Taking “Labor” Out Of The Department of Labor
One of the suggestions contained in the Labor transition report submitted to Governor Christie is to delete the word “Labor” from the Department of Labor and Workforce Development because the “current name suggests a bias toward organized labor, and a change in the name will help the department more closely align with all stakeholders.”
The Governor wants to focus on job development and presumably the stakeholders to which the report is referring are employers. But simply issuing an executive order changing the name of the department will not make it more employer-friendly or customer driven, if that’s the goal.
Whatever its name, the department was not legally created as a booster of trade and commerce. Among other things, it was authorized to administer and enforce Federal and State wage, hour, health and safety laws. And to no one’s surprise, these laws are complex and conflicting and near incomprehensible to a many employers.
So to be truly employer-friendly, the new commissioner has two choices - streamline existing regulations so that they work better and do not conflict with Federal counterparts, or engage in lax enforcement.
Lax enforcement is a default option until something really bad happens, like worker injuries that could have been prevented or docked paychecks that should never have occurred. So while banishing the word “labor” is good symbolism, the real work is engaging in a total review of all existing regulations and to streamline them through executive order when possible or to propose new ones when necessary.
