Labor hails Wiseman decision

Wednesday, 15 September 2010 00:00 By Junhan B. Todeno - Reporter
E-mail Print

THE recent court ruling on a labor case is something that the Department of Labor has been seeking for several years, Deputy Secretary Cinta M. Kaipat said yesterday.

Labor believes that bond claims enforcement should be done in court, she added.

“Only a court has the power to force a bonding company to pay,” she said in an e-mail.

Labor, she added, “does not control the licensing of bonding companies, and we cannot attach their bank accounts. So we could issue opinions on their liability with respect to bonds, and nothing would happen. We had cleaned up the entire backlog of labor cases and we wanted our orders enforced.”

In 2007, she said, after the enactment of Public Law 15-108, Labor pushed for the enforcement of bond claims in court.

In the same year, she added, “we started handing out Small Claims packets to claimants telling them how to take their cases to court. Many of them did that, and two of the insurance companies — Royal Crown and Oceania — objected. They said that the workers’ claims on the bonds could not be considered in the first instance in court. They argued that they were entitled to a hearing at the Labor Department first. Judge [Perry] Inos issued an opinion in 2009 accepting the insurance company arguments and sending all these cases back to the Department of Labor. So we did two things: first, we set up hearings for all the bond claims and advertised extensively so workers would come in and present their claims. Second, we petitioned the Legislature to change the law to make it clear to the courts that workers could go to court to enforce the Department of Labor’s orders.”

According to Kaipat, “We processed all the claims and issued orders in all the cases where there was a bond by January of this year. Many of those cases were appealed to the [Labor] secretary, and all those appeals were completed months ago. Now, Royal Crown is back in Superior Court appealing the secretary’s decision in eight of these cases claiming — you guessed it — that they did not get a fair deal at the Labor Department (where they were ordered to pay) and now they want their day in court. They even took one case to federal court, where Judge [Alex] Munson held that the Department of Labor had proceeded properly. He dismissed their claim.

Judge Wiseman has not yet ruled on the appeals the insurance companies have filed in Superior Court, but we expect the same result as we got from Judge Munson.”

Kaipat said Labor “succeeded in getting a new section put into P.L. 17-1 providing specifically that workers could take the enforcement of their claims to court. We drafted that statutory section in consultation with lawyers for the workers. That became effective in March 2010.”

So, she added, “we have cleaned up all the past bond claims that were presented to the department, and we have changed the law so that, going forward, workers can take their cases directly to court. This is an example of the good progress the Department of Labor is making on all fronts.”

On Friday, Judge David A. Wiseman ruled that based on Public Law 17-1, which took effect last March, alien workers can now file court actions to collect administrative awards even without exhausting collection remedies at the Department of Labor.