Hiltzik: Trump makes a good pick for his Cabinet

Dear readers: Hang on to your hats. I’m about to praise Donald Trump for one of his Cabinet nominees.

She’s Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.), who will be the nominee for secretary of Labor.

Chavez-DeRemer has solid pro-labor credentials, a huge departure from the two men who served Trump as secretaries of Labor in his first term. She was one of only three Republicans in the House to vote in favor of the so-called PRO Act, which would significantly strengthen collective bargaining rights. (The measure passed the House in 2019 and 2021 but has been becalmed in committee during the current Congress.)

During her last electoral campaign she promoted herself as the daughter of a Teamsters union member; that might have been connected to her strong endorsement for the Cabinet post by Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, one of the very few major labor leaders who favored the Republicans during the presidential campaign, to the extent of speaking from the podium at the Republican National Convention in July.

Chavez-DeRemer is a one-term Republican member of Congress who lost her bid for reelection last month to Democrat Janelle Bynum. Her loss wasn’t much of a surprise: Her congressional district has been a solid Democratic stronghold for more than a decade, and she won election in 2022 by only two percentage points.

Labor activists and pro-labor politicians promptly announced support for Chavez-DeRemer after Trump announced her nomination on Nov. 22. Among those making positive noises about the nominee was the staunchly pro-labor Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

“It’s a big deal that one of the few Republican lawmakers who have endorsed the PRO Act could lead the Department of Labor,” Warren said. “If Chavez-DeRemer commits as Labor secretary to strengthen labor unions and promote worker power, she’s a strong candidate for the job.”

Chavez-DeRemer received an explicit endorsement from Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “Her record suggests real support of workers & their right to unionize,” Weingarten tweeted. “I hope it means the Trump admin will actually respect collective bargaining and workers’ voices from Teamsters to teachers.”

The labor-affiliated Economic Policy Institute also offered encouraging words, citing Chavez-DeRemer’s support for the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would protect organizing and collective bargaining rights for government employees.

“While Congresswoman Chavez-DeRemer’s support for these needed reforms is encouraging,” EPI general counsel Celine McNicholas wrote, “if confirmed, she will be Secretary of Labor for a president who steadfastly pursued an ambitious anti-worker agenda during his first term in office.”

Another indicator of Chavez-DeRemer’s pro-labor outlook is the bilious reaction from anti-labor conservatives and Republicans to her nomination. Much of that opposition has been focused on her support of the PRO Act. Among other provisions, the act would override state right-to-work laws, racist and anti-union statutes that are common in southeastern and heartland states.

“In this woman’s America, every worker would have to have a boss and pay the union for the privilege of working,” said Grover Norquist, the right-wing anti-tax warrior. The New York Post, a mouthpiece for Rupert Murdoch, quoted an anonymous GOP insider labeling Chavez-DeRemer “toxic for so many Republicans.”

Indeed, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) tweeted that he would “need to get a better understanding of her support for Democrat legislation in Congress that would strip Louisiana’s ability to be a right to work state.”

As McNicholas observed, the chief challenge for Chavez-DeRemer if she’s confirmed may be navigating the shoals of an anti-labor Trump administration. During his first term, he turned the Department of Labor into something that more resembled a Department of Employer Rights.

That was especially true under his second Labor secretary, Eugene Scalia —the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who had made a career as a lawyer for big corporations resisting labor regulations. (Scalia succeeded Alex Acosta, who resigned as Labor secretary when a furor arose over the solicitous plea deal he had reached with child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in 2008 when he was a U.S. attorney in Florida.)

Trump pursued what economics commentator Pedro Nicolaci da Costa called “the most hostile anti-labor agenda of any modern president” in 2019. He overturned an Obama administration rule on overtime pay that eliminated overtime protection for an estimated 8.2 million workers. The Biden administration tried to restore much of that protection, but its effort was blocked by a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas.

Through changes to the National Labor Relations Board, Trump reversed the board’s trend toward expanding the definition of “joint employer,” which would have made big franchisers such as McDonald’s jointly liable with their franchisees for violations of employees’ wage and hour rights. He rescinded the Obama-era “persuader” rule, which required employers to disclose their relationships with union-busting law firms.

Amazingly, Trump’s Labor Department fought legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour from its woefully outdated $7.25. (The federal minimum wage is still mired at $7.25.)

Among the challenges facing Chavez-DeRemer would be a tough comparison with the labor policies of the Biden administration, who has been the most pro-labor president in decades, possibly ever. In an unprecedented move, Biden walked a United Auto Workers picket line in 2023 while the union was negotiating what became a landmark contract with major automakers.

Trump had tried to counter Biden’s appearance by staging a rally at a nonunion auto parts factory, but it was shortly revealed that some of the workers brandishing signs reading “union members for Trump” and “auto workers for Trump” weren’t actually union members or auto workers.

Promptly after taking office, Biden swept a gang of union-busting Trump appointees out of an important federal labor relations agency — the Federal Service Impasses Panel, which rules on disputes between labor and management involving government union contracts. Trump had stacked the 10-member panel with professional union busters and anti-union ideologues, including corporate lawyers and officials from Koch network-funded right-wing organizations. Eight of the 10 resigned under pressure; Biden fired the two holdouts.

The Democratic majorities Biden assembled at the National Labor Relations Board and Federal Trade Commission drafted and implemented pro-worker policies. The Labor Department revived enforcement of overtime and worker safety laws, which had grown cobwebs under Trump.

Biden didn’t get everything he wanted on the labor front. The Federal Trade Commission, headed by Biden appointee Lina Khan, crafted a rule to ban noncompete clauses in employment contracts, which tend to suppress wages and innovation, but the rule was blocked by another Trump-appointed federal judge this summer just days before it was scheduled to take effect.

The Senate confirmations of two superbly qualified Biden nominees for top posts at the Labor Department were blocked by a Big Business cabal allied with not only Republicans but supine Democrats including Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. (Manchin and Sinema subsequently changed their party affiliations from Democratic to independent, but continued to caucus with the Democrats. Neither will be in the Senate after their current terms end this year.)

Ferocious opposition from business interests forced David Weil, an expert in labor law and all the ways employers cheat their workers of wages, to withdraw his name from consideration as head of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division in 2022.

The same cabal denied confirmation of Julie Su, a stalwart and exceptionally effective advocate for worker rights throughout a professional career that included service as California Labor Commissioner, as successor to Biden’s first Labor secretary, Marty Walsh. Su has been serving as acting secretary since Walsh’s departure in February 2023.

Many Biden administration policies are likely to be rolled back in the new administration, just as Trump in his first term rolled back Obama’s pro-labor policies. These efforts will be test cases for Chavez-DeRemer’s independence from the worst instincts of her boss and his inner circle.

EPI’s McNicholas points to several issues that worker and union advocates will be watching closely. Will she fight to defend the Biden administration’s expansion of overtime eligibility? The Trump administration could act to challenge the court ruling that blocked the expansion, or let it ride. Will she act to preserve the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s new standard requiring employers to protect workers from heat-related injuries?

Will she fight any effort to reimplement a Trump-era program that gave employers a free pass if they confessed when accused of wage theft, in which case penalties and damage assessments were waived?

“Chavez-DeRemer should make it harder for employers to steal workers’ wages,” McNicholas argued, “not easier.”