How Biden Can Raise Some Wages Even if Congress Won't
In its last dying days, the Trump administration is busily at work depriving American workers of rights they previously held. Civil servants are threatened with having their jobs reclassified so Trump can fire them, a threat that encompasses nearly 90 percent of employees at the Office of Management and Budget. Environmental rules that protected those toiling at hazardous work sites have been placed on the chopping block. And workers who receive the tipped-worker minimum wage of $2.13 an hour (or slightly higher in states with their own tipped-worker laws) when they’re actually waiting tables, but the regular federal minimum wage of $7.25 (or the state minimum when it’s higher) when they’re not (as when they’re in the kitchen folding napkins, say), are now threatened by a newly proposed Department of Labor rule. Under that rule, their pay when not engaged in tipped work would spiral down to $2.13 or the state tipped-worker minimum.
These lame-duck cruelties, should these rule changes be finalized before Trump decamps for Mar-a-Lago, could be reversed by the next Congress. Under the terms of the Congressional Review Act, Congress has the authority to roll back such changes during the first 60 days of its next session. Should the Republicans retain control of the Senate, however, such reversals aren’t likely.
The Deeper Poverty for Restaurant Workers rule is currently under review by OMB political appointees, not the endangered civil servants. But it originated in Trump’s lame-duck Department of Labor. “My understanding,” says one DOL insider, “is that [Labor Secretary Eugene] Scalia has been relying on political appointees from the department’s Wage and Hour Division, the department’s solicitor’s office, and the secretary’s office, with most career appointees frozen out of the process.”
This stands to reason, since the Wage and Hour Division’s civil servants did the work—researching tipped workers’ incomes, refining a proposal entitling them to more than the $2.13 when not doing tipped work, soliciting public comments on that rule, and then finalizing and publicizing it—to establish the rule that Trump’s appointed minions are now endeavoring to strike down.
Read more: https://prospect.org/day-one-agenda/how-biden-can-raise-some-wages-even-if-congress-wont/
(American Prospect)
