This week in the war on workers: Trump's top attacks on workers ... so far

Daily Kos Staff

Saturday April 22, 2017 · 3:00 PM PDT

2017/04/22 · 15:00

The Economic Policy Institute’s Perkins Project “tracks actions by the administration, Congress, and the courts that affect people’s wages and their rights at work,” and as we get to the end of Donald Trump’s first 100 days, they’ve provided a list of the top 10 things he and congressional Republicans have done to working people. Here’s a sample:

Protecting Wall Street profits that siphon billions of dollars from retirement savers. At President Trump’s behest, the Department of Labor has delayed a rule requiring that financial professionals recommend retirement investment products that serve their clients’ best interests. The “fiduciary rule” aims to stop the losses savers incur when steered into products that earn advisers commissions and fees. The rule was supposed to go into effect April 10. For every seven days that the rule is delayed, retirement savers lose $431 million over the next 30 years. The 60-day delay will cost workers saving for retirement $3.7 billion over 30 years.

Letting employers hide fatal injuries that happen on their watch. The Senate approved a resolution making it harder to hold employers accountable when they subject workers to dangerous conditions. The March 22 resolution blocks a rule requiring that employers keep accurate logs of workplace injuries and illnesses for five years. This time frame captures not just individual injuries but track records of unsafe conditions. President Trump said he would sign the resolution. If he does, employers can fail to maintain—or falsify—their injury and illness logs, making them less likely to suffer the consequences when workers are injured or killed. Blocking this rule also means that employers, OSHA, and workers cannot use what they learn from past mistakes to prevent future tragedies. If the rule is overturned, more workers will be injured, and responsible employers will be penalized.

Allowing potentially billions of taxpayer dollars to go to private contractors who violate health and safety protections or fail to pay workers. The federal government pays contractors hundreds of billions of dollars every year to do everything from manufacturing military aircraft to serving food in our national parks. The Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule required that companies vying for these lucrative contracts disclose previous workplace violations, and that those violations be considered when awarding federal contracts. The rule was needed, as major federal contractors were found to be regularly engaging in illegal practices that harm workers financially and endanger their health and safety. On March 27, President Trump killed this rule by signing a congressional resolution blocking it. This will hurt workers and contractors who play by the rules, while benefitting only those contractors with records of cutting corners.

Click here to check out the rest.

● The looming writers' strike is about much more than what's on TV.

● Reps. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Rick Larsen (D-WA) write opposing air traffic control privatization in the Washington Post.

Last year, the GAO found that a privatized air-traffic-control system would be “too big to fail,” meaning taxpayers might have to bail out the corporation if it couldn’t pay the costs to operate a safe system. The GAO also could not confirm that a private system would be capable of protecting national security and collaborating with the military to protect Americans from security threats, nor could it guarantee that a private corporation would speed up the Federal Aviation Administration’s work to modernize the nation’s air-traffic-control system.

● Hear from the organizers of the May 1 Day Without an Immigrant.

● Sarah Jaffe: Back at the Carrier plant, workers are still fighting on their own:

The emptiness of Trump’s made-for-reality-TV moment becomes painfully clear a few miles southwest of the union hall, where the Carrier plant sits, amid a cluster of factories and warehouses, in one of the last industrial districts in the United States. On my visit in early March, signs of the workers’ struggles aren’t immediately visible, though they’re easy enough to find. Just across the street from Carrier, workers from the Sumco plant are walking a picket line. Less than a mile away, some 300 workers at the Rexnord plant await layoff notices as the company prepares to shut down and head south.

● Retail vs. Coal is an issue that’s been getting a lot of attention this week, and Erik Loomis weighs in:

It is however worth noting that the decline of manufacturing jobs is also the decline of generations of work that was once horrible, deadly, and destructive turned into well-paid, union jobs. And that is part of the story here too. Retail jobs are not worse than manufacturing jobs except for the fact that retail jobs have always been low paid and fights to turn manufacturing jobs into “good jobs” were successful. Of course, that process was racialized and gendered too because society valued the jobs of white males more than those of people of color and women. But part of the story is the decline of good paying jobs for the working class.

● Poynter’s Melody Kramer compares parental leave policies in American newsrooms, and the picture is bleak.

● Erik Loomis asks: Democrats and Labor: Frenemies forever?

Nothing in American labor history suggests unions can succeed if the government opposes their causes, but unions have consistently failed to further a pro-labor agenda within the Democratic Party. And without a realistic alternative—the Republican Party, after all, has waged a multi-decade war on workers—unions have no choice but to keep working within the Democratic Party.

● How Barnard contingent faculty won their first contract.

● Farmworker ... guestworker ... in North Carolina ... with a union?

This week in the war on workers: Trump's top attacks on workers ... so far

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