Trump adds insult to injuries with Scalia nomination

Bill Knight column for 9-2, 3 or 4, 2019

Days before Labor Day, President Trump on Tuesday (Aug. 27) confirmed that July rumors about his nomination for Labor Secretary were accurate, as he officially nominated Eugene Scalia to be the next Secretary of Labor.

Unions and pro-worker groups and politicians will forcefully oppose the move, but Scalia’s confirmation by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the GOP-majority Senate is likely – continuing the most anti-worker administration in U.S. history.

Scalia, a Washington corporate attorney and member of the Right-wing Federalist Society, is the 56-year-old son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The nomination hasn’t shocked labor leaders.

“It’s no surprise that Eugene Scalia has a long record of representing Big Business at the expense of working people,” said Chris Shelton, president of the Communications Workers of America. “He’s spent his whole career helping Big Business clients shirk their responsibility to treat their workers with respect and dignity.”

As a private-practice partner with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Scalia has represented Chevron, Kraft, Dole, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Viacom, Walmart, and Saudi Arabian oil interests. The nomination fits a pattern of Trump choosing employer minions, unionists say. The billionaire President’s first selection, in 2016, was Andy Puzder, a fast-food executive and critic of raising the minimum wage. After Puzder withdrew following his domestic-violence record, Trump pegged former bank chairman Alex Acosta, who had the position for two years until resigning due to his role as prosecutor in a plea deal for billionaire sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The Labor Department is supposed to safeguard workers and enforce laws enacted for workers’ benefits.

“The ability of everyday people to organize and collectively bargain with employers and others who have power over their economic sustainability is fundamental to a healthy democracy,” said Erica Smiley, Executive Director of the labor coalition Jobs with Justice (JwJ). “The Department of Labor is tasked with upholding this critical practice in a way that allows working people and executives to come to the table and negotiate on equal footing. This includes policies such as insisting employers provide ‘just cause’ when terminating someone to prevent retaliation, taking responsibility for the conditions of employees at all levels of contracting, and supporting workers’ ability to form unions. Any effort to disproportionately favor corporations at the Department of Labor inevitably undermines and erodes our democracy,”

The Senate didn’t confirm Eugene Scalia when George W. Bush nominated him to a Labor Department post in 2001, when the AFL-CIO blasted his “extreme views on key worker protections.” But Bush installed him anyway n a recess appointment. Now, the labor federation says, “He has threatened to destroy workers’ retirement savings [and] challenged the expansion of health care. The Secretary of Labor needs to be a true advocate for working people. Scalia’s views are dangerously outside the mainstream.”

Other labor-rights advocates agree.

David Madland from the Center for American Progress said, “His appointment is part of a larger pattern where Trump clearly goes after workers.”

For example, in 2000 Scalia fought the Occupational Safety and Health Administration when it tried to impose a rule on employers to identify and take responsibility for hazards contributing to repetitive stress injuries, arguing that the science behind prevention was “quackery.” Congress overturned the rule the next year.

In 2006, on behalf of Walmart, Scalia helped the corporate giant beat back a Maryland law requiring the company to spend 8 percent of their payroll costs on health care or pay into Medicaid.

And in 2010, he won a case for the Business Roundtable, a corporate lobby, against the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, which sought financial oversight after 2008’s economic meltdown.

Continuing to seek ways to eliminate regulations and worker protections, the Trump administration already has stacked the National Labor Relations Board with corporate voices, rolled back overtime rules for some workers, and continues to oppose raising the minimum wage. And the anti-worker agenda has Republican support.

“I’m confident he’ll be a champion for working Americans against red tape and burdensome regulation,” said U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).

Still, some remember what the cabinet position is supposed to do.

“The Secretary of Labor has the crucial responsibility of ensuring that employers provide working Americans in the United States with a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, safe and equitable working conditions, and other workplace rights,” added Jessica Felix Romero, JwJ’s Director of Communications. “Working people deserve no less than a champion and an advocate at the Department of Labor.”

Short takes on new Americana music

Bill Knight column for 8-29, 30 or 31, 2019

Capsule reviews can be like speed dating in a bouncy house. They risk insulting artists who spent substantial investments of inspiration, energy and time, but such glimpses also are a way to acknowledge their efforts.

(Likewise, excuse the name-dropping comparisons, but they’re efficient, too.)

Anyway, much of the 4th of July was spent listening to American music – not the John Philip Sousa/Kate Smith variety, but the red-white-and-blue roots music from small-label outfits offering that hardscrabble heart, charm and creativity traced to Appalachia and Texas and a heritage of rank-and-file roadhouse/barn dance expressions.

However, there were few fireworks and not enough hooks – those unforgettable melodies that stay with listeners like summer memories – in these four CDS. An exception is Van Dyke Brown (the alter ego of 40-year-old Scott Hone), whose debut CD “Holy Libel” has an acoustic-oriented sound, but with a pedal steel guitar and a pleasant pop feeling, like CSN&Y when they got along or Paul Simon if he were less pretentious.

“The Fair” launches this ride with a narrative becoming a novella (appropriate since Honea is an author as well as a filmmaker and photojournalist). His word play itself tells stories: “The night I dropped acid and went to the fair/ I spent 36 dollars throwing darts through the air/ for a Motley Crue mirror that would soon need repair / and I laid there knowing I'd never leave there.”

“Sycamore” is a memory of visiting a cemetery close to a family home, seeing June bugs and feeling gravel between the toes and reflecting, “You come and you go, you love and you leave.” “Five Miles” has a more indie/country feel, and “Gary” is a sheer thrill, a track of “Magical Mystery Tour” psychedelia that Honea calls “cosmic folk.”

