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REPUBLICANS HAVE PLANS FOR WORKING PEOPLE  
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Rebecca Gordon
April 9, 2024
Tom Dispatch
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_ And You’re Not Going to Like Them _

Members of the United Steelworkers and AFL-CIO rally for public
employees., AP/Gene J. Puskar

 

Recently, you may have noticed that the hot weather is getting ever
hotter. Every year the United States swelters under warmer
temperatures and longer periods of sustained heat. In fact, each of
the last nine months — May 2023 through February 2024 — set a
world record
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for heat. As I’m writing this, March still has a couple of days to
go, but likely as not, it, too, will set a record.

Such heat poses increasing health hazards for many groups: the old,
the very young, those of us who don’t have access to air
conditioning. One group, however, is at particular risk: people whose
jobs require lengthy exposure to heat. Numbers from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics show that about 40 workers died of heat exposure
between 2011 and 2021, although, as CNN reports
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that’s probably a significant undercount. In February 2024,
responding to this growing threat, a coalition of 10 state attorneys
general petitioned
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the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to
implement “a nationwide extreme heat emergency standard” to
protect workers from the kinds of dangers that last year killed, among
others, construction workers, farm workers, factory workers, and at
least one employee who was laboring in an unairconditioned area of a
warehouse in Memphis, Tennessee.

Facing the threat of overweening government interference from OSHA or
state regulators, two brave Republican-run state governments have
stepped in to protect employers from just such dangerous oversight.
Florida and Texas
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have both passed laws prohibiting localities from mandating
protections like rest breaks for, or even having to provide drinking
water to, workers in extreme heat situations. Seriously, Florida and
Texas have made it illegal for local cities to protect their workers
from the direct effects of climate change. Apparently, being
“woke” includes an absurd desire not to see workers die of heat
exhaustion.

And those state laws are very much in keeping with the plans that the
national right-wing has for workers, should the wholly-owned Trump
subsidiary that is today’s Republican Party take control of the
federal government this November.

WE’VE GOT A PLAN FOR THAT!

It’s not exactly news that conservatives, who present themselves as
the friends of working people, often support policies that threaten
not only workers’ livelihoods, but their very lives. This fall, as
we face the most consequential elections of my lifetime (all 71 years
of it), rights that working people once upon a time fought and died
for [[link removed]] — the
eight-hour day, a legal minimum wage, protections against child labor
— are, in effect, back on the ballot. The people preparing for a
second Trump presidency aren’t hiding their intentions either.
Anyone can discover them, for instance, in the Heritage Foundation’s
well-publicized Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership
[[link removed]], a “presidential transition”
plan that any future Trump administration is expected to put into
operation.

As I’ve written before
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the _New York Times_’s Carlos Lozada did us a favor
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by working his way through all 887 pages of that tome of future
planning. Lacking his stamina, I opted for a deep dive into a single
chapter
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of it focused on the “Department of Labor and Related Agencies.”
Its modest 35 pages offer a plan to thoroughly dismantle more than a
century of workers’ achievements in the struggle for both dignity
and simple on-the-job survival.

FIRST UP: STOP DISCRIMINATING AGAINST DISCRIMINATORS

I’m sure you won’t be shocked to learn that the opening salvo of
that chapter is an attack on federal measures to reduce employment
discrimination based on race or sex. Its author, Jonathan Berry
[[link removed]] of the Federalist
Society, served in Donald Trump’s Department of Labor (DOL). He
begins his list of “needed reforms” with a call to “Reverse the
DEI Revolution in Labor Policy.” “Under the Obama and Biden
Administrations,” Berry explains, “labor policy was yet another
target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution”
under which “every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with
which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate
against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and
others, including pro-life views.”

You may wonder what it means to advance “classifications” or why
that’s even a problem. Berry addresses this question in his second
“necessary” reform, a call to “Eliminate Racial Classifications
and Critical Race Theory Trainings.” Those two targets for
elimination would seem to carry very different weight. After all,
“Critical Race Theory,” or CRT, is right-wing code for the view
that structural barriers exist preventing African Americans and other
people of color from enjoying the full rights of citizens or
residents. It’s unclear that such “trainings” even occur at the
Labor Department, under CRT or any other label, so their
“elimination” would, in fact, have little impact on workers.

