By Reid Maki, Director of the Child Labor Coalition

The tip call came into the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Wage and Hour Division (WHD) hotline: children were illegally working during school hours in a meatpacking plant in Modesto, CA, and they were operating dangerous equipment like meat grinders and circular saws. The caller was forced to leave a message because the hotline operators did not answer. What happened next? What did the people tasked with protecting child workers from dangerous and illegal activities? Nothing. For four months after the message was left, no action was taken. No one even responded to the call. And the call was not even logged into the Department of Labor case system. It just fell through the cracks. And apparently it wasn’t an isolated case.

The call was fictitious—a test being conducted by the Government Accountability Office, a government agency that frequently evaluates federal programs, and the Modesto case was fabricated to see how Wage and Hour would respond. The GAO presented its findings on Wednesday, March 25 at a hearing before the House Education and Labor Committee that raises a lot of concerns about the effectiveness of the DOL between July 2008 and March 2009 when the research was conducted. Last September, Sally Greenberg of the National Consumers League testified before Education and Labor’s Subcommitee on Workforce Protections, and asked for increased WHD enforcement, including a doubling of the number of WHD investigators.

Of the 10 fictitious calls GAO made to test WHD responses to possible workplace violations (mostly involving lost wages), WHD successfully investigated only one of the cases! Five of the cases were not even recorded into the WHD database of cases. In one case, the WHD investigator lied about a company’s profitability and claimed he was unable to investigate the case. In two of the cases, WHD recorded the cases as successfully resolved because the worker had been paid lost wages when no money had been actually paid. In one case, a caller left seven messages asking for help and none were returned. Some calls went straight to messages saying the office was closed when it was supposed to be open. In several cases, WHD investigators attempted to dissuade complaint filers by telling them that they faced an 8-10 month backlog or that they may be fired by their employer for filing a complaint.

Among the problems GAO found in the investigation:

• The pre-recorded message at one WHD regional office hotline had a 23-second gap of silence before it went to voicemail. Customers with complaints thought they were disconnected and often hung up.
• In WHD’s southeast division, which recorded 57 percent of the conciliations during fiscal year 2007, there was a policy of not recording unsuccessful conciliations in the WHD Database.
• Staff in one field office said that they were required to drop a case if there were three unanswered phone calls made to an employer under investigation.
• In 150 test calls, more than half went directly to voicemail with no phone calls ever returned.

GAO investigators also analyzed WHD records in 115 conciliated cases and 115 non-conciliated cases between October 1, 2006 and September 31, 2007 and found numerous flaws. Gregory Kutz, managing director of forensic audits and special investigations, told committee members that the system did not work for 19 percent of the complainants in the non-conciliated cases they looked at. In other words, one in five people who deserved help didn’t get it.

“This investigation clearly shows that the Department of Labor has left thousands of actual victims of wage theft who sought federal government assistance with nowhere to turn,” concluded investigators in their written report.

The one bright spot: GAO found that cases that were correctly entered into the system and acted upon were often resolved satisfactorily—even among nonconciliated cases, they found that 81.2 percent had been investigated and resolved appropriately.

The GAO felt that most WHD investigators were dedicated to their work and they did help recover an estimated $200 million in back wages. The GAO suggests that training and better tools—computers, databases, and software—might help eliminate some of the case failures. More investigators might help they said. The intake system certainly needs to be overhauled and all valid complaints must be entered into the WHD’s database, they maintained. They also suggested looking at expanding the current two-year stature of limitations on wage theft.

We’d like to point out that these alleged abuses occurred during the last administration and with a new WHD under Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, who has a reputation as a friend of workers, we are hopeful that the system will be corrected. She has already called for hiring 250 new investigators. The GAO report suggests however that much work needs to be done.

by Mimi Johnson, NCL Health Policy Associate

The Obama Administration will announce its pick for the National Coordinator for health information technology later today. David Blumenthal, a professor at Harvard Medical School and director of the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital will oversee the nearly $20 billion dollars from the economic stimulus package to build health IT. Dr. Blumenthal worked for Senator Ted Kennedy’s Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research in the 1970s, and we are optimistic that his knowledge of and history in health policy will help move this country towards significant health reform.

The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC), within the Department of Health and Human Services, will work to use the stimulus money to provide incentives and reimbursements for the use of “hardware, software, integrated technologies or related licenses, intellectual property, upgrades, or packaged solutions sold as services that are designed for or support the use by health care entities or patients for the electronic creation, maintenance, access, or exchange of health information.” According to the ARRA, “the National Coordinator may provide financial assistance to consumer advocacy groups and not-for- profit entities,” which should provide for a stronger consumer voice as the various health IT provisions are implemented. The ONC is establishing an HIT Policy Committee , on which a handful of consumer advocates will serve.

Still, billions of dollars are not the silver bullet to improving health care. In a report last week, the difficulties of adopting health IT were discussed. Doctors struggle to make the transition – especially those in small practices. The National Consumers League will continue to work to ensure that the expansion of health IT will work to help improve quality and access for patients, as well as reduce disparities.

