Wages, safety, pension
rules head for the meat grinder
By Christine Owens, Executive
Director, National Employment Law Project
In the released by the U.S. Department of Labor, the Trump
administration continues its relentless march toward repealing safeguards
designed to protect the rights of workers to receive the wages they are owed,
to be safe on the job, and to have access to robust health care and retirement
security.
For a president who promised in his inaugural speech that
every decision he made would be to benefit our nation’s workers, the DOL’s Fall
Regulatory Agenda is just another in a of
broken promises to working people.
Proposals from the Wage and Hour Division continue to threaten the right of workers to earn a decent living from their labor.
First, WHD will press forward with weakening the overtime
pay protections the Obama administration adopted, despite the number of
employers who have successfully implemented the increases without adverse
effects.
In addition, we are deeply concerned that the DOL
rulemaking regarding what constitutes the ‘regular pay rate’ under the Fair
Labor Standards Act will give outsized influence to corporate lobbyists who
have long advocated loopholes allowing employers to pay workers less overtime
than that to which they are entitled.
As more and more employers ‘outsource’ their workers to
other employers, often with the aim of shedding their legal obligations to
those workers, the DOL’s proposal to ‘modernize’ their interpretation of joint
employment must be viewed with great skepticism.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration seems
determined to weaken an Obama-era regulation requiring injury and illness
reporting, and to repeal other important protections that safeguard workers’
health and lives on the job.
OSHA’s regulatory failures are coupled with the U.S.
Department of Agriculture’s proposed rule that would increase job hazards and
worker injuries in meatpacking plants, and the Environmental Protection
Agency’s proposed rule that would weaken and revoke protections for farmworkers
and landscapers who handle the most toxic pesticides (for example, by lowering
age restrictions to allow children to apply these pesticides).
These actions demonstrate a shocking disregard for the
health and safety of our nation’s workers and an utter lack of commitment to
safeguarding against easily preventable injuries and deaths.
NELP shares the DOL’s goal of job training for teens
through apprenticeships, but we urge the agency abandon its proposal to make it
easier for 16- and 17-year-olds to work in ‘hazardous occupations.’ The DOL has
a responsibility to safeguard the health and well-being of all workers,
especially children.
The DOL also seems determined to remove provisions in
Health Savings Accounts and Multi-Employer Retirement Accounts designed to
ensure that workers receive the benefits they were promised.
It is truly sad to see DOL, the agency charged with
promoting the welfare of the nation’s workers, proposing to remove provisions
designed to protect workers. Meanwhile, DOL has deprioritized any efforts to
protect retirement savers from harmful conflicts of interests.
NELP will continue to fight any and all attempts to weaken
important safeguards that workers depend on to protect their lives and
livelihoods on the job.
The National Employment Law Project is a non-partisan, not-for-profit
organization that conducts research and advocates on issues affecting low-wage
and unemployed workers. For more about NELP, visit .