History
The U.S. Congress first established a Bureau of Labor in 1888 under the Department of the Interior. Later, the Bureau of Labor became an independent Department of Labor but lacked executive rank. It became a bureau again within the Department of Commerce and Labor, which was established February 15, 1903. President William Howard Taft signed the March 4, 1913 (the last day of his presidency), bill establishing the Department of Labor as a Cabinet-level Department.
President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to consider the idea of reuniting Commerce and Labor. He argued that the two departments had similar goals and that they would have more efficient channels of communication in a single department. However, Congress never acted on it.
In the 1970s, following the civil rights movement, the Labor Department under Secretary George P. Shultz was instrumental in promoting racial diversity in unions.
During the John F. Kennedy Administration, planning was undertaken to consolidate most of the department's offices, then scattered around more than 20 locations. Construction on the "New Labor Building" began in the mid‑1960s and finished in 1975. It was named in honor of Perkins in 1980.
During 2010 a local of the American Federation of Government Employees stated their unhappiness that a longstanding flextime program reduced under the George W. Bush administration had not been restored under the Obama administration. Department officials said the program was modern and fair and that it was part of ongoing contract negotiations with the local. In August 2010, the Partnership for Public Service ranked the Department of Labor 23rd out of 31 large agencies in its annual "Best Places to Work in the Federal Government" list. In December 2010, Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis was named the Chair of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, of which Labor has been a member since its beginnings in 1987.
In July 2011, the Department was rocked by the resignation of Ray Jefferson, Assistant Secretary for VETS, in a contracting scandal.
Read more about this topic: United States Department Of Labor
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)