Labor Department

Biden administration weeks behind on Covid-19 workplace safety rules

The federal worker safety watchdog is weeks behind on President Joe Biden’s deadline for the agency to issue mandatory workplace safety rules that experts say will fight the spread of the coronavirus and protect workers. Shortly after taking office, Biden gave the Labor Department a March 15 deadline to decide whether such emergency rules were …

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Can a Federal Job Guarantee Unite the Left?

As left-wing economic policy proposals go, a federal job guarantee has never quite reached prime time status, despite the fact that the underlying idea has been around since at least 1944, when President Franklin Roosevelt proposed it as part of his ?“Economic Bill of Rights.” Now, with Democrats in control of the federal government and as the nation tries to …

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Biden picks Boston Mayor Marty Walsh for labor secretary

President-elect Joe Biden is nominating Boston Mayor Marty Walsh for labor secretary. Walsh’s history with labor goes back to his early 20s, when he joined Laborers’ Union Local 223 in Boston, a union to which his father had long belonged, and one later headed by his uncle and then by Marty himself, who went on to …

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‘Yet another major, ideologically driven last-minute rule change’ from Team Trump

Donald Trump began his time in the White House by dismantling as many Obama-era regulations and rules as he could—ones that protected workers, or the environment, or consumers. Now he’s ending his time in the White House by rushing to lock in as many avenues for discrimination and pollution as possible. The Labor Department has just finalized …

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Labor Department reports 36.5 million unemployment claims over 2 months

Thursday’s report brought the eight-week total of coronavirus-induced layoffs to 36.5 million. Workers filed nearly 3 million new unemployment claims last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday, signaling that a wave of coronavirus-induced layoffs is continuing as the country struggles to reopen for business. The latest number, which covers the week ending May 9, pushed …

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’No words for this’: 10 million workers file jobless claims in just two weeks

Unemployment claims soared to a record-smashing 6.6million last week, the Labor Department reported, more than double the previous week, signaling more economic pain from the coronavirus pandