Schofield on Berry
Submitted by James on Sat, 01/31/2009 - 6:59pm
Who knows how we can recall the incompetent ideologue recently elected as Commissioner of Labor? Either that, or rename her Commissioner of Management.
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.
And yet...
And yet, she was re-elected. Come on, James. Let's go for the jugular.
Commissioner of Labor
Whatever you might think about the job Commissioner of Labor Berry is doing, keep in mind who was in charge when the Hamlet processing plant fire took place several years back, killing numerous workers and injuring many others. It wasn't Berry or the Republicans but the Democrats who were in charge. And when the workers took their case to court seeking damages for the failure of the Department of Labor to make ANY inspections of the plant, it was the Democrats on the NC Supreme Court that rewrote the law so as to completely block their efforts to present their case. I'd say Commissioner Berry is doing just as good a job or even better than her Democrat predecessor. Check the facts.
Hamlet
As I said in the piece, it was the Hamlet disaster that led to Harry Payne's succesful candidacy to unseat the incumbent Democrat. Ultimately, this is not a partisan issue of Repubs vs. Dems, it's an ideological battle between conservatives (or in Berry's case, far right conservatives) who'll do anything big bidness asks and progressives who want to put workers and their safety first. Clearly, there have been and still are many Dems in the pro-bidness, anti-regulation camp and a few Repubs who care about something more than money.
The fact that Berry has had no incidents involving mass fatalites on her watch is about as relevant to assessing her abysmal performance as the lack of large-scale domestic terror attacks was to assessing W's -- i.e. not at all.