By Rubkwan Tharmmapornphilas, Ph.D., Child Labor Coalition Intern

Rubkwan is a child labor public policy intern at the National Consumers League. She is a Ph.D. graduate from Columbia University and a Thai Government Scholarship recipient. Her doctoral thesis was on the determinants of child labor in Thailand, where she will return to work as a government officer in the Ministry of Education once her internship is completed.

Do you know someone who is invisible? No, I don’t mean Kevin Bacon in “Hollow Man” or Jessica Alba in “Fantastic Four.” I mean a person who could easily disappear one day and no one would notice. If not, then let me introduce 13-year-old “Emmanuel,” one of the world’s 140 million street kids—“throw away” children who are left to fend for themselves in city slums around the globe.

In the compelling documentary film “Rescuing Emmanuel” (released in 2008), Len and Georgia Morris followed the life of street kids in Kenya, Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia and the United States. These children have no birth certificate, ID card, money, home, or family. They live on the margins, neglected and ignored by communities, societies, and government. Emmanuel and his friends struggle to survive day by day, working, begging, stealing, and selling their bodies. Hunger, violence, abuse, drugs, crime, HIV, and other diseases are common in their daily lives.

The street children are in desperate need of a better life, and they seize any tiny bit of opportunity. In the case of Emmanuel, he stole Glen and Georgia’s attention by shouting in broken English, “I want to go to school right now!”

Touched by Emmanuel and his demand, the Morrises decide they must act and help him. They place him in Huruma Children’s Home, founded by Mama Zipporah and home to 150 abandoned and abused kids.

Although it might seem hopeless to help just one kid while millions of others are still out there on streets, the Morris’s action reminds me of Loren Eiseley’s “The Star Thrower”, the story about a person walking on the beach who encounters stranded starfish and decides to save some of them by throwing them back in the sea. When asked why he is saving a handful of starfish when thousands more will go unsaved—whether, in fact, his actions are really making a difference, the Good Samaritan throws one more starfish into the sea and says, “ I made a difference to that one.”

“Rescuing Emmanuel” shows us just how vulnerable children are in many parts of the world. It’s a haunting story but one that needs to be witnessed.

Ordering information for “Rescuing Emmanuel” may be found at https://store.galenfilms.com. Galen Films also produced “Stolen Childhoods” (2003), a wonderful feature- length examination of child labor around the world.

The National Consumers League (NCL) today issued the following statement regarding the introduction in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).  This statement is attributable to Sally Greenberg, Executive Director of the National Consumers League:

“We applaud the introduction of the Employee Free Choice Act in Congress.  Throughout its 109 year history, the League has been dedicated to promoting social and economic justice for consumers and workers.  NCL strongly believes that consumer empowerment is closely aligned with the rights of workers to unionize,” said Greenberg.  “In a time of economic turmoil with consumers faced with massive debt, high unemployment, and too many instances of corporate greed, it is more important than ever for workers and consumers to band together to help rebuild the middle class.”

In a December 2008 letter to Congress, NCL joined with six other consumer groups in a statement of support for EFCA. In that letter, the groups laid out three major consumer benefits of EFCA, including:

1. Giving workers a fair and direct path to form unions through majority sign-up. EFCA would require an employer to recognize its employees’ union when a majority has signed union authorization cards. Under current law, management can refuse to recognize a union even when 100 percent of employees have signed authorization cards. After a majority of workers have signed cards, an employer can still call for a separate election. Under the current system, then, the employer gets to decide whether a separate election is necessary.
2. Helping employees secure a contract with their employer in a reasonable period of time. Under current law, anti-union employers often drag workers through lengthy negotiations by delaying bargaining sessions, withholding relevant information, and putting forth bogus proposals. Even though these tactics are illegal, there are no effective deterrents to prevent “surface bargaining.” The Employee Free Choice Act will strengthen workers’ ability to achieve a first contract within a reasonable period of time.
3. Toughening penalties against employers who violate their workers’ rights. Too many unscrupulous employers get away with breaking labor laws because the current penalties are too weak. The Employee Free Choice Act would increase penalties against employers who illegally fire or retaliate against pro-union workers.

To read more about NCL’s support for EFCA, click here.

By Mimi Johnson, NCL Health Policy Associate

… Or all your money trying to pay for it! Thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last month, COBRA premiums are shrinking. This brings needed support to the many thousands of people who have lost their jobs – and their health insurance. Traditionally, COBRA coverage requires the former employee to pay 100 percent of the premium plus an additional 2 percent for “administrative costs”, but under the ARRA, those eligible will only have to pay 35 percent of the premiums. To see if you qualify, visit the Department of Labor’s site.

While the League envisions a day when all Americans have access to affordable coverage regardless of employment status, we applaud policy makers for taking a step to prevent even more citizens from losing their coverage.