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5 Ways Trump's Labor Secretary Pick Can Prove She's Really Pro-Worker
If workers truly have an ally in Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.), she will advance policies that improve workers’ lives.
Nov 27, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump recently announced his nomination of Oregon Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer to serve as secretary of labor.
She is one of only three House Republicans to cosponsor the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and one of only eight Republicans to cosponsor the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. Both bills would help reform our nation’s badly broken system of labor law. While Rep. Chavez-DeRemer’s support for these needed reforms is encouraging, if confirmed, she will be secretary of labor for a president who steadfastly pursued an ambitious anti-worker agenda during his first term in office.
Chavez-DeRemer has stated that “working-class Americans finally have a lifeline” with President-elect Trump in the White House. If workers truly have an ally in Chavez-DeRemer, she will advance policies that improve workers’ lives. Here are a few policies that will reveal whether the second Trump administration will actually aid working-class Americans or be a continuation of his first administration’s agenda attacking workers’ rights.
If confirmed as secretary of labor, Chavez-DeRemer should not follow the playbook of Trump’s first administration that used populist pro-worker rhetoric while advancing an anti-worker agenda that proved deeply harmful to U.S. workers.
Win funding for the Department of Labor (DOL) that enables the agency to serve the U.S. workforce:DOL and other worker protection agencies have been chronically underfunded. As the workforce has grown, the budgets of these agencies have shrunk, leaving workers without effective enforcement of basic minimum wage and overtime and health and safety protections. Chavez-DeRemer should fight for and secure at least a $14 billion budget to ensure that U.S. workers have health and safety inspectors and wage and hour investigators on the job to enforce their rights.
Protect workers’ overtime: Overtime pay ensures that most workers who put in more than 40 hours a week get paid 1.5 times their regular pay for the extra hours they work. Most hourly workers are guaranteed the right to overtime pay, while salaried workers’ eligibility is based on their pay and the nature of their duties. DOL recently issued a rule to raise the pay threshold for salaried workers to be eligible for overtime, which stands to benefit 4.3 million workers. Despite this benefit to U.S. workers, corporate interest groups and conservative states challenged the rule in court. Chavez-DeRemer should fight for workers’ right to overtime and continue to defend this rule in litigation. She should not allow the Trump administration to, once again, institute a low-salary threshold for overtime eligibility that leaves millions of workers without these protections and forced to work long hours for no additional pay.
Refuse to reinstitute the Payroll Audit Independent Determination program: This program was instituted during Trump’s first administration and essentially permits employers who have stolen workers’ wages to confess and get out of jail free. If an employer proactively notified DOL of the failure to pay minimum wage or overtime or for taking illegal deductions from workers’ paychecks, then DOL waived all penalties and liquidated damages. Wage theft is rampant, costing U.S. workers as much as $50 billion each year. Any program that makes it easier and less costly for employers to steal workers’ wages is a program that hurts U.S. workers and their wages. Chavez-DeRemer should make it harder for employers to steal workers’ wages, not easier.
Promote policies to protect workers’ health and safety: DOL’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is responsible for ensuring U.S. workers are safe on the job. Still, 344 workers die each day from hazardous working conditions. Under the prior Trump administration, OSHA scaled back safety inspections. Chavez-DeRemer should ensure that OSHA does not repeat this under her watch and instead expands inspections to ensure that all workers have a safe workplace. Further, she should fight to protect safety standards like the recently proposed standard protecting workers from extreme heat. Workers’ health and safety must be a priority for any secretary of labor and administration claiming to be pro-worker.
Hold employers accountable for exploiting workers: Some employers use workers’ immigration status as leverage to exploit workers, threatening them with deportation if they report violations of labor and employment laws. For workers in labor disputes, the current administration granted deferred action, which is a determination to defer removal (deportation) of an individual from the U.S. In order to qualify for deferred action, a worker’s employer must be the subject of an open investigation at a labor agency, like DOL, and the labor agency conducting the investigation must submit a letter supporting deferred action to the Department of Homeland Security which oversees the program. Deferred action helps hold lawbreaking employers accountable, and Chavez-DeRemer should continue to support this for workers whose employers are being investigated for violating the law. If she is confirmed, she should fight to ensure the Trump administration provides deferred action for workers whose rights have been violated and should work to issue letters in support of deferred action for eligible workers.
