It may be time to rethink the duties of the state Labor Commissioner

North Carolina state government has dozens of agencies with a wide variety of missions. The Department of Public Instruction is supposed to oversee the education of our children; The Department of Correction is charged with housing and maybe even rehabilitating those who commit crimes; The Department of Environment and Natural Resources acts as a steward for our state's natural environment.

Though mostly very different, each of these agencies has, for lack of a better term, a constituency; some group or institution or thing (in addition to the general citizenry) that it is designed to serve and/or protect. We even have agencies, like the Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture whose missions are largely to serve, promote and recruit private businesses.

And then there's the Department of Labor. Founded early in the last century, the Department of Labor is one of only a few of the state's many departments and agencies whose head is singled out by the state constitution for statewide election. Its central mission is to protect and serve the working people of North Carolina. Unfortunately, this critical and longstanding mission is something that has escaped the consciousness of many North Carolinians – especially the Department's current leader, Commissioner Cherie Berry. 

A memory refresher

To read the state statute that spells out the authority, powers and duties of the Commissioner of Labor is to get a straightforward refresher course on why the Department was created (the statute dates back to at least 1919) and why it still exists. Here are the three main substantive paragraphs in that law:

"To secure the enforcement of all laws relating to the inspection of factories, mercantile establishments, mills, workshops, public eating places, and commercial institutions in the State.  To aid him in the work, he shall have power to appoint factory inspectors and other assistants."

"To visit and inspect, personally or through his assistants and factory inspectors, at reasonable hours, as often as practicable, the factories, mercantile establishments, mills, workshops, public eating places, and commercial institutions in the State, where goods, wares, or merchandise are manufactured, purchased, or sold, at wholesale or retail."

"To enforce the provisions of this section and to prosecute all violations of laws relating to the inspection of factories, mercantile establishments, mills, workshops, public eating houses, and commercial institutions in this State before any court of competent jurisdiction."

In other words, the Labor Commissioner and the Department he or she oversees were put in place, first and foremost, as a regulator with a mission to protect those who labor, i.e. workers. The central idea is that workplaces can be dirty and dangerous places and that state government needs a significant department headed by a statewide elected official to oversee and protect working people (as well as the general public) from danger and abuse.

Over the years, the Department's mandate has been broadened and specified several times to include oversight and enforcement of numerous other worker protection laws, including those that cover wages and hours, occupational safety and health, workplace violence prevention, toxic and hazardous substances and even elevators and "amusement devices."

In recent times

Like some of the other elected agency heads who end up buried near the bottom of North Carolina's ridiculously crowded statewide ballot every four years, the visibility of the Labor Commissioner has remained very limited through the years. In 1992, after the disastrous fire that killed 25 chicken plant workers in Hamlet the year before, the job received much more attention and a reform-minded state legislator, Harry Payne, won a successful Democratic Party primary challenge and swept into office.

Unfortunately, probably due in some measure to Payne's hard work and many successes, the public's attention to the Department and the Commissioner waned in the years that followed. When Payne retired in 2000, a new Commissioner was elected whose main qualifications were a catchy name and the publicity she received as a state legislator while helping to spearhead an ideologically driven effort to reduce or eliminate welfare for people in need.

Since that time, Commissioner Cherie Berry has pursued what might be most charitably described as a "minimalist" approach to her job. Though paying official lip service to the notion that workplace safety is her top priority, Berry has done virtually nothing in eight years to advance that cause in a new or affirmative way. For the most part, she has pursued an approach in which she purports to work with employers in a cooperative rather than and adversarial manner. In reality, it has been an approach in which she mostly does what she can to minimize fines and other tough enforcement actions.

Not surprisingly, it has been an approach that has found favor with employers. Her own official website brags of awards she has received (but not the campaign contributions, of course) from groups of manufacturers, home builders and contractors.

Throughout this period, however, Berry has managed to avoid any kind of public groundswell for her removal or well-funded challengers – even after an award winning Charlotte Observer series last year documented her abysmal non-performance in the regulation of horrific worker conditions in the poultry industry. This is almost certainly due in no small measure to the ubiquity of her picture that stares back smilingly from the inspection certificate that is posted in every elevator in the state.

Time for some changes?

Since her narrow reelection over an extremely bright, but unknown and underfunded challenger last November, Berry is apparently feeling emboldened to stake out a position as an even more dogmatic and ideologically driven public figure with a mission that extends well beyond her statutory duties. Recently, at a speech before the Henderson-Vance Chamber of Commerce, the state's chief protector of workers delivered a highly partisan attack on organized labor as well as, of all things, the Obama administration's nominee for Treasury Secretary and its economic recovery proposal.  

As the longest tenured statewide elected official with an ultra-conservative ideology, Berry seems to have decided to come out from behind the cloak of a supposedly quiet and pragmatic administrator and to engage more directly and publicly on behalf of an agenda that is, in many ways, directly contrary to her statutory mandate.

The spectacle of Berry's wretched job performance has sparked at least one state legislator to cry "enough." This past week, one of the first bills introduced during the new session of the General Assembly was one by Senator Doug Berger. Under the proposal, the responsibility for overseeing worker health and safety would be shifted from the Department of Labor to a newly created "Employment Safety and Security Commission."  

Berger – himself once a candidate for the Labor Commissioner job – argues persuasively that Berry's ideological, anti-regulatory approach to worker safety has become simply unacceptable. At a time when thousands of North Carolina's most vulnerable workers (such as those in the poultry industry) are being essentially ignored by their designated defender in state government, the state must find another way to offer the protection that common sense and decency demands.  

Going forward

Though it is within the authority of the General Assembly to remove essentially all of Berry's power as Labor Commissioner, Berger's bill does not go that far. It does not, for instance, take away her authority to inspect elevators. As the senator told the News & Observer of Raleigh: "There's no question that most people in the state feel they can ride an elevator safely. She's done a good job on that, and that's why she was re-elected."

Given her apparent desire to use her position mostly as a bully pulpit for an ideological agenda (rather than for serving or protecting workers) perhaps Berry will even go along with the change.