private Schools, No more, Outsourcing of Government contracts to foreign companies.
Job 1 for President Obama’s appointee to head the Department of Labor is to return all Government Jobs that were eliminated through privatization.
No Government jobs should be privatized.Period…
Tom Harkin should be appointed Secretary of Labor, he is a long time friend of the working man. We need the Wagner Act revamped without amendments and brought up to this century, amongst many other things. If the AFL-CIO truly has Obama’s ear then they should recommend this, NOW.