Monday, April 19, 2010

On The Left Podcast Episode 9



Once again coming to you from the great state of Minnesota, welcome to On The Left Podcast Episode 9
This week Mike brings you Headlines and Matthew Talks about the Mining disaster and its connection to Mitch McConnell and the Bush Administrations Department of Labor.
This week I would like to start with a follow up on last week’s subject. On April 15th the Senate finally passed H.R.4851 Continuing Extension Act. This was the bill the house passed back in February.
The vote on H.R.4851 was 59 for and 38 against, that means all the dems voted for it right, well you would be wrong on that count. 3 repugs voted for the bill, Snowe,Collins of Maine and Vionovich of (OH)
But not voting were Bayh (IN), Nelson (FL), and Warner (VA). I would like to know why they did not vote on this bill. Now there had to be an amendment to the bill, because it took so long to pass it would have only extended the benefits until May 5th so it was amended so that it will expire on June 5th, so it has to go back to the House and be voted on again. Now it is good they did this new extension but they really need to do a long term fix for this problem, unemployment is not going down any time soon and we can’t have one month extensions, every month.
He is the link to the article that Cenk talks about in the Young Turk Clips
http://www.kentucky.com/2006/10/20/11062/two-for-the-money.html

One of the things that I have not heard about much is the connection between the Repugs, the Bush administration, The Coal industry and the department of Labor.

From 2001 until 2009 the Department of Labor was headed by Elaine Chao. Who is Elaine Chao, well during her tenure at the department of Labor she not a friend of Labor but a big supporter of Business.

Chao “updated” the white collar overtime rules, so that companies did not have to pay you for overtime if you were a “supervisor” of any kind, she had the rules for union financial disclosure rewritten to make it harder for Unions to comply with the regulations costing them money. After analyzing 70,000 closed case files from 2005 to 2007 the GAO reported that the Department of Labor Wage and Hour division inadequately investigated complaints from low-wage and minimum wage workers alleging that employers failed to pay the federal minimum wage, required overtime ,and failed to issue a last paycheck after letting an employ go. Remember when Wal-Mart was locking employees in and not letting leave and not giving them breaks, not paying over time, and just stealing hours off their paychecks.

That was Chao’s job, she was suppose to be looking after the workers but she was helping the companies, steal from their employees

1 comment:

  1. Elaine & Mitch... perfect together. What a pair of (fill in the blank here) :(

    ReplyDelete