On Wednesday, President Donald Trump said he had revoked a six-decade-old executive order designed to combat workplace discrimination and promote affirmative action among federal contractors, undoing a labor standard that stretches back to the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The rule Trump nuked, Executive Order 11246, forbade federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity. It granted the Labor Department the power to enforce its provisions through a contracting standards office.
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Judy Conti, government affairs director at the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group, said Trump had stripped away a “key tool” in combating discrimination.
“This is not a return to so-called ‘meritocracy,’” Conti said in a statement. “Rather, it’s an attempted return to the days when people of color, women, and other marginalized people lacked the tools to ensure that they were evaluated on their merits.”
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