The Department of Labor has launched a special program to assist and protect illegal immigrant workers in the U.S., referred to as "vulnerable" and "underpaid" by the presidential cabinet member who heads the agency.
Hundreds of new field investigators have been deployed to reach out to Latino laborers in areas with large numbers of illegal alien employees. Their message, in Spanish, is "we can help" bring workplace protections to the nation's most vulnerable and underpaid workers, including those who have no legal right to live in the Untied States.
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Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, a former California congresswoman with close ties to the influential La Raza movement, announced the "We Can Help" project with great fanfare a few days ago. A total of 1,000 investigators from her agency will focus on enforcing labor and wage laws in industries that typically hire lots of illegal aliens without reporting anyone to federal immigration authorities.
Solis told Latino workers that "your president, your secretary of labor and this department will not allow anyone to be denied his or her rightful pay, especially when so many in our nation are working long, hard and often dangerous hours." She assured illegal immigrants that "if you work in this country, you are protected by our laws."
The same day Solis publicly announced the Obama Administration's new project, a Labor Department investigator visited a day laborer center in northern California to promote it. The federal employee actually chatted warmly with the illegal immigrants about how to find jobs without being exploited, according to a local newspaper report. "We're the feds but the good ones," he told the day laborers in Spanish. "We're here to help workers."
The agency has also launched a Spanish television advertising campaign to spread the word and created a web site. Workers in industries from construction to food service are urged to contact the Labor Department of wage and hour violations. An investigator may be deployed to the work site or the employer may be taken to court.
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