These are just a few actions Chavez-DeRemer could take to demonstrate her commitment to workers. If confirmed as secretary of labor, Chavez-DeRemer should not follow the playbook of Trump’s first administration that used populist pro-worker rhetoric while advancing an anti-worker agenda that proved deeply harmful to U.S. workers.
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How Donald Trump Undermined the Health and Safety of American Workers
Even in the ostensibly “good” years before the onset of the pandemic, the absence of adequate health and safety measures under the Trump administration contributed to an appalling number of work-related deaths in the United States.
Aug 16, 2024
During his four years as President of the United States, Donald Trump was remarkably active and often successful in sabotaging the health and safety of the nation’s workers.
Trump, as the AFL-CIO noted, targeted Medicare and Medicaid for $1 trillion in funding cuts, eroded the Affordable Care Act (thereby increasing the number of Americans lacking health insurance coverage by 7 million), and “made workplaces more dangerous by rolling back critical federal safety regulations.” Trump’s administration not only refused to publicly disclose fatality and injury data reported to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but slashed the number of federal workplace safety inspectors and inspections to the lowest level in that agency’s 48-year history. According to one estimate, with these depleted numbers, it would take 165 years to inspect every worksite in the United States.
Furthermore, the administration repealed rules requiring employers to keep and report accurate injury records, proposed eliminating the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, and cut workplace safety research and training programs. The Trump administration also proposed revoking child labor protections, weakened the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s enforcement of mine safety, and reversed a ban on chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide that causes acute reactions among farmworkers and neurological damage to children.
In April 2019, the Trump Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service put into place a rule to allow an unlimited increase in the line speeds for hog slaughter. In an industry already notorious for endangering workers―with more than 4,700 occupational injuries and more than 2,700 occupational illnesses per year―this was a sure-fire recipe for undercutting worker safety. Even so, the Trump administration completely ignored the impact on workers’ safety and health before issuing the rule.
Downplaying workplace hazards, the administration scrapped new rules on styrene, combustible dust, infectious diseases, and silica dust―a mineral that can cause silicosis, an incurable and often fatal lung disease carrying an increased risk of lung cancer. Eager to reduce business expenditures, it also canceled a requirement for training shipyard and construction workers to avoid exposure to beryllium, a known carcinogen. In addition, the administration delayed and proposed a rollback of the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical risk management rule, thus increasing health dangers for workers, the public, and first responders.
The grim fate of millions of American workers―crushed by dangerous machinery, riddled with carcinogenic chemicals, or gasping their last breaths with Covid-19―apparently did not matter enough to Donald Trump, as President, to safeguard their health and safety.
The Trump administration’s callous disregard for the health and safety of workers became particularly apparent during 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic swept through American workplaces. Trump refused to issue binding rules requiring businesses to institute safety measures to protect nurses, bus drivers, meatpacking and poultry workers, and other particularly vulnerable workers. Quite the contrary, in April 2020 Trump issued an executive order to require the nation’s meat production plants to stay open. This fact, plus an April 2020 authorization by Trump’s Department of Agriculture for 15 large poultry plants to increase their line speed, led by September to the sickness of more than 40,000 meat and poultry workers and to the deaths of hundreds.
Other groups of workers were also hard-hit by the absence of key Trump administration health and safety measures during the pandemic, including its failure to use the Defense Production Act to expand production of personal protective equipment for endangered workers. According to National Nurses United, by September 2020 more than 250,000 health care workers had come down with the Covid-19 virus and at least 1,700 of them had died from it. In addition, according to Purdue University’s Food and Agriculture Vulnerability Index, 147,000 agricultural workers had contracted Covid.
By that fall, although more than a thousand meatpacking, food-processing, and farming facilities had reported cases of Covid-19, Trump’s OSHA had managed to cite only two of them for violations of health and safety regulations. JBS (the biggest meat-processing company in the world, with annual revenues of over $51 billion) was ordered to pay a fine of just $15,615, while Smithfield (owned by the WH Group, the largest pork company in the world, with more than $25 billion in annual revenue) was ordered to pay only $13,494 (about $10 per worker sick with Covid). Both companies refused to pay the fines. Meanwhile, Trump’s OSHA remained ineffective and rudderless, with an acting director yet to be named.
Even in the ostensibly “good” years before the onset of the pandemic, the absence of adequate health and safety measures contributed to an appalling number of work-related deaths in the United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the annual number of worker deaths on the job rose between 2016 (the last year of the Obama administration) and 2019 (the last pre-Covid year of the Trump administration) to 5,333. In addition, an estimated 95,000 American workers died in 2019 from occupational diseases.