The rest:

* Chuck Hawthorne’s “Fire Out of Stone,” his second record, is a collection of songs about surviving and healing. His vocals aren’t unlike Bob Dylan in his pre-electric period or maybe Roger Whittaker during the height of his ubiquitous TV commercials in the ’70s and ’80s, and “Such is Life” and “Broken Good” stand out, but a strong theme can unfortunately also result in a thread of sameness.

* Meghan Hayes’ “Seen Enough Leavers” CD photos indicate she went for a forlorn waif-with-an-edge look, but despite that choice, her voice is reminiscent of tender Judy Collins, easygoing Linda Ronstadt or rollicking Alison Krauss. Pointed and pouty on “Burley” and “Potholes,” two other cuts are delightfully incongruous and appealing: “A Birthday in the Pawnshop” is as entertaining as Joni Mitchell jamming with Jimmy Page, and “Second to Last,” though somewhat overproduced, has an organ wash like a Springsteen anthem from the ’80s.

* Rod Picott singing on “Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil” sounds like an accessible Tom Waits, less gruff than gravelly. Recovering from health issues, Picott recorded 12 tunes at home alone, so the sound and sense are as private and casual as time in a confessional. Emotionally charged, but not exactly powerful and certainly draining, the gentle, bleak songs range from whispering asides to poetic images. “A 38 Special & A Hermes Purse” describes “another lost soul waiting to be found” and himself as “a train wreck turning Beaujolais into p**s,” “A Guilty Man” features a provocative simile: “Guilt as strong as gasoline.”

Throughout this batch, there’s a repeated tendency for the poignant slipping to somber to abject anger and outright depression: something like what a wrongfully convicted inmate might feel in prison.

Honea escaped such bondage and celebrates freedom.

Government picks fight with its workers, our neighbors

Bill Knight column for 8-26, 27 or 28, 2019

“Trickle-down” is a phrase noted for its use in the disproven economic theory that enriching the wealthy eventually will help everyone else.

It also can be applied to decisions in Washington that can flow down to the local level like water. It’s easy to take federal workers for granted, reminding one of the lyric, “You don't miss the water 'til the well runs dry” that Harry Belafonte sang in “Crawdad Song.”

That’s true whether it’s President Trump shutting down government or attacking government unions.

Trump in July got the U.S. Court of Appeals in the D.C. Circuit to rule 3-0 that it lacked jurisdiction to block three White House executive orders affecting 2 million federal workers, union and non-union, restricting their rights on the job.

The orders limit subjects of bargaining, let bosses implement rules to fire workers fast and with little right of appeal, throw unions out of their cramped offices in federal buildings – where union reps meet with workers over grievances – and deprive them of phones, computers and even paper.

Changing past practice, Trump also requires union stewards to represent workers in grievances on their own time and at their own expense, prohibits workers from contacting Congress, and compels federal agencies to devise unfavorable contracts with unions.

Despite a lower court judge overturning the orders a year ago, the July decision essentially reinstates Trump’s decrees.

Elsewhere, the Trump administration this summer proposed a rule enabling federal workers to drop union membership – and opt out of paying membership dues – any time after their first year of membership. The new measure would allow supervisors to intimidate or threaten workers to resign from their union, or even refuse to join in the first place, unionists say.

Published in the Federal Register, the proposal follows “Janus v. AFSCME,” the 2018 Supreme Court decision that barred public sector unions from collecting “fair-share dues” from workers who are represented by the union, but who decline membership. The “Janus” suit was funded by Right-wing think tanks.

The proposed rule says it’s “consistent with ‘Janus’ [in that] upon receiving an employee’s request to revoke a previously authorized union dues assignment, an agency should process the request as soon as administratively feasible, if at least one year has passed since the employee initially authorized union-dues assignment from the employee’s pay.”

But the supposed effort to make labor law consistent throughout the public sector is obviously just union-busting.

 “The entire labor movement stands with our dedicated federal workers and will put our full strength behind fighting for the workplace protections all working people deserve,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. “Our voices will not be silenced by concerted union busting.”

J. David Cox, President of the American Federation of Government Employees – representing about 700,000 federal and District of Columbia government workers – said the change is “part of an all-out assault on federal employees’ collective bargaining rights.

“They are throwing out our contracts, enforcing illegal executive orders, and now trying to make it harder for workers to join and stay in the union,” he said. “Their ultimate goal is to destroy federal-sector unions, and we will do everything in our ability to prevent that from happening.

 “The union-busting framework laid out in the executive orders and actions already at the bargaining table demonstrate clearly there must be a check on the president’s power to destroy federal employees’ union rights,” he added.

Such dramatic changes in the terms of employment aren’t confined to Washington, national parks and federal lands, of course. For instance, downstate Illinois’ federal employees, unionized or not, work in:

The Department of Agriculture (Peoria’s “Ag lab”), USDA/Natural Resources & Conservation site in Havana, Coast Guard stations along the Illinois River, Department of Commerce offices, Customs & Border Protection, Federal Aviation Administration, air traffic controllers and TSA workers at airports, Federal Bureau of Investigation employees, Federal Correctional Institute workers (such as the Pekin prison), Federal courts’ staffers, the Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service, the Federal Public Defender offices, Food & Drug Administration locations, the Internal Revenue Service, Justice Department U.S. Attorneys and Marshall Service, Labor’s Wage & Hour Divisions, the National Labor Relations Board regional offices, Occupational Safety & Health Administration sites, Secret Service personnel, the Social Security Administration, and Veterans Administration facilities.

The appeals panel ruled that federal worker-management relations law requires federal employees to first take complaints to the Federal Labor Relations Authority (the U.S. government’s equivalent of the National Labor Relations Board). If they lost there, the unions could then go straight to appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court, the appeals-court judges said.

This latest “trickle-down” trick isn’t abstract or distant. The administration offensive on federal employees affects our neighbors and, ultimately, us.