In a meeting Monday evening at a local Miami church with a mixed crowd of African-American, Latino, Haitian-American and white workers and the next day in an AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting at an Electrical Workers union hall, Soils made clear her agency’s plans are “to treat our workers with dignity and respect.”
Solis did not forget larger issues. Though she did not commit, in a subsequent press conference, on campaigning for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act – labor’s No. 1 legislative priority – her past support for it, as well as Obama’s, is clear.
But “we expect her to have an advocacy” role for the legislation, “and an enforcement role,” at the department, said AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff, who was inside the closed-door meeting.
Solis spent her time in Miami talking to the union leaders on the first day of their meeting here, but also listening to the workers – a crowd that reflected the city’s diverse makeup, but also a crowd where five workers shared their tales of the impact of the Bush crash upon their lives and their families. She followed the council meeting with a walking tour of IBEW Local 349’s training center next door to the union hall.
That center trains apprentices in a five-year intensive curriculum on “repairing everything from telephones to infra-red technology,” training director John McHugh said. Its 272 apprentices alternate between their classroom and practical work and the on-the-job apprenticeships that lead them to journeyperson’s certificates.
“We do practical training in electric work – for example motor control centers to make sure to make sure they’re wired correctly so they can hook it (the motor) up without blowing it up,” added Local 349 board member and teacher Ki Dauphin.
It’s that type of job training that Solis said in a short press conference that she wants to foster as Labor Secretary, because “it produces collaborative ways to offer good-paying jobs in areas that are somewhat depressed” like the two Miami neighborhoods the IBEW job training center serves.
“It’s a demonstration of our commitment to help inspire people who may have been laid off or are in dead-end jobs,” she added. “These are jobs at the center with an average starting salary of $28 an hour.”
But such jobs programs were given short shrift by the Bush administration, Solis said, pledging a reversal. ”I hope to see these programs expand with stimulus funding,” she added of the DOL section of the $787 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act Obama just pushed through Congress. “These (job training) programs work, but they haven’t been as functional as they should have been.”
And Solis also took a jab at the united House GOP opposition to the stimulus law, saying legislators need to come to centers like that in Miami to see job training programs that work. Miami’s two U.S. representatives are Republicans.
Enforcement is Solis’ other key priority for workers. “We want to protect workers’ rights and protect them in workplaces,” she told TV cameras before the walking tour.
“The first priority is jobs and job creation,” she said later. “That goes hand-in-hand with enforcement. There’ll be a lot of federal contracting and we’ll be looking at how standards should be set” in wages, benefits and working conditions for federal contractors to meet, “and getting the best data” for the tasks, Solis said.
In that area, Obama has partially sped ahead of his own Labor Secretary, with a January executive order favoring project labor agreements on federal construction contracts and another order banning contractors’ use of federal dollars for or against union organizing drives at their worksites.
Mark Gruenberg writes for Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.
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In a meeting Monday evening at a local Miami church with a mixed crowd of African-American, Latino, Haitian-American and white workers and the next day in an AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting at an Electrical Workers union hall, Soils made clear her agency’s plans are “to treat our workers with dignity and respect.”
Solis did not forget larger issues. Though she did not commit, in a subsequent press conference, on campaigning for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act – labor’s No. 1 legislative priority – her past support for it, as well as Obama’s, is clear.
But “we expect her to have an advocacy” role for the legislation, “and an enforcement role,” at the department, said AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff, who was inside the closed-door meeting.
Solis spent her time in Miami talking to the union leaders on the first day of their meeting here, but also listening to the workers – a crowd that reflected the city’s diverse makeup, but also a crowd where five workers shared their tales of the impact of the Bush crash upon their lives and their families. She followed the council meeting with a walking tour of IBEW Local 349’s training center next door to the union hall.
That center trains apprentices in a five-year intensive curriculum on “repairing everything from telephones to infra-red technology,” training director John McHugh said. Its 272 apprentices alternate between their classroom and practical work and the on-the-job apprenticeships that lead them to journeyperson’s certificates.
“We do practical training in electric work – for example motor control centers to make sure to make sure they’re wired correctly so they can hook it (the motor) up without blowing it up,” added Local 349 board member and teacher Ki Dauphin.
It’s that type of job training that Solis said in a short press conference that she wants to foster as Labor Secretary, because “it produces collaborative ways to offer good-paying jobs in areas that are somewhat depressed” like the two Miami neighborhoods the IBEW job training center serves.
“It’s a demonstration of our commitment to help inspire people who may have been laid off or are in dead-end jobs,” she added. “These are jobs at the center with an average starting salary of $28 an hour.”
But such jobs programs were given short shrift by the Bush administration, Solis said, pledging a reversal. ”I hope to see these programs expand with stimulus funding,” she added of the DOL section of the $787 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act Obama just pushed through Congress. “These (job training) programs work, but they haven’t been as functional as they should have been.”
And Solis also took a jab at the united House GOP opposition to the stimulus law, saying legislators need to come to centers like that in Miami to see job training programs that work. Miami’s two U.S. representatives are Republicans.
Enforcement is Solis’ other key priority for workers. “We want to protect workers’ rights and protect them in workplaces,” she told TV cameras before the walking tour.
“The first priority is jobs and job creation,” she said later. “That goes hand-in-hand with enforcement. There’ll be a lot of federal contracting and we’ll be looking at how standards should be set” in wages, benefits and working conditions for federal contractors to meet, “and getting the best data” for the tasks, Solis said.
In that area, Obama has partially sped ahead of his own Labor Secretary, with a January executive order favoring project labor agreements on federal construction contracts and another order banning contractors’ use of federal dollars for or against union organizing drives at their worksites.
Mark Gruenberg writes for Press Associates, Inc., news service. Used by permission.