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| October 27, 2008 DOL Home > Newsroom > Speeches & Remarks |  |
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U.S. Secretary Elaine L. Chao As Prepared DOL Compliance Assistance Summit Thank you, Barbara [Bingham, Director of Compliance Assistance, U.S. Department of Labor]. You and your team have done a great job bringing together all these agencies and planning a full day of compliance assistance training. And I want to thank you for the tremendous job you are doing as Director of our Department’s new Office of Compliance Assistance as well. Welcome to this Summit! I also want to thank all of you for attending, especially those of you came from the regions to attend this meeting. The fact that we are doing this event demonstrates the high priority we place on building a compliance assistance culture at the Department of Labor. We start from the fundamental proposition that our mission is to protect workers. At the end of the day, that is always our most basic responsibility. The reason we care about compliance assistance is that it is a powerful additional tool to help us protect workers. No one should imagine that compliance assistance is a substitute for strong enforcement—it is a complement to enforcement. As many of you know, there simply aren’t enough resources in the government to inspect every workplace in America. So we must develop other approaches to maximize compliance with our labor and employment laws. There is a time and place for contentious contact with the regulated community. Bad actors need to be investigated and appropriately penalized. But most businesses, nonprofit organizations, and unions are run by people who care about their workers and want to protect them. They want to follow the law and we ought to help them in every way we can. By reaching out and educating employers and employees about the law, we can reduce injury, illness and wage hour problems by preventing them from happening in the first place. That’s what compliance assistance is all about. Already, the word about compliance assistance is spreading—thanks in part to your efforts. Employers and employees alike are reaching out to us. Our compliance assistance elaws web site is getting hundreds of hits a day. Our Employment Law Guide—now available in Spanish—is being distributed and read by thousands of small businesses. And our toll free national call center is busy referring dozens of callers an hour to the appropriate agency and resources. These are milestone achievements. And there are many other success stories, as well. A recent article from Aviation Now discussed how a major airline partnered with OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Program to create a new culture of health and safety that dramatically reduced injuries and time lost-on-the-job. That’s the kind of success story we want to encourage. If compliance assistance is to reach its full potential, we must first provide more compliance assistance tools to employers—like the FirstStep Employment Law Advisor and OSHA’s new computer workstation eTool. We have also heard from many of you that you want compliance assistance training to help you understand and implement what this program. We also want to seek your counsel, experience and assistance because you are the drivers, the front line in protecting workers through helping employers understand what their responsibilities are under the law. Today is, hopefully, a major step in that direction. We hope you will find the update on new compliance assistance initiatives informative and useful. You’ll hear about the Department’s confidentiality protocol, which is so crucial to gaining callers’ and employers’ trust and cooperation. And hopefully, you will gain some new insights on the best ways to measure the effectiveness of your tools and strategies and how to create a compliance assistance communications plan. Most importantly, we hope this conference will provide a showcase of the best practices in compliance assistance. Here are just a few examples:
These are just a few of the compliance assistance tools and strategies some of you and your colleagues have put in place to help the regulated community understand and comply with our thicket of rules, regulations, and laws. These rules, regulations, and laws may seem familiar to us as many of you have spent years working with their framework. But, remember when you first entered the Department, how much you had to learn, and how long it took for you to understand these regulations and laws. All of our agencies have made a great start creating compliance assistance tools. Yet, much remains to be done. I hope you can increase the number of business and professional compliance assistance partnerships. I also hope you can think of creative ways to apply more cutting edge technology to our training and outreach programs. And I hope we can create new incentives for employers to seek compliance assistance. That’s why it is so important that you actively take part in today’s sessions and panels. And, again, I want to thank you for coming. You are the front lines of our compliance assistance initiative. It is through you and your efforts that we will change the culture of the Labor Department to encompass a pro-active strategy that better protects workers. The dramatic decline in occupational fatalities, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics just last week, is very encouraging. The fact that job-related deaths have dropped to the lowest level ever recorded since the survey began in 1992 is a tribute to your professionalism, your commitment and hard work. Together, I know we can accomplish even more for America’s workers by nurturing a climate of respect, understanding and compliance with the nation’s labor laws. Thank you for everything you are doing and for being here today. Have a great conference. # # # _________________________________________________________________ |
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