DOL Developments

Kenneth Shiotani (National Disability Rights Network) sends us word of two Department of Labor developments:

• The DOL is publishing its draft Environmental Justice Strategy in response to the Memorandum of Understanding with the Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice (EJ IWG) signed in August 2011. President Obama has renewed agencies’ environmental justice planning by reinvigorating Executive Order 12898 (EO 12898), which tasked Cabinet-level Federal agencies with making environmental justice part of their mission. The agencies were directed to identify and address, as appropriate, the disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of their programs, policies, and activities on minority and low-income populations.
  
  The Department views Environmental Justice from a workplace training, health and safety perspective. The Department is developing an Environmental Justice Strategy that is in line with the mission of the Department and Secretary Solis’ vision for the future: good jobs for everyone. The vision of good jobs for everyone includes ensuring that workplaces are safe and healthy; helping workers who are in low-wage jobs or out of the labor market find a path into middle-class jobs; and helping middle-class families remain in the middle-class.

• The DOL's notice of proposed rulemaking on the application of the FLSA to home care workers was published in the Federal Register today.  Comments are due on or before February 27, 2012.

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