Moreover, occupational deaths during the Trump era were dwarfed by occupational injuries and illnesses. As the AFL-CIO reported: “In 2019, nearly 3.5 million workers across all industries, including state and local government, had work-related injuries and illnesses that were reported by employers.” Furthermore, added the union federation, “due to limitations in the current injury reporting system and widespread underreporting of workplace injuries, this number understates the problem. The true toll is estimated to be two to three times greater—or 7.0 million to 10.5 million injuries and illnesses a year.”
The grim fate of millions of American workers―crushed by dangerous machinery, riddled with carcinogenic chemicals, or gasping their last breaths with Covid-19―apparently did not matter enough to Donald Trump, as President, to safeguard their health and safety. But it might be of greater concern to Americans when they go to the polls this November.
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'Monumental': Advocates Applaud Federal Rule to Protect Workers From Extreme Heat
The administration has established that "every worker in America has the right to shade, water, and rest while working in temperatures that could kill them," a labor leader said.
Jul 02, 2024
Labor advocates celebrated on Tuesday following the Biden administration's announcement of a proposed rule to protect workers from extreme heat—the first national workplace heat safety standard.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), an agency within the U.S. Department of Labor, published the rule, which the administration says would protect about 36 million indoor and outdoor employees from heat-related injuries and illnesses. It follows similar regulations that five states have approved in recent years.
Labor groups said the rule was the result of decades of advocacy by farmworkers and others subjected to extreme heat, who tend to be working-class people of color or immigrants. The movement was galvanized by heat-related deaths in workplaces around the country.
"This is a bittersweet moment for farmworkers," United Farm Workers president Teresa Romero said in a statement. "Every significant heat safety regulation at the state, and now federal, level was written in the blood of farmworkers."
"Today, the federal government put itself on the right side of history by seeking, for the first time, to establish the precedent that every worker in America has the right to shade, water, and rest while working in temperatures that could kill them," Romero added.
Juley Fulcher, a worker health and safety advocate at Public Citizen, an advocacy group that first called for a federal workplace heat protection standard in 2011, said in a statement that the OSHA rule was a "monumental victory for those who toil in the summer heat."
President Joe Biden has and will continue to protect workers. This President continues to show us where his priorities lie.
Thank you for prioritizing workers' right to safe working conditions, @POTUS. https://t.co/D4YMvWgIml
— Machinists Union (@MachinistsUnion) July 2, 2024
The focus on protection from heat comes as millions of Americans are under heat advisories this week and fossil-fuel driven climate change causes record-setting temperatures month after month.
The OSHA regulation, which will be the subject of written comments and a public hearing before being finalized, requires worker access to clean drinking water, indoor or shaded areas, rest breaks, and heat-related training. The regulation contains tiers so that certain protections kick in at a heat index of 80°F and still more at 90°F. The rule mandates an acclimatization process for new employees, as they are especially at risk in high temperatures.
The rule would also substantially increase the penalties that employers might pay in the case of heat-related employee injuries, according toThe Guardian.
Bill McGuire, a climate scientist at University College London, wrote on social media that the new rule was "absolutely vital" but warned that "working outside will not be possible at all in the extreme summer temperatures that coming years will bring."
The federal rule comes amid a push by labor and environmental groups to establish more workplace protections against extreme heat. Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) helped organize a "thirst strike" with unions and civil society groups on the U.S. Capitol steps last July. Responding to bottom-up pressure, California, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, and Washington have passed workplace heat safety standards in recent years.
Industry groups have lobbied against the rules, with remarkable success in states such as Florida and Texas, both of which have gone as far as passing laws that prohibit local authorities from mandating heat protections for outdoor workers. The Texas law was ruled unconstitutional by a state district court judge last year.
The new federal rule comes as a part of a larger administration effort to address the extreme heat that Americans are increasingly facing. An OSHA program that began in 2022 has conducted more than 5,000 heat-related inspections in workplaces with the most heat exposure, according to a Labor Department statement.
Separately on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced a set of 656 projects aimed at preparing for extreme heat and other weather disasters, at a total cost of nearly $1 billion.
Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an emailed statement that the project funding "only scratches the surface of the nation's enormous need for tools to combat extreme heat" and pushed for FEMA to classify extreme heat and wildlife smoke events as "major disasters," which would unlock much more key funding.
Su did praise OSHA's "landmark rule" and called for an "urgent, government-wide game plan to tackle catastrophic extreme heat."
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