The Wall Street Journal's Melanie Trottman and Alexandra Berzon report that the Labor Dept. will step up its federal-state workplace safety programs: The action follows calls from unions and senior congressional Democrats -- including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and U.S. Rep. George Miller of California -- for a tough response to 12 construction deaths that occurred on the Las Vegas Strip between December 2006 and June 2008 amid a building boom.

The New York Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Steve Greenhouse had a Labor Day piece on the relationship between Barack Obama and labor unions. Labor is of course happy to have a Democratic president in the White House -- someone they spent $450 million on (that's from labor political ...

Barack Obama has nominated David Michaels, a public health professor at George Washington and assistant secretary Energy Dept. in the Clinton administration Energy Dept., to head the Labor Dept's Occupational Health and Safety Administration. According to Ames Alexander of the Charlotte ...

Multiple press accounts and a Labor Dept. audit yesterday paint a portrait of a derelict Occupational Safety and Health Administration over the last several years. Now, R. Jeffrey ...

The beat goes on. R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post reports on a Labor Dept. audit that finds a Bush administration workplace safety program failed to monitor especially hazardous workplaces. Bush's Occupational Safety and Health Administration unveiled the Enhanced Enforcement ...

Melanie Trottman reports in today's Wall Street Journal that Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration will set strict standards to limit worker's exposures to the chemical diacetyl. Diacetyl is a chemical found in microwave popcorn and has caused lung problems for food processsors. It has been linked to three ...

A New York Times editorial today distills the conventional left-center wisdom on whether Rep. Hilda Solis, a California Democrat, is the right choice to lead Barack Obama's Labor Dept. On the one hand, Solis champions workplace rights and is a favorite of labor unions, a ...

It's December 28, 2008.  In less than a month the Bush Administration will be history.  But its legacy will live on at federal agencies like the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.  R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post delivers a smorgasbord of Bush-era misdeeds at OSHA:  political appointees pressuring ...

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 ...