One of the brightest spots of the Obama Administration has been Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis. Under the Bush Administration, the Department of Labor was used to carry out the agenda of big business. Solis has done a complete 180 despite efforts of Republicans to block some of her key nominees such as Lorelei Boylan as the head of the Wage and Hour Division.

While Solis has made incredible efforts to change the Department of Labor, there is still a lot of institutional inertia that needs to be overcome to effectively stop labor law abuse. Bush has just done so much damage from Department of Labor being an effective organization. Jake Blumgart of the American Prospect has done an excellent expose on the struggles of the Department of Labor to overcome this damage.

Here’s an excerpt on the problems Solis in effectively enforcing labor law:

Last March, as Obama selected the department’s new administrators, the Government Accountability Office released a damning report enumerating Wage and Hour’s inability to properly enforce labor laws. (One GAO investigator reported a case of underage children working with dangerous machinery in a meat-packing plant during school hours; the division failed to investigate.) The enforcement failure resulted in staggering levels of abuse. A September study showed 68 percent of low-wage workers interviewed had experienced a wage-related violation in the previous week.

The complete breakdown of Wage and Hour’s capabilities should not be blamed on career staffers. The problem is the division’s inability to adequately enforce laws covering tens of millions of low-wage workers with the tools on hand: 732 investigators muzzled by conservative Bush appointees, and no strategic plan. Solis took steps to address these issues, hiring 250 new investigators last year, a one-third increase in the work force that brings the division a mere 77 hands shy of its 1980 peak of 1,059.

But experts insist that hiring increases won’t be enough on their own. “It’s not just the ratio of investigators to workplaces; it’s got to be about changing how the Wage and Hour division undertakes its activities,” says David Weil, professor of economics at Boston University School of Management. “A directed approach, instead of just reacting to complaints. Where they choose places to focus their activity because changing [that employer's behavior] is going to have larger impact.”

Under both Bush and Clinton, the Department of Labor largely relied on a complaint-based strategy, reacting to complaints as they came in — a tactic that can disadvantage low-income workers, especially immigrants, who may be hesitant to bring their troubles to a government agency. According to Weil and other experts, Obama’s Wage and Hour Division is considering a turn to strategies designed to impact the labor market beyond the specific target of an investigation. (There are precedents: In 1996, Wage and Hour inaugurated the “No Sweat” campaign, tailored specifically to the garment industry, which targeted whole production networks instead of a few contractors at the bottom of the supply chain.)

Go to the American Prospect to read the whole piece. This is a key fight for organized labor that often gets overlooked for some of the sexiest fights such as health care, jobs, efca, etc.