DEPARTMENT OF LABOR

Protecting Workers

• Enforces labor laws. Protects workers’ wages, benefits, and working conditions.

  • Protects the health and safety of the Nation’s 350,000 miners through the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

  • Enforces workplace safety and health standards through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

  • Investigates wage and hour violations in low-wage industries that employ the most vulnerable workers.

  • Ensures union financial integrity and transparency.

Improving Job Training and Trade Adjustment Assistance Programs

• Trains workers more effectively. Increases significantly the number of workers trained—while saving taxpayer dollars—by reforming the Department’s job training grant programs. The reforms:

  • Consolidate several similar programs and cut Federal red tape and unnecessary overhead.

  • Create Career Advancement Accounts—worker-directed accounts that help workers develop their skills and compete for 21st Century jobs.

  • Propose a State match, which will better integrate Federal and State workforce investment resources.

• Helps workers transition. Gives trade-impacted workers the help they need to transition to new jobs with good wages through reforms to the Trade Adjustment Assistance program.

Supporting Returning Servicemembers

• Helps Veterans transition. Provides job-search assistance and related services to separating service members and their spouses through the Veterans’ Employment and Training Service and the Employment and Training Administration.

Safeguarding Workers Pensions

• Improves retirement security. Implements the Pension Protection Act of 2006 reforms.

• Strengthens the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). Restores the solvency of the pension insurance system and avoids a future taxpayer bailout by raising the premiums companies pay to PBGC, which protects the defined-benefit pension plans of 44 million Americans.

Improving the Foreign Labor Certification Process

• Modernizes the temporary foreign labor certification process. Helps employers find the talent they need while protecting the rights of U.S. workers.

Major Savings and Reforms

• Terminates or reduces 10 programs representing more than $1.4 billion, including:

  • Employment Service State Grants, which provide services that duplicate those provided under the Workforce Investment Act programs.

  • Migrant and Seasonal Farmworker program, which duplicates other Federal programs and is insufficiently focused on employment and training.

  • Office of Disability Employment Policy’s grant program, which duplicates other grant-making programs.

• Proposes legislation that would reduce improper payments of unemployment insurance by $3.6 billion and recover almost $200 million in delinquent taxes over 10 years.

Since 2001, the Department of Labor has:

• Provided leadership in the effort to strengthen the pension system to ensure that Americans have a secure retirement.

• Posted the strongest-ever worker protection enforcement results.

• Revised outdated regulations to better protect workers by strengthening overtime protections for more than 6.7 million workers and improving the transparency of labor union finances.

• Modernized the permanent foreign labor certification program and eliminated the chronic backlog, which stood at 363,000 applicants at the beginning of the Administration.

• Published the first-ever regulations explaining the reemployment rights and protections for our National Guard, Reserve, and active duty servicemembers serving in the Global War on Terror and elsewhere around the world.

• Implemented innovative programs to enhance America’s competitiveness through the High Growth Job Training Initiative, Community-Based Job Training Grants, and Workforce Innovation in Regional and Economic Development initiative.