By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

WASHINGTON (PAI)--Democratic President Barack Obama’s proposed Labor Department budget for fiscal 2011, which starts Oct. 1, leaves spending flat for “discretionary programs,” but shifts the emphasis more towards enforcement, the budget document shows.

Obama proposed spending $14 billion, down $300 million from this year, for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, mine safety and health, wage and hour enforcement and other such programs. That’s separate from unemployment benefits and other mandatory programs, which will cost approximately $100 billion-plus.

But OSHA and Wage and Hour in particular would see increases, with money and people shifted away from anti-worker GOP President George W. Bush’s OSHA “compliance assistance” for businesses -- a program that federal auditors concluded last year doesn’t work.

“Today's budget affirms this administration's strong commitment to vigorous enforcement. OSHA received over 100 inspectors in our 2010 budget, as well as an additional 25 requested in 2011. We are also moving 35 inspectors from compliance assistance activities to enforcement,” Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said.

“In addition, OSHA is showing how we can leverage our resources more effectively. With the largest fine in OSHA’s history and more egregious cases, we are sending a strong message throughout industry that we will not tolerate endangerment of workers. We will continue those efforts with a number of new and innovative enforcement initiatives in the coming year,” Solis added, without details.

OSHA will concentrate “on high-risk workplaces like construction and meatpacking,” Solis stated. And OSHA isn’t the only place where DOL would become more of “the new sheriff in town,” to use her frequent line. Solis said there will be more inspectors going after firms that misclassify their workers as “independent contractors.”

The misclassification, which is rife in construction and trucking, leaves the workers without labor law coverage or workers’ comp and liable for paying the employer and employee share of Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes -- a big bite out of workers’ paychecks. The Teamsters and the Laborers have led the fight against the “independent contractor” dodge.

The Democratic majority in Congress is generally sympathetic to the increased enforcement emphasis, but the Republicans object to making OSHA less cooperative and more confrontational with business. Other specifics of DOL’s budget include:

* $25 million and 100 more enforcement personnel for DOL and the Treasury Department “to identify and penalize employers who improperly misclassify employees as independent contractors. As part of this, the budget funds competitive grants to boost states’ incentives and capacity to address this problem.”

“The goal is to improve capacity to identify misclassification through increased information sharing and targeted audits in high-risk industry sectors,” explained Jane Oates, assistant labor secretary for employment and training. “These efforts will prevent misclassification, increase statutory enforcement where appropriate, and enable collection of payroll taxes previously lost due to misclassification, such as in the unemployment insurance program.” Inspectors will concentrate on companies that pay misclassified workers less than the minimum wage, or refuse to pay them overtime.

* “$1.7 billion -- a $67 million increase -- for worker protection agencies to make sure they have the resources to meet their responsibilities under the more than 180 laws they enforce,” a department fact sheet says. That includes $573 million for OSHA, up $14 million from this year, to add 60 enforcement staff and conduct 9% more inspections. That in turn will raise the number of federal job site inspections to more than 42,000, up from 38,000, DOL’s fact sheet adds.

In a blog, Obama budget director Peter Orszag added more details about jobs programs government-wide, including:

* $100 billion, spread government-wide, for the new “jobs bill” Congress is considering. That measure would have a large construction section, the budget says. The House has approved a $154 billion bill. Key senators favor an $80.2 billion one.

* The 3-year freeze on overall spending on domestic non-defense-and-security discretionary programs, but with shifts within that. The Obama administration wants to trim or kill 126 programs, saving $23 billion next year and $250 billion over a decade.

* Adding $2.9 billion or 6.2% to federal aid to schools under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act programs “while reforming it to be more effective, and provide more money for Pell grants and Race to the Top,” Orszag said.

* “To build a more modern infrastructure, the budget establishes a new $4 billion National Infrastructure Innovation & Finance Fund to focus on infrastructure investments of national and regional significance. To help put the nation at the top of the pack” in “the new clean energy economy, the budget includes more than $6 billion in funding for clean energy technologies while also eliminating existing fossil fuel subsidies,” he said.
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