Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC office, was quoted in the Bloomberg Law Daily Labor Report, in “Inside Scalia’s Pro-Industry Revamp of Labor Agency Enforcement,” by Ben Penn.

Following is an excerpt:

… Scalia’s primary objective as U.S. Labor Secretary has been to solidify an enforcement philosophy at DOL that’s predictable for employers. Businesses had railed against the Obama administration for what they viewed as its overly punitive, “gotcha"-style tactics. Their frustration mounted when President Donald Trump‘s first labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, was slow to rebalance the enforcement landscape.

Scalia, who took office Sept. 30, 2019, has worked to centralize decision-making; shift power away from career investigators and attorneys; emphasize providing employers with fair notice of pending actions; and ensure consistency across DOL’s vast bureaucracy of enforcement offices, according to interviews with two dozen current and former DOL officials and outside lawyers. …

Scalia’s Moves

Under Scalia’s watch DOL has begun soliciting complaints from companies under investigation. The head of DOL’s Wage and Hour Division, one of its foremost enforcement arms, has invited corporate lawyers to complain to the national office about “tenacious” investigators.

“Over the last year there’s been a welcome renewal of opportunities for stakeholders to have determinations that are made in the field by agency personnel reviewed by individuals who are higher up in the agency to ensure consistency of policy application,” said Paul DeCamp, a senior DOL official in the George W. Bush administration who now represents companies in wage-hour disputes.

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