John C. Brooks

John C. Brooks (born 1937) served as North Carolina Commissioner of Labor from 1977 to 1993.

Brooks, a native of Greenville, North Carolina, is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (with a Morehead-Cain Scholarship), and the University of Chicago law school. He worked as an attorney and clerked for N.C. Supreme Court Justice William H. Bobbitt. He served on the staff of Governor Terry Sanford, worked as an administrative officer for the North Carolina General Assembly and assisted constitutional conventions in Maryland and Illinois before being elected Labor Commissioner in 1976.

During his tenure, Commissioner Brooks greatly expanded job training through the apprenticeship program. He implemented annual inspections of all migrant labor camps and chicken processing plants. He adopted a blood-borne pathogens standard—the first in the south—and regulations designed to curb abuses in the temporary employment agency industry. He expanded the Wage and Hour enforcement staff so that there could be prompt response to wage and hour complaints. He insisted that all amusement rides be inspected every time they were reassembled. Brooks also advocated for the protection of workers' benefits and for the state minimum wage to be tied to the federal minimum wage.

His tenure included the 1991 fire at a food-processing plant in Hamlet that killed 25 workers. This food (not chicken) processing plant was not registered with the North Carolina Secretary of State's office, as required by law, and thus was not on any state inspection list. Moreover, there had been no complaint about the plant from anyone working there, so the N. C. Department of Labor had no way of knowing that the plant even existed. Brooks fined the plant $808,150, which was the largest such penalty in state history.

...
Wikipedia