Help me welcome Kirstin Downey, author of The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience. Kirstin will be online this hour.

Imagine this: Former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao witnesses a terrifying spectacle of young women leaping to their deaths from the windows of a burning building where they worked—their only means of escape.

Before she became the first female Labor secretary in 1933, Frances Perkins had seen firsthand the tragedy of Manhattan’s 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Locked in by their employer, 146 mostly young girls died when they couldn’t escape the burning building where they toiled in sweatshop labor. Later, as the New York industrial commissioner, Perkins held employers accountable for workplace safety and health, expanding factory investigations and championing other pro-worker laws, like unemployment insurance.

Last week, a confluence of events reminded the U.S. public that it’s not just the food we eat that’s increasingly dangerous in our daily lives—inadequate safety on the job still is killing America’s working people.

The week ended with two more deaths from construction cranes, this time in Illinois. These fatalities came within days of four deaths due to a crane collapse in Houston—and raises to 18 the number of workers who died from crane-related deaths so far this year, according to an estimate by The Wall Street Journal, which doesn’t include bystander deaths.

Brownie, Rummy, Wolfie, and Alberto – all incompetent Bush appointees, none of whom enjoy taxpayer-funded jobs anymore. When the public heard about their wrongdoings, they were out of office (sooner or later).

So why is Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao entering her eighth year in office under Bush? Is she the anti-Bush appointee? Does she actually do her job well? A diamond in the rough of this administration?

Yeah, right.

Elaine Chao is George W. Bush’s longest-serving cabinet member and wife of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. Under Elaine’s ‘leadership,’ the Department of Labor has turned into an agency that screws America’s workers and enables corporate giveaways.