Christine Owens, executive director at the National Employment Law Project, issued the following statement:
“The Trump Administration is approaching a new low in terms of its attack on workers. The regulatory roadmap it released today promises to extend its almost year-long trail of broken promises to working people.
“The Labor Department’s Fall Regulatory Agenda is a plan to cut pay for working people, endanger their health and safety in workplaces across numerous industries, and take away vital safeguards that enable consumers to make informed investments to build and protect their retirement savings. In particular, the Trump Administration is proposing to continue its efforts to undermine the overtime, beryllium, injury and illness tracking, and conflict of interest (or fiduciary) rules, gutting protections for workers and retirement savers who need every dollar they can get and who count on OSHA to make sure their jobs are safe and healthy. The rules that this agenda seeks to undermine – and the rights it seeks to take away from working people – grew out of dozens of stakeholder meetings with DOL and OMB, hundreds of thousands of public comments, and careful review of reams of economic analysis. In proposal after proposal, the Trump Administration is struggling – and usually failing – to find valid reasons to reconsider these well-designed, well-settled rules.
“In fact, the Trump Administration is using its corporate-backed two-for-one executive order to direct the DOL to cut nearly $2 billion in present value regulatory costs, or $137 million in annualized costs – more than any other government agency except the Department of the Interior. That ‘cost savings’ translates to less money, less protection, and less security for our nation’s workers.
“Actions speak louder than words, and the Fall Regulatory Agenda shows yet again that the Trump Administration is acting to elevate corporate and financial industry interests, boost corporate profits and enrich corporate insiders. It’s yet another example of how the Trump Administration has turned its back on working people and made their interests last, not first, as the president initially promised.”
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