The Labor Dept's Occupational Safety and Health Administration talks a good game, says ProPublica's Robert Lewis, but the industry penalties they publicly announce are rarely collected. Lewis examined OSHA's 25 highest fines and found that 19 were reduced and three were dismissed. And the ...

Following the Enron scandal, the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act was supposed to protect corporate whistleblowers against retaliation from their employers. The Wall Street Journal's Jennifer Levitz reports that is not the case: out of the 1,273 cases brought before the Labor Dept. where whistleblowers allege ...

The Washington Post editorializes this morning against a dubious sounding labor regulation proposed by the Office of Management and Budget. OMB would strip Occupation Safety and Health Administration scientists from their duties of assessing the risk of workplace. Instead, workplaces would ...

A year and a week ago six miners at Crandall Canyon in Utah were trapped nearly a half mile underground when thousands of coal pillars collapsed on them. Subsequent Congressional investigations placed much of the blame on Ohio-based Murray Energy, which failed to notify miners or federal authorities about myriad ...

The New York Times' Julia Preston reports on the Iowa Labor Commission's finding that 57 underage workers were employed at Agriprocessors, a meatpacking plant in tiny Postville, Iowa. The investigation comes after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in May, which detained ...

Congress has called for the Department of Labor to abandon a proposed rule change that could increase the danger of worker exposure to toxic substances, ...

In a burst of activity atypical for the Department of Labor, top officials are rushing to change rules about permissible exposure to toxins in the workplace, according to a report by Carol Leonnig in the Washington Post.  The Post stresses that "political appointees" at Labor are making the changes, locking ...

The Occcupational Safety Health and Administration, which tracks workplace injuries, hasn't been doing its job very well. A new study, reported out by the Wall Street Journal's Kris Maher, shows that employers are reporting to OSHA only about 50-75 percent of the injuries ...

A team of reporters from the Wall Street Journal has investigated the massive explosion at the Imperial Sugar Co. refinery in Georgia and concluded that a lack of local government inspections, attention from the plants' owners, and federal government oversight combined to create the fireball that ignited on Feb. 7, 2008.  The problem, as Paulo Prada, Betsy McKay and Stephanie Chen write, was "all because of dust."

Last fall the Labor Department’s Mine Safety and Health Administration got into deep trouble for its lack of oversight at the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah. Richard Stickler, the Acting Assistant Labor Secretary in Charge of MSHA, has subsequently promoted increased inspections, citations and fines as signs of ...