Secretary of Labor, Licencing and Regulation Tom Perez clearly does not regard his job as a nice sinecure after he was forced to withdraw from the Attorney General's race. He wants to reenergize a department he believes was neutered under the previous Republican governor:
Among the department’s responsibilities ‘‘is a strong focus on nuts-and-bolts law enforcement, and frankly we need to rebuild some of that capacity that was stripped by the Ehrlich administration,” Perez said in an interview in his Baltimore office this week.‘‘In the wage and hour context and prevailing wage context, there was, frankly, an ideological battle, an ideological assault on those units that was unfortunate,” he said.
The state had 25 wage and hour investigators in the early 1990s, he said. But funding for the Employment Standards Service was eliminated in July 2005, leaving the department without investigators to check for violations of wage and hour rules, spokeswoman Linda Sherman said.
