It’s no secret that Donald Trump is not exactly out serving as the champion of workers he suggested he’d be during the 2016 campaign. But the scope of the attack he’s mounted on working people is staggering … and mostly under the radar.
Steven Hill rounds up some of the damage at Working In These Times: The Trump administration killed the Obama-era rule requiring federal contractors to disclose violations of labor law when they bid for contracts. They stopped the Obama administration’s effort to expand overtime eligibility so that millions more people would get overtime when they work more than 40 hours a week.
Then there’s the string of damaging National Labor Relations Board decisions, including a ruling against small unions within larger workplaces, the decision that got McDonald’s off the hook for workers in its franchise restaurants, and:
— Reversing a 2004 decision bolstering workers’ rights to organize free from employer interference.
— Reversing a 2016 decision safeguarding unionized workers’ rights to bargain over changes in employment terms.
— Overturning a 2016 decision that required settlements between employers and employees to provide a “full remedy” to aggrieved workers, instead of partial settlements.
Over at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, meanwhile, they’ve delayed three important workplace safety rules. And, of course, the Supreme Court has said that employers can force workers into mandatory arbitration, denying them their day in court, and has also attacked public unions in the Janus decision.
These haven’t been high-profile issues, for the most part—they haven’t gotten the attention of the Muslim ban or family separation or Trump’s hostility to allies—but they stand to affect tens of millions of workers’ lives, and even to end some of those lives.
● Massive wage theft at Washington, D.C.'s Founding Farmers and related restaurants.
● ‘Algo Hermoso’: NY Nail Salon Workers Join Fight for a Fair Wage.
● ‘First Day Fairness: An agenda to build worker power and ensure job quality.
● A new UPS union contract shows how online shopping is dragging down delivery jobs:
Smith’s union, the Teamsters, is negotiating a new five-year collective bargaining agreement with UPS that will cover a whopping 260,000 workers. The tentative agreement that’s been reached would create a new class of “hybrid” drivers who would have two duties: sorting packages at UPS facilities and delivering them out on the truck. Their work week would include Saturdays and likely Sundays as well. [...]
The new employees would work on a lower pay scale than current full-time drivers, starting and topping out at lower hourly rates. They also wouldn’t enjoy the same limits on forced overtime, opening them up to long work weeks. The way Smith sees it, those factors would essentially make the new drivers second-class within the union and potentially drive down the standards for everyone over the long term.
● Stealing a plane and crashing it, as Horizon Air’s Richard Russell did, seems unthinkable. One of his coworkers understands.
● The American Federation of Teachers is organizing student debt clinics, to help people figure out how to manage their debt.
● How to defend workers against immigration raids:
In Western Massachusetts, the Pioneer Valley Workers Center has created a rapid-response network it calls “Sanctuary in the Streets” (SiS). The worker center, founded in 2014, organizes restaurant workers and farmworkers in the area. Worker committees set the network's priorities.
The rapid-response network consists of a 24-hour emergency hotline, 2,000 members, and 20 religious congregations. Forty bilingual responders are trained to manage the hotline, where they instruct callers in their constitutional rights, connect them to services, and activate the response team if necessary.
