With the calendar turning to 2010, the Associated Press took a look back at the first year of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis’ tenure, pointing out that “her aggressive moves to boost enforcement and crack down on businesses that violate workplace safety rules have sent employers scrambling to make sure they are following the rules.”

In many ways, Solis has completely reversed the course of the Labor Department that was set by her predecessor, Elaine Chao. And Solis’ crackdown has business lobbyists yearning for the days when Chao ran the show:

“Our members are concerned that the department is shifting its focus from compliance assistance back to more of the ‘gotcha’ or aggressive enforcement first approach,” said Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business’ small business legal center…Chao has claimed that success was the result of cooperating with businesses to help them understand the myriad regulations. Keith Smith, a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, said his members “want to build upon [Chao's] progress and recognize what’s working.”

Of course, what worked for big business didn’t work at all for workers, as Chao’s Labor Department spent eight years “walking away from its regulatory function across a range of issues, including wage and hour law and workplace safety.”

Consider some of Chao’s legacy. The Government Accountability Office found that her Department “did an inadequate job of investigating complaints by low-wage workers who alleged that their employers were stiffing them for overtime, or failing to pay the minimum wage.” In one survey, 68 percent of low-income workers reported a pay violation in the previous week alone.

The Department’s own inspector general blamed “a lack of management emphasis on worker safety” for unsafe conditions at mines leading to a jump in worker deaths, while fines for workplace safety violations fell so low that employers began “factoring them in as part of their cost of doing business rather than complying with labor laws.” In all, “workers lose $19 billion in wages and benefits through illegal practices, nearly 6,000 American workers die on the job, and at least 50,000 workers die due to occupational disease” each year.

Solis, meanwhile, “slapped the largest fine in [Department] history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery.” She is hiring 250 additional wage-theft inspectors, and “started a new program that scrutinizes business records to make sure worker injury and illness reports are accurate.”

Labor Department staffers were so disgruntled under Chao that they threw a “good-riddance party” to cheer her departure. But for big business, Chao’s tenure meant acting with impunity and facing puny fines on the rare occasions that that were caught, and they’d like to go back.

Early last year, I highlighted a couple of reports that banks were aiming to exploit the Public-Private Investment Fund (PPIP), which Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner set up to purge financial institutions of their toxic assets. At the time, the banks which were supposed to be getting rid of their toxic waste — particularly Bank of America and Citigroup — were instead using TARP money to scoop up more financial garbage, in anticipation that once the PPIP was up and running, they could offload it and make a tidy profit.

And indeed, that seems to be exactly what’s happening. Bloomberg reported today that “the banks that received the biggest taxpayer bailouts are seeking to reap trading profits from securities rescued by the government,” as the program “designed to purge debts of no immediate discernable value from the balance sheets of troubled banks has helped transform the frozen debt into a money-maker.” And look which firms have been purchasing bundles of it:

Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc., who received 22 percent of the $418.7 billion American taxpayers loaned to troubled financial institutions, boosted holdings on their trading books of home- loan bonds that lack government guarantees while investors were raising cash for the program, according to Federal Reserve data. Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America along with Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., all based in New York, added a combined $2.74 billion of the debt, for which there were few buyers as recently as March, to their short-term trading assets during the third quarter, up 13 percent from the second quarter.

So before the program to offload the securities began, the big banks ran around purchasing lots of them, and if the prices of these securities go up, these few banks stand to reap a large share of the benefits. But due to the program’s design, if the price of the securities go down, taxpayers are left holding the bag. Joshua Rosner, who advises regulators and institutional investors, said that “it’s a trade that will likely work out, but it’s still a speculative trade, which is not what a taxpayer should want from firms that have only recently come out of critical care.”

Michael Schlachter, managing director of the investment consulting firm Wilshire Associates, was even stronger in denouncing the banks, saying it’s “absolutely ridiculous” that they may claim outsized profits from the program. “Some of them created this mess, and they are making a killing undoing it,” he added.

With banks inching their way back to profitability and financial stocks driving the 2009 market rally, PPIP and the weakness of bank portfolios largely faded from view, swallowed by concerns over unemployment, Wall Street bonuses, and housing. But are the banks really healthy? The coming year may be when we find out how much of their return to strength is real and how much is due to government support and accounting gimmickry.