On the other hand, the elimination of “racial classifications”
would be consequential for many working people, as Berry makes clear.
“The Biden Administration,” he complains, “has pushed ‘racial
equity’ in every area of our national life, including in employment,
and has condoned the use of racial classifications and racial
preferences under the guise of DEI and critical race theory, which
categorizes individuals as oppressors and victims based on race.”
Pushing racial equity in employment? The horror!

Berry’s characterization of CRT is, in fact, the opposite of what
critical race theory seeks to achieve. This theoretical approach to
the problem of racism does not categorize _individuals_ at all, but
instead describes _structures —_ like corporate hiring practices
based on friendship networks — that can disadvantage _groups_ of
people of a particular race. In fact, CRT describes self-sustaining
systems that do not need individual oppressors to continue
(mal)functioning.

The solution to the problem of discrimination in employment in Project
2025’s view is to deny the existence of race (or sex, or sexual
orientation) as a factor in the lives of people in this country.
It’s simple enough: if there’s no race, then there’s no racial
discrimination. Problem solved.

And to ensure that it remains solved, Project 2025 would prohibit the
Equal Economic Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, from collecting
employment data based on race. The mere existence of such “data can
then be used to support a charge of discrimination under a disparate
impact theory. This could lead to racial quotas to remedy alleged race
discrimination.” In other words, if you can’t demonstrate racial
discrimination in employment (because you’re enjoined from
collecting data on the subject), then there’s no racial
discrimination to remedy. Case closed, right?

By outlawing such data collection, a Republican administration guided
by Project 2025 would make it almost impossible to demonstrate the
existence of racial disparity in the hiring, retention, promotion, or
termination of employees.

Right-wingers in my state of California tried something similar in
2003 with Ballot Proposition 54, known as the Racial Privacy
Initiative
[[link removed]].
In addition to employment data, Prop. 54 would have outlawed
collecting racial data about public education and, no less crucially,
about policing. As a result, Prop. 54 would have made it almost
impossible for civil rights organizations to address the danger of
“driving while Black” — the disproportionate likelihood
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that Black people will be the subject of traffic stops with the
attendant risk of police violence or even death
[[link removed]]. Voters soundly
defeated Prop. 54 by a vote of 64% to 36% and, yes, racial
discrimination still exists in California, but at least we have access
to the data to prove it.

There is, however, one group of people Project 2025 would emphatically
protect from discrimination: employers who, because of their
“conservative and religious viewpoints… including pro-life
views,” want the right to discriminate against women and LGBTQ
people. “The President,” writes Berry, “should make clear via
executive order that religious employers are free to run their
businesses according to their religious beliefs, general
nondiscrimination laws notwithstanding.” Of course, Congress already
made it clear that, under Title VII of the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act of 1993, “religious” employers are free to ignore
anti-discrimination laws when it suits them.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

Not content with gutting anti-discrimination protections, Project 2025
would also seek to rescind rights secured under the Fair Labor
Standards Act, or FLSA, which workers have enjoyed for many decades.
Originally passed in 1938, the FLSA “establishes minimum wage,
overtime pay, recordkeeping, and child labor standards affecting
full-time and part-time workers in the private sector and in Federal,
State, and local governments,” according to the Department of Labor.
[[link removed]]

Perhaps because the federal minimum hourly wage has remained stuck at
$7.25 for a decade and a half, Project 2025 doesn’t launch the
typical conservative attack on the very concept of such a wage. It
does, however, go after overtime pay (generally time-and-a-half for
more than 40 hours of work a week), by proposing that employers be
allowed to average time worked over a longer period. This would
supposedly be a boon for workers, granting them the “flexibility”
to labor fewer than 40 hours one week and more than 40 the next,
without an employer having to pay overtime compensation for that
second week. What such a change would actually do, of course, is give
an employer the power to require overtime work during a crunch period
while reducing hours at other times, thereby avoiding paying overtime
often or at all.

Another supposedly family-friendly proposal would allow workers to
choose to take their overtime compensation as paid time off, rather
than in dollars and cents. Certainly, any change that would reduce
workloads sounds enticing. But as the Pew Research Center reports
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more than 40% of workers can’t afford to, and don’t, take all
their paid time off now, so this measure could function as yet one
more way to reduce the overtime costs of employers.

