Fair Pay, Safe Workplaces, Republican Objections

As the nation’s chief executive, the president gets to set standards for companies that do business with the government. In 2014, after a Senate report found that many federal contractors had been repeatedly cited for cheating, harassing and injuring their employees, President Obama ordered federal agencies to check how well companies have complied with labor laws before awarding contracts.

The president gave procurement officials and federal regulators two years to write rules putting the order into effect — and they needed every minute. Federal contracting is a $500-billion-a-year business, and federal labor law includes 14 different statutes. Regulators had to weigh input from companies that could be affected by the changes as well as from the general public.

This week, in a big step forward for labor standards, the final regulations and guidance were issued. The new procedures require companies to disclose violations from the previous three years when bidding for new contracts of $500,000 or more. They require procurement officials to take the common-sense step of considering past wrongdoing that is serious, willful, repeated or pervasive in weighing whether to award a contract.

The main goal is not to deny contracts or to blacklist companies, as critics claim, but to rectify and prevent violations. To that end, the new rules allow companies to meet with compliance officials and develop plans to fix violations before submitting bids. If a given company takes corrective action, its bid will be considered. The rules lay out procedures to check compliance.

Even so, some Republicans in Congress oppose the effort. In the House and Senate, a rider on the pending appropriation for the Department of Defense — the largest contracting agency — would exempt defense contractors from the executive order and the new rules. Thirty-five Democratic senators and 80 Democratic representatives have signed letters to the chairmen of the Armed Services Committees urging them to remove the rider; the White House has also protested. Since the defense appropriation is generally considered must-pass legislation, the rider may well be dropped.

In the meantime, labor violations among federal contractors continue to pile up. To give just one example, federal regulators recently cited Tyson Foods, the chicken processor whose contracts with the Agriculture Department include providing food to the military, for 15 serious violations that exposed workers to amputation hazards, high levels of carbon dioxide and burns at a plant in Texas. (Tyson says it intends to meet with federal officials to resolve the claims.) Many other labor violations by contractors in numerous industries — from food processing to heavy manufacturing to cloud computing — have been documented.

At last, the government has devised a means to better protect American workers and ensure that companies obey the law. Why would anyone stand in the way?