Trump’s truth AND consequences for workers

Bill Knight column for Oct. 4, 5 or 6, 2018

Two new reports on issues vital to working Americans detail the attacks on U.S. workers that have accelerated since President Trump and the GOP assumed control of Congress and all three branches of the federal government – and the potential consequences ahead.

The nonpartisan Public Citizen group issued the 23-page “Workers Left Behind Under Trump’s OSHA,” and the labor-supported Economic Policy Institute released its 20-page analysis, “First Day Fairness: An agenda to build worker power and ensure job quality.”

“Trump has betrayed America’s workforce, sacrificing lives at the altar of industry profits,” said Shanna Devine, author of Public Citizen’s report and the worker health and safety advocate in Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division.

“In June 2016, candidate Trump promised, ‘The American worker will finally have a president who will protect them and fight for them.’ But since becoming president, Trump has followed the dictates of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, rolling back fundamental protections at the U.S. Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), the report says.

Indeed, shortly before Labor Day, Trump cancelled a scheduled pay raise for about 2 million public employees and approved an Executive Order instructing the Treasury Department to investigate rules on distributing funds from retirement accounts to prevent withdrawals “to see if investors can keep more money for a longer time in 401(k)s, Individual Retirement Accounts, and other tax-sheltered  savings plans,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Also, Trump is gutting OSHA and cutting requirements to keep relevant records public and accessible, said Devine, who commented, “The Trump administration has systematically dismantled fundamental health and safety protections, and undermined the very agency tasked with safeguarding America’s workforce.”

Celine McNicholas, EPI’s director of labor law and policy, added, “This has been a terrible 18 months-plus for working people in this country, It’s an unprecedented attack on workers.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to hide behind accurate but misleading headlines about the U.S. economy, stressing that the stock market is up – both the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 on Sept. 21 set all-time highs, with the Dow finishing that day at 26,656.98 and the S&P at 2,930.75 – but neglecting to note that profitable corporate performance hasn’t meant improved wages for workers. Also, apart from media spin and public relations, real hourly wages between July of last year and this summer are, in reality, down, since a 2.7 percent increase over that 12-month period was eliminated by inflation – even as the $1.5 trillion tax cut enriched the wealthy and corporations.

However, suspicions are beginning to register with everyday workers.

“For the first time in a long time, you have lots of different folks here in DC and out in the states talking about the need for some sort of labor and employment law reform,” said Celine McNicholas, director of labor law and policy at EPI. “There hasn’t been much worker-favored activity in that area in quite some time.”

The EPI report makes four key recommendations: Americans need the right to unionize; more to ensure a basic level of job quality, whether or not they’re in a union; freedom from employers’ demand that applicants surrender their rights as a condition of employment; and enforcement of labor rights.

Nevertheless, challenges remain ahead.

“The little power that workers have, this administration seems to be bound and determined to diminish even more,” said Sharon Block of Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program and a former national Labor Relations Board member and adviser to President Obama. “The time for tinkering around the edges has past. What we really need is fundamental change.”