Pullback on “joint employers” rules blasted. The AFL-CIO is criticizing a Trump administration Labor Department pullback of how to interpret who “joint employers” are.
DOL yanked an interpretation of the law by David Weil, the Wage and Hour Administrator during the Obama administration. He noted the law is broad and should be interpreted that way to cover as many workers as possible – and to prevent labor law-breaking.
DOL said it’s yanking Weil’s 15-page memo on how to interpret and enforce the rule. DOL also pulled a second Weil memo on how the agency worked with states and federal agencies to crack down on company misclassification of workers as “independent contractors.” Such misclassification deprives workers of Social Security coverage, workers’ comp benefits, other wage and hour law coverage and labor law protection.
“Although independent contracting relationships can be advantageous for workers and businesses, some employees may be intentionally misclassified as a means to cut costs and avoid compliance with labor laws,” Weil said then. He used similar language in the joint employer memo.
Income inequality threatens democracy worldwide, Trumka says. Widening income inequality here and abroad threatens democracy, just as it did in the 1930s, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said last month at an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) meeting in Paris.
“Please understand, the alternative to addressing wage stagnation and the status of working people in the global economy is not more of the same elite-dominated globalization,” Trumka said. “The alternative is an escalating crisis where the false promises of authoritarianism and racism threaten to overwhelm the democratic ideal.”
If OECD nations, including the United States, don’t address the crisis, democracy is endangered because its economic underpinning is endangered, he warned.
Unions, retiree groups are gearing up against GOP health care bill. The nation’s two big retiree groups, the labor-backed Alliance for Retired Americans and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), are joining forces with organized labor to defeat Congress’ ruling Republicans’ health-care bill. The Senate is now the battle scene.
And with several GOP senators expressing doubts about the measure and its impact on their constituents, unionists and their allies have a shot at beating it – even if Senate Republicans write their own version.
The House bill would strip health coverage from about 24 million people and cause huge, and often unaffordable, premium increases for millions more, analysts say.
“House Republicans succeeded in making a very bad health care bill even worse,” said AARP Director Richard Fiesta. “Access to health care is a right, not a privilege.”
The GOP measure not only does not cut health care costs or ensure universal coverage, but hurts people with pre-existing conditions – an estimated 84 percent of everyone aged 55-64, Fiesta noted. It also would let insurers charge older Americans – those not covered by Medicare or Medicaid – five times as much as other people, he added.
Ex-Massey CEO Blankenship freed, blames others for fatal Upper Big Branch blast. No sooner did Don Blankenship, former CEO of Massey Coal Company, leave federal prison after serving a year for violating mine safety laws – violations that led to the fatal explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine seven years ago — than he started blaming almost everyone else. The sole exception: the 29 victims.
Blankenship was convicted in federal court in West Virginia of willfully conspiring to violate federal mine safety laws. Sentenced to prison and fined $250,000, Blankenship wants the GOP Trump administration to reopen the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s probe, which start once Trump “gets the union mindset” out of MSHA. Former Mine Workers Safety and Health Director Joe Main, an Obama administration appointee, headed MSHA then.
University of Chicago TAs, RAs, library workers seek union votes. Graduate-student teaching assistants and research assistants at the University of Chicago filed union-election recognition cards with the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board which also received cards from an undergrad unit of University of Chicago library workers.
The grad-student vote is another milestone in organizing drives by the teachers at private colleges nationwide. The University of Chicago’s 2,000-plus TAs and RAs are in Grad Students United and have campaigned for a union for a decade. The 174 undergrads seek a vote to join Teamsters Local 743. The two elections are expected this summer.
Congress’ Progressive Caucus elects union member co-chair. Members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, workers’ most-reliable backers in the GOP-run U.S. House, have elected union member Mark Pocan, a painter and a Democrat from Madison, Wis., as their new co-chair.
“It is my goal to help make the Congressional Progressive Caucus the voice of the resistance,” Pocan said. “I will continue to fight for the kitchen-table issues we all care about and put forward pragmatic, progressive policies to combat Donald Trump and Paul Ryan’s radical agenda.”
News briefs courtesy of The Labor Paper