WASHINGTON — Paul DeCamp said he will be guided by the law and the best interests of workers as administrator of the Labor Department’s Wage & Hour division, but labor advocates have marked the attorney who once represented Wal-Mart as pro-business.
Only time will tell the impact that DeCamp, 35, will have as enforcer of a broad range of laws that govern the working lives of more than 110 million people and regulate everything from overtime pay to minimum wage and child labor. DeCamp’s legal work for Wal-Mart involved an appeal of the class-action status of a gender discrimination lawsuit against the company.
“Everything that we do, every statute that we administer here in the Wage & Hour division, is fundamentally about protecting workers,” said DeCamp.
Sidestepping opposition from labor advocates, including Sen. Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.), President Bush appointed DeCamp to the post while Congress was out of town in late August. The recess appointment lasts until the end of the 2007 congressional session.
About 75 percent of Wage & Hour’s enforcement activities are driven by complaints, such as those from workers, businesses and advocacy groups. The balance of the investigations are self-directed by the division. Companies found to be breaking the law can be made to pay back wages and could face civil penalties.
The Wal-Mart case DeCamp worked on as an attorney for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher involved 1.6 million current and former women and alleged sex discrimination in pay and promotions. Wal-Mart’s appeal of the suit’s class-action status is pending.
DeCamp said the company will get equal treatment from his office.
“The same laws that apply to everyone else apply to Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart has to comply with the law,” he said. “We will not treat them any better or any worse because of some of the political atmospherics.”
Wage & Hour also devotes significant resources to educating employers about the law.
“Many of the violations of our laws that occur are not the result of willful or intentional misconduct on anybody’s part but are oftentimes the result of a lack of knowledge,” said DeCamp.
Who should be counted as exempt and therefore ineligible to receive overtime pay is a good example. It is also a hot-button issue that is important to the labor movement and one where DeCamp can make an impact, as his office issues regulations that interpret the Fair Labor Standards Act.
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“The words in the statute admit potentially a wide range of interpretations” of which workers should be eligible for overtime, DeCamp said. “The regulations help put meat on the bones with regard to those exemptions.”
Kelly Ross, legislative representative for the AFL-CIO, said DeCamp has a history of representing employers against workers and, in his writings, raised some red flags for labor.
“He has a hostile attitude toward the recovery of overtime back pay,” said Ross. “He thinks that major changes are necessary to keep workers from getting overtime pay, and he’s in a position to do that.”
For his part, DeCamp said he has always searched for clarity.
“My position has never been that more or fewer workers should be exempt,” he said. “That’s really an issue for Congress. My position has always been that whatever the number of exempt or non-exempt people would be or whatever the standard is, it ought to be as clear as possible, so that everyone who wants to and intends to comply with the law in good faith can do so.”
DeCamp, who hails from Norton, Mass., and received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, likes the intellectual aspect of the law.
“I was initially pre-med, but I found that I enjoyed political science and history more than I enjoyed hard sciences, so I gravitated toward the humanities,” he said.
That pull eventually took him to Columbia University, where he received his law degree. In 1998, he started working at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. In July 2005, he became senior policy adviser for the assistant secretary for employment standards at the Labor Department. DeCamp lives in Great Falls, Va., with his wife, Antoinette, who is also an attorney, and their two sons.
Whereas an AFL-CIO blog earlier this year said he was “another Bush fox heading for the henhouse,” DeCamp maintained that his work as an attorney was not inconsistent with enforcing the law.
“When you’re representing a client in private law practice, your legal duty is to zealously advocate on behalf of your client,” he said. “In the department, your obligation is to enforce the laws. Our obligation in the department is to enforce the statutes that Congress has written in order to protect workers.”
That switch in outlook is one of the things that makes DeCamp describe his current gig as the best job he’s ever had.
“Your actions are driven not by the interests of a particular client, but rather first and foremost directed by the law,” he said. “That, to me, is very interesting.”