In case you had any doubts about how strongly Barack Obama would push the deceptively named Employee Free Choice Act when he became president, well, his choice of a new secretary of labor should let you know where he stands.

Reports in the Los Angeles Times  and The Wall Street Journal indicate that Obama is going to name California Democratic Rep. Hilda Solis as his labor secretary.

There should be no surprise that Solis is a hard-core supporter of organized labor, and by extension, the Employee Free Choice Act. According to Politico.com, “Solis came to Congress in 2000 in part thanks to organized labor. With financial and organizational support from unions, she knocked off a Democratic incumbent who had supported ‘fast-track’ trade authority in a heavily liberal Los Angeles-area district. An ally of her fellow Californian House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Solis serves on the influential House Energy and Commerce Committee. She rates a 97 percent lifetime AFL-CIO voting record.”

And as Mark Schoeff Jr. has written in his Workforce Washington blog, “In an Obama administration, the Department of Labor, along with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board, ‘will be emboldened (and further funded with bigger budgets) to pursue aggressive investigations against employers for wage and hour violations, unfair labor practice charges and charges of unlawful discrimination,’ ” according to Gerald L. Maatman Jr., a partner at Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago.

Who better to lead the charge in an aggressive, employer-hostile Labor Department than someone like Solis, a woman who “sits on the board of American Rights at Work, an organization backed by a broad swath of unions that pushes workplace issues, especially legislation to ease union organizing,” according to the Journal. It’s difficult to think of anyone worse for the job.

What fascinates me about the Solis choice for the Labor Department is that she is virtually invisible here in Southern California, where the Workforce Management world headquarters is located.

Although you can make the case that many members of the House aren’t all that prominent, particularly compared with U.S. senators, Solis is someone who even flies below the radar with well-informed Californians who live in her general geographic area.

It will be interesting to see how that lack of name recognition plays out in Washington. But really, I wish that Obama had named someone with a little higher political profile as labor secretary instead of the little-known Solis. After eight years of the do-nothing, empty-suit reign of Elaine Chao at the Labor Department, it would have been nice to have gotten a bigger player in this key Cabinet post, even if it wasn’t someone I don’t particularly agree with politically.

As much as I detest the Employee Free Choice Act and its frighteningly wrongheaded notion that the secret ballot, a pillar of our democracy, is somehow good for electing presidents but flawed when it comes to union organizing, I’m willing to give Hilda Solis a chance. After all, can she be any worse than Chao, a woman who can’t point to a single accomplishment except serving in Bush’s Cabinet longer than anyone else?
 
For my money, Chao is the worst secretary of labor since the department was split off from the Commerce Department in 1913. And, both she and Solis pale in comparison to some of people who have held the post in the past—such as Francis Perkins, George Shultz, Robert Reich and Elizabeth Dole.

So vaya con dios, Hilda Solis. I’m praying that, somehow, you will find a way not to do the obvious and will instead surprise the hell out of me at the Labor Department.