New U.S labor secretary meets unionists in Miami

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MIAMI (Reuters) - After just five days on the job, U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis made her first public speech as a member of President Barack Obama's cabinet at an open meeting with labor unions Monday and said "there's a new sheriff in town."

Solis, a California politician with a working class background and immigrant parents, has been welcomed by American labor unions that complain workers' rights were trampled and worker protection laws ignored during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush.

Solis heard pleas for jobs, health care, education and better protection for workers from a teacher, a nurse and a painter at the forum, held at a church in Overtown, an inner-city community in Miami.

"My goal and my dream in this country is to have my own home," said the painter, Natanael Aburto, a 28-year-old immigrant from Nicaragua who supports a wife and two children. "But I'm afraid that tomorrow I might not have a job."

It was a common refrain in Miami, a city where employment boomed during the peak of the U.S. housing frenzy, but among the hardest hit in the collapse. Florida unemployment has doubled in the last two years, reaching around 8 percent. . . .