In contrast to the Heritage Foundation’s scheme, Senator Bernie
Sanders has proposed a genuinely family-friendly workload reduction
plan: a gradual diminution of the standard work week from 40 to 32
hours at the same pay. Such proposals have been around (and ridiculed)
for decades, but this one is finally receiving serious consideration
in places like the _New York Times_
[[link removed]].

In deference to the supposedly fierce spirit of “worker
independence,” Project 2025 would also like to see many more workers
classified not as employees at all but as independent contractors. And
what would such workers gain from that “independence”? Well, as a
start, freedom from those pesky minimum wage and overtime compensation
regulations, not to speak of the loss of protections like disability
insurance. And they’d be “free” to pay the whole tab (15.3% of
their income) for their Social Security and Medicare taxes, unlike
genuine employees, whose employers pick up half the cost.

Young people, too, would acquire more “independence” thanks to
Project 2025 — at least if what they want to do is work in more
dangerous jobs where they are presently banned. As Berry explains:

“Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs.
Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is
running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in
worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise
interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job.”

The operative word here is “adults.” In fact, no laws presently
exclude adults from hazardous work based on age. What Berry is talking
about is allowing _adolescents_ to perform such labor. Duvan Tomás
Pérez, for instance, was a 16-year-old who showed just such an
“interest” in an inherently dangerous job: working at a poultry
plant in Mississippi, where he died
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in an industrial accident. The middle schooler, a Guatemalan immigrant
who had lived in the United States for six years, was employed
illegally by the Mar-Jac Poultry company. If there are “worker
shortages in dangerous fields,” it’s because adults don’t want
to take the risks. The solution is to make the work less dangerous for
everyone, not to hire children to do it.

WE’RE GONNA ROLL THE UNION OVER

Mind you, much to the displeasure of Project 2025 types, this country
is experiencing a renaissance of union organizing. Companies that long
thought they could avoid unionization, from Amazon
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my own world of higher education, new unions are popping up and
established ones are demonstrating renewed vigor in both private
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and public
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universities. As the bumper-sticker
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puts it, unions are “the folks who brought you the weekend.”
They’re the reason we have laws on wages and hours, not to speak of
on-the-job protections. So, it should be no surprise that Project 2025
wants to reduce the power of unions in a number of ways, including:

* Amending the National Labor Relations Act to allow “Employee
Involvement Organizations” to supplant unions. Such
“worker-management councils” are presently forbidden for good
reason. They replace real unions that have the power to bargain for
wages and working conditions with toothless pseudo-unions.

* Ending the use of “card-checks” and requiring elections to
certify union representation. At the moment, the law still permits a
union to present signed union-support cards from employees to the
National Labor Relations Board and the employer. If both entities
agree, the union wins legal recognition. The proposed change would
make it significantly harder for unions to get certified, especially
because cards can be collected without the employer’s knowledge,
whereas a public election with a long lead time gives the employer
ample scope for anti-union organizing activities, both legal and
otherwise.

* Allowing individual states to opt out of labor protections granted
under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations
Act.

The measures covered here are, believe it or not, just the highlights
of that labor chapter of Project 2025. If put into practice, they
would be an historically unprecedented dream come true for employers,
and a genuine nightmare for working people.

Meanwhile, at the Trumpified and right-wing-dominated Supreme Court,
there are signs
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that some justices are interested in entertaining a case brought by
Elon Musk’s SpaceX
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that could abolish the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the
federal entity that adjudicates most labor disputes involving federal
law. Without the NLRB, legal protections for workers, especially
organizing or organized workers, would lose most of their bite.
Despite the court’s claim to pay no attention to public opinion, its
justices would certainly take note of a resounding defeat of Donald
Trump, the Republicans, and Project 2025 at the polls.

A NEW “CONTRACT ON AMERICA?”

The last time the right wing was this organized was probably back in
1994, when Newt Gingrich published
[[link removed]] his “Contract
with America.” Some of us were so appalled by its contents that we
referred to it as a plan for a gangster hit, a “Contract _on
_America.”

This year, they’re back with a vengeance. All of which is to say
that if you work for a living, or if you know and love people who do,
there’s a lot on the line in this year’s election. We can’t sit
this one out.

Copyright 2024 Rebecca Gordon

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* Republican Attack on Workers' Rights; Attack on NLRB; Company
Unions;
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