Posted on 07/06/2009 6:42:12 PM PDT by reaganaut1
Hilda L. Solis often recalls some advice her high school guidance counselor gave her mother: “Your daughter is not college material. Maybe she should follow the career of her older sister and become a secretary.”
Telling that story recently at the Hunter College commencement in Manhattan, Ms. Solis roared into the microphone that she, the daughter of immigrants, did become a secretary — the nation’s labor secretary. The crowd thundered with applause.
...
Like President Obama and Judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose confirmation to the Supreme Court would make her the first Hispanic justice, Ms. Solis, 51, pulled herself up through her own drive and intelligence. Now, she is hoping to use those qualities to reinvigorate the Labor Department, which she said became a neglected, atrophied, often pro-business backwater under President George W. Bush.
She has promised a vigorous campaign to combat workplace violations, after government auditors found that the Bush Labor Department sometimes did not follow up on complaints of minimum wage, overtime and child labor violations. She said she planned to hire 250 more investigators and conduct a nationwide outreach program so that workers knew their rights and employers knew their obligations.
“There are so many people I knew when I was growing up who were not even paid the minimum wage,” Ms. Solis said. “People wouldn’t know where to go to lodge a complaint. And if you didn’t speak good English, forget it.”
Her goal of restoring morale and efficiency to the 17,000-employee department would not be easy, she said, partly because so many dedicated people had quit in recent years. When she spoke at a church in Miami in March, she pledged to increase workplace enforcement and used a much-applauded line: “There’s a new sheriff in town.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
There is no salvation for Leftwingtard Apparatchiks.
So if she wasn’t college material, did she bump some more deserving student out of line via affirmative action?
I've always said guidance counselors are under-appreciated.
Just when was it legal to treat some races or income groups unfairly? Was there a list of people you could treat unfairly? I guess until brave Ms. Solis got her legislation passed the EPA routinely adopted regulations that had had different restriction based on skin color or income. Like the EPA issued pesticide regulations for poor latino farmers only; you white farmers do whatever you want. Sure I remember that.
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