Trump's war on worker safety

[DonViejo]

'We want to protect our workers,' Trump said in 2017. But his administration has weakened measures designed to keep them safe.

By IAN KULLGREN 09/03/2018 08:23 AM EDT

When President Donald Trump came into office pledging to cut regulations “massively,” he made a point of exempting regulations that protected workers’ health.

But almost two years in, the Trump administration has done the opposite, rolling back worker safety protections affecting underground mine safety inspections, offshore oil rigs and line speeds in meat processing plants, among others.

Trump's deregulatory moves on worker safety are at odds with his public stance as a champion of working class Americans, but consistent with his naming two management-side attorneys bent on rolling back economic protections for workers to the National Labor Relations Board, which regulates labor unions, and with his nominations of two reliably pro-management jurists to a now-Republican-majority Supreme Court that recently dealt a heavy financial blow to public-employee unions.

One of those Supreme Court nominees, Brett Kavanaugh, will on Tuesday begin Senate confirmation hearings, where Judiciary Committee Democrats will almost certainly quiz him about dissenting opinions in which he denied undocumented workers had the right to bargain collectively and that San Diego's Sea World bore responsibility for a deadly attack on one of its employees by a killer whale.

“When you look at core worker protections and union rights, the administration and the president have been totally anti-worker,” said Peg Seminario, director of occupational safety and health for the AFL-CIO.

more
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/03/trumps-worker-safety-regulations-protections-unions-806008

[Ohiogal]

1. An important and timely article for Labor Day.

[Omaha Steve]

2. Ding ding ding