Congratulations Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis!
Lost in yesterday’s excitement was the fact that Hilda Solis was confirmed (finally) to be Secretary of Labor by an 80-17 margin. In case you don’t know much about her, see this:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWuQzJk6ERs[/youtube]
This is really good news.
w00t! I hope she can influence Geithner and Summers in a good way. So far, those two are major disappointments.
It will be great to actually have a Pro-Labor Secretary at DOL for a change! . Let me add my hope that Ms. Solis looks within the DOL, specifically the Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs, as a place where major clean-up needs to take place. I was employed there 8 years – 4 under the Bush Administration with Secretary Elaine Chao, and witnessed this program for injured Federal Employees go from bad to worse. The guidelines of being impartial and non-adversarial went out the window, as more quotas and numeric “standards” were put in place, creating conflicts of interest. An Examiner’s evaluations, chance for promotion, and piece of the bonus pie depended on how well s/he played the “numbers game”. So much energy was focused on reducing the rolls, and for Examiners already overburdened with huge caseloads, the pressure was great to take shortcuts. I saw this happen often, and tried my best to not work that way, but ran into conflicts with Management when I spoke out against adversarial adjudication practices. This was quite a stressful situation, when my own Supervisor would parrot “Deny now, they have their appeal rights.” I believe Ms. Solis needs to clean up OWCP, from DC, down to the District and Regional levels, including all Supervisors who enforced and/or encouraged adversarial adjudication procedures. Our Federal Employees deserve better. I realize the Secretary wil have her hands full with many issues, but truly hope genuine reform finally comes to OWCP.