If you listen to the Left, the Bush administration has been oppressing and endangering American workers for the last eight years. Workplace conditions have deteriorated and workers live at the mercy of unaccountable and unscrupulous employers. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, sitting squarely in the pocket of big business, has dithered. As President-Elect Obama has put it, the department has forsaken its intended role of protecting workers and instead acted as a “Department of Management.”

The Washington Post this week quoted Scott Lilly from the left-wing Center for American Progress complaining of an agency that has either gone to seed or run amok, depending on the function. “I think you’ve got people embedded there who are philosophically hostile to the mission of the agency,” he said.

The ideologues are framing their own narrative about the Bush Department of Labor, but it is not backed up by the facts, which tell the story of an agency that is not only doing what it is supposed to do, but doing it better than it has in years past — in some cases, much better.

The Bush administration has witnessed administrative and policy failures, but the operation of the Department of Labor is not among them. In addition to being the best-run agency according to the administration’s own standards — the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) — the performance statistics show clear improvement on nearly every measure. In most cases, the Bush labor department has done more to help workers — and even their unions (if not union bosses) — than the Clinton administration.

One of Labor’s important functions is to recover money for workers who are wrongfully denied their pay. Congressional Democrats, led by House Education and Labor chairman George Miller (D., Calif.), have used reports backed by anecdotal evidence to attack the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour division for failing to perform this function adequately. In fact, their hearing on the issue earlier this year revealed that the current Labor Department is significantly outperforming its Clinton-era predecessor on this score. Last year, Labor’s Wage and Hour Division recovered three times as much in unjustly withheld wages ($220,613,703 all told) for three times as many short-changed workers (341,624) as it had ten years earlier during the Clinton administration.

Another key role of the Labor Department is to safeguard working conditions through OSHA. The Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that Labor’s results have also been good in this regard. The rate of workplace injuries and illnesses is down 21 percent since fiscal 2002. The rate of workplace fatalities is at its lowest level in history, down 14 percent since Bush took office. OSHA, whose budget has increased modestly since 2001 (from $426 million to $502 million), has more than doubled the size of its workplace safety-training program over what existed under President Clinton, with more than 3 million workers trained over the last seven years.

The Labor Department also protects the employees of federal contractors from unlawful discrimination through the Office of Federal Contractor Compliance Programs. This is one more measure in which Chao’s department has excelled. Since fiscal 2001, the department has increased annual monetary remedies for employees who were treated unfairly by 170 percent. So why do the ideologues murmur? The best explanation might be the success of another important agency at Labor, the Office of Labor and Management Standards (OLMS). OLMS, which oversees how unions spend their members’ money, has dramatically improved transparency in this regard — and union bosses are none too happy. The Bush administration has been the first to enforce key transparency provisions of the 1959 law governing union activities that was pushed through the Senate by John F. Kennedy (D., Mass.). Previously, top union officials were able to obscure their expenditures on disclosure forms with vague and unrevealing line items. In the past, unions could (and did) report eight- and nine-figure amounts for “sundry expenses” or “state grants” without breaking out any of the numbers. Under Bush, this has changed: rank-and-file union members now must receive a detailed accounting of how union leaders are spending their money, which is available online at UnionReports.gov.

With this increased transparency and a tripling in the number of audits of union books, OLMS has not only been able to give workers a much better picture of how unions spend their money, but it has also been able to refer many large-scale cases of embezzlement by union officials to the Justice Department. Unions have recovered $57 million in embezzled funds in the last four years — which is obviously good for the unions themselves. In the last four fiscal years of the Clinton administration, OLMS was recovering just $3.3 million per year, on average.

You’d think that OLMS’s success in thwarting inappropriate uses of union workers’ dues would have pleased the Left, but it did not. In fact, it resulted in congressional Democrats cutting the OLMS budget in 2007, amid complaints that they had too much money and too many investigators. The budget cuts were followed by dramatically smaller recoveries of embezzled funds in fiscal 2008.

Why did Democrats cut that agency’s budget? Union bosses spent nearly $60 million just in PAC money to elect Democrats this year, and the top six unions alone account for an additional $50 million in spending by 527 organizations. While the Left complains that the Bush Labor department is in the deep pockets of Management, the department’s actual performance — and Big Union’s campaign contributions — tell a very different story about who is pulling the strings of whom.

– David Freddoso is a National Review Online staff reporter and author of The Case Against Barack Obama.