Liberal groups file complaint over teen labor rule

Liberal groups file a complaint about teen labor rule

Labor Law

According to POLITICO, three liberal groups today filed a legal complaint about a Labor Department proposal that would allow 16- and 17-year-old workers to operate medical patient lifts unsupervised.

“The proposal contains false and misleading information about the need for and the impact of the Department’s proposed changes to child labor policies, and it fails the transparency standards embedded in the guidelines,” the groups wrote in a complaint to Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta and Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget and acting White House chief of staff.

The letter is signed by the National Employment Law Project, the Service International Employees Union, and the Child Labor Coalition. In a November letter to Acosta, Democrats complained that DOL relied on a SurveyMonkey poll with fewer than two dozen respondents. The groups also noted that DOL did not make the full survey results public, despite requests from Democrats.

“Hiding key information from the public is clear evidence that DOL is also completely failing to meet even the most basic principles of transparency embedded in the DOL guidelines,” the groups wrote. “There is clearly a pattern at the Department’s Wage and Hour Division of hiding information that is inconvenient and does not support the Department’s position.”

A DOL spokesperson declined to comment.

The complaint comes amid an inspector general investigation of DOL’s rulemaking process. In a Jan. 25 letter to Democrats, the IG wrote he would investigate whether the agency “deviated from agency regulatory and data quality requirements.”