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Donald Trump: A Year of Making Workplaces More Dangerous
Wikimedia Commons
It has been a year since Donald Trump took office. Despite promising to be a friend of workers, Trump has spent much of his first year making our workplaces less safe.
AFL-CIO Director of Safety and Health Peg Seminario described Trump's actions:
The Trump administration has teamed up with Republican leaders in Congress and corporate allies to launch a war on regulatory protections, putting workers and the public in danger. Workers’ safety and health, wages and financial security are threatened. These regulatory protections don’t kill jobs. But there is no doubt that rolling back these protections will hurt workers.
Here are some of the ways Trump's record on health and safety has failed working people in the United States:
Repealed an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule requiring employers to keep accurate injury records (PL-115-21).
Repealed the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule to make sure federal contractors follow safety and labor laws (PL-115-11).
Repealed Department of Labor rules providing...
Bill Cosby faces retrial in April on charges he drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand in 2004.
Bill Cosby faces retrial in April on charges he drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand in 2004.
More U.S. kids are getting their full series of vaccines, but more and more parents are also refusing vaccinations, new health insurance data show.
"I'm still trying to process it," military veteran Helen Grace James said upon receiving the long-awaited news.
"I'm still trying to process it," military veteran Helen Grace James said upon receiving the long-awaited news.
Outgoing NLRB Chair Miscimarra Leads Attack on Working People's Rights
On Dec. 16, 2017, National Labor Relations Board Chair Philip Miscimarra’s term came to an end. In the final days before the end of his term, a series of 3-2 decisions were handed down that were unprecedented in several respects, not the least among them was the extent that the decisions will harm working people.
What the board did during this time wasn’t normal. The decisions were all of great importance, they all reversed recent precedent, and they were issued without public notice or the ability for affected parties to weigh in with arguments or evidence. In several of the cases, the NLRB went far outside the facts of the case and applied the law to other situations, including to both pending cases and other cases that may come before the board. In one case, the board addressed a question that neither party to the case raised. And, not least of all, two members of the NLRB, William Emanuel and Marvin Kaplan, only served on the board for a few months each before casting deciding votes in significant decisions without the benefit of briefing by all interested members...
A Franklin County, Ohio, sheriff's deputy fired a shot after allegedly being attacked by family members as a teen was court, and the 16-year-old was struck.
When CEOs Say 'Do No Harm' in NAFTA, They Mean 'Don’t Harm Me'
AFL-CIO
We keep hearing CEOs of global companies and giant agribusiness conglomerates say “do no harm” in the North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations, but from the perspective of working families who haven’t had a raise in the past 20 years, this advice doesn’t make any sense.
NAFTA continues to hurt families across the United States, Canada and Mexico, pushing down our wages, making it harder to join together in union, and making us constantly vulnerable to losing our jobs due to outsourcing. NAFTA threatens our health and undermines democracy. It forces our governments to pay off private companies like Exxon Mobil that object to laws and rules created in a democratic fashion. So how could any rational person say that fixing NAFTA would be "harmful"?
It’s true that the negotiations could make NAFTA more like the Trans-Pacific Partnership—and that would be extremely harmful. But big businesses liked TPP, so that’s not what they mean.
To understand what they mean, let’s use an analogy, comparing North America's economy to the human body...
Let’s Rebuild the Middle Class by Rebuilding Our Infrastructure
The Biden Forum
The middle class has been on a steady slide for decades. Signs of this slide are all around us: anemic wage growth, historic income inequality, chronic unemployment and underemployment and, not coincidentally, the steady erosion of workers’ freedom to join unions and bargain for fair wages and benefits. At the same time, American households are facing rising costs that far outpace their stagnant wages. The result is that tens of millions of Americans are stuck in middling jobs that cannot support a family, while a select few enjoy the benefits of rampant inequality.
As we live through this era of severely concentrated wealth at the top, coupled with a flood of low-wage jobs, our elected representatives have failed to come together to enact solutions to this imbalanced economy. In particular, they have not been able to advance one strategy that provides quality middle-class jobs while easing the burden on families: rebuilding American infrastructure.
Our infrastructure failings are epic. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)...
