On it! That’s the mantra and marching order at NELP these days, whether before the Labor Department, Congress, or the courts.
We’re on it, deploying our legal, policy, and advocacy tools to fight efforts to cut workers’ pay, gut health and safety protections, undermine workers’ retirement security, block workers’ access to the courts, and weaken workers’ organizing rights.
Driven internally by our legal and federal advocacy teams, including Senior Counsel (former Labor Solicitor) Patricia Smith, NELP’s leadership over this tumultuous year has helped secure important and unexpected results:
- Withdrawal of the nomination of fast food magnate Andy Puzder to be labor secretary.
- Labor Department appeal of a Texas judge’s ruling invalidating the new overtime rule.
- Labor Department implementation of core requirements of the Obama era fiduciary rule.
- Quashing of a Trump budget proposal that would essentially eliminate OFCCP, undermining federal contractor affirmative action obligations.
We’re still on it, working to:
- Preserve a strong joint employer standard, advocating in Congress, in briefs, and in the media to hold companies accountable for the working conditions they control.
- Block the corporate campaign to deny workers’ access to the courts, by requiring workers to agree to mandatory arbitration and waiver of class claims.
- Create the administrative record we’ll need to defend the Obama overtime rule (establishing a $47,476 salary threshold) against a new rulemaking challenge.
- Block USDA approval of a “line speed” petition that would let poultry companies require workers to process 175 chickens per minute, threatening their health and consumers’ health, too.
- Convince the Labor Department, through agency comments and litigation support, to defend the fiduciary rule and implement its enforcement mechanisms.
- Protect the EEOC’s 2012 landmark guidance on the use of criminal records in employment against a challenge led by the state of Texas.
- Maintain strong protections against workplace carcinogens, through comments challenging any agency action to narrow the scope of OSHA’s new beryllium rule in covered industries;
- Torpedo any Labor Department changes to tip credit rules that would shift ownership of tips to employers and away from the workers who earned them.
