As a presidential candidate last fall, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to battle for US workers, but ever since he returned to the White House, he has taken a surprisingly large number of anti-worker actions, labor experts say. Some of those moves, among them hobbling the National Labor Relations Board, will help Trump’s billionaire business friends, most notably Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
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“Donald Trump is showing that his promises to be a champion of workers are hollow,” said Judy Conti, government affairs director of the National Employment Law Project, a worker advocacy group. “He surrounds himself with people who are anti-worker. He has a history of being anti-worker, but he tries to put a nice face on it. He says he’s a champion of workers. He’s just not.”
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Trump also fired two EEOC commissioners, Charlotte Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels, leaving it too without a quorum. He also fired members of two boards that hear cases in which federal employees assert they have been improperly fired or treated: the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Federal Labor Relations Authority.
“All of these are agencies where workers who believe their rights have been violated can go to get remedies,” said Conti of the National Employment Law Project. “They’re essentially freezing the ability of these boards to remedy workers’ problems.”
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Conti defended the federal government’s longtime effort to promote workforce diversity. “It is to promote true, full meritocracy,” Conti said. “It is not about quotas. It is not about not hiring white people. It is about removing the barriers that people of color, women, LGBTQ and other disadvantaged people face to compete for jobs for which they are qualified.
“What people need to know,” Conti continued, “is this is not some sort of targeted campaign against employment practices that have gone too far. It is a broad-based campaign to roll back our country’s civil rights protections. Full stop.”
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Read the full article at theguardian.com.
