U.S. House Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions Chairman Phil Roe (R-TN) issued the following statement after the Department of Labor released employment data for November: Job creation remains slow as economic uncertainty continues to weigh down the nation’s workforce. The difficult reality reflected today’s jobs report will worsen if we plunge over the fiscal cliff. It’s time ... Read more »
House Republicans have filed an amicus brief in support of legal efforts to overturn the National Labor Relation Board’s (NLRB) poster regulation. Issued by the board in August 2011, the controversial regulation requires virtually every private employer to post in the workplace a biased and vague notice of employees’ labor rights. In response to the board’s action, organizations representing worke... Read more »
One hallmark of the Obama Presidency is its habit of running roughshod over Congressional prerogatives. A test of that arrogation of power comes Wednesday when the Administration has to defend its imperial treatment of recess appointments in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. We have long supported such appointments as long as they are made when Congress is genuinely in recess. Yet in January Mr.... Read more »
Late last week, the Obama administration’s Department on Health and Human Services (HHS) quietly informed a Wisconsin newspaper that it would not announce the results of the Head Start re-competition process this year. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Grants were expected to be awarded in November or December, but Kenneth Wolfe, a spokesman for the Administration for Children and Famil... Read more »
Dear Chairman Pearce and Acting General Counsel Solomon: On November 19, in response to my inquiry, the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) Office of Inspector General (IG) issued a memorandum, attached, stating that “certain statements in e-mail messages from personnel in the Division of Advice and Region 19 infringed upon the statutory prohibitions regarding ex parte communications to Board... Read more »
U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline (R-MN) issued the following statement today after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released two reports examining the U.S. Department of Labor’s proposed changes to the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act (FECA): The GAO reports offer important insight into the consequences of the Labor Department’s proposed FECA ref... Read more »
Each year, the federal government spends more than seven billion dollars on Head Start, a program designed to help low-income children prepare for success in school and in life. In an effort to ensure the program is working for families and taxpayers, congressional leaders in the House and Senate have attempted for months to obtain information on Head Start's effectiveness and implementation. How... Read more »
The House of Representatives today approved the Streamlining Claims Processing for Federal Contractor Employees Act (H.R. 6371), legislation that moves responsibility for wage claims adjustments for workers employed by federal contractors from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to the Department of Labor. Sponsored by Representative Tim Walberg (R-MI), chairman of the Subcommittee on Workf... Read more »
The bill before us will take a small yet important step toward greater efficiency in federal construction contracting. For more than eighty years, federal contractors have been required to pay workers the ‘locally prevailing wage.’ Additionally, since 1961 those same workers have been entitled to one and a half times their basic rate of pay for every hour worked that exceeds 40 hours per week. Whi... Read more »
U.S. House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN), Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Representative Judy Biggert (R-IL), Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Ranking Member Mike Enzi (R-WY), Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) today sent a letter... Read more »
