It would take a post that no one would have patience to read to tick off the reasons that the Department of Labor has been irrelevant in the workplace. For many years, it’s been clear that the DOL is sort of a scam: it pretends to be the agency that looks after workers’ rights on behalf of the government but it never has the resources to do so, and, more important, the way the law is written, it’s actions are kind of irrelevant–my favorite examples being the irrelevancy of the nation’s labor laws that are supposed to protect a person’s right to organize a union (but don’t) and enforcement of basic things like child labor laws (see the most recent DOL outrage when it came to fining Wal-Mart for violating those laws).

But, I still wanted to throttle some bureaucrat when I read Steven Greenhouse’s piece today in The New York Times on the new attempt by the DOL to go after union corruption by hiring 48 new people to audit union finances. The piece is the usual Times “he said, she said” exploration. You have the DOL claiming it’s important to root out union corruption versus John Sweeney saying this is payback for the labor movement’s support for John Kerry.

But, the piece is weak because it dances around some obvious points. Of course, this is political retribution—Elaine Chao, the Labor Secretary, is a right-wing ideologue, married to none other than Sen. Mitch McConnell, the third-ranking person in the Republican leadership; the piece neglected to point out the anti-union background of the person running the whole department.

The second point—only made in a fragment of a quote by former labor secretary Robert Reich—is that, at the same time that the DOL is hiring this new squad to dig out perceived corruption in unions, it has cut back on personnel dedicated to enforcement of safety and health and other labor law violations, while making deals with companies like Wal-Mart to get off lightly when it breaks child labor laws. And, truth be told, over the past several decades, the resources spent on safety and health have been pathetic: over 15 years ago, I remember that someone once figured out that, given the personnel available, it would take the government seven years to make even a cursory visit to every workplace in the country with a sizable number of workers.

Let me say right away that anyone caught stealing members’ dues should be punished harshly. But, while workers are dying and being injured on the job, and being fired every day for trying to exercise their basic legal right to organize a union, what’s more important? We know the answer: setting political scores over a safe workplace. It’s particularly outrageous that, given the crimes against workers being executed every day by their employers, precious resources are being spent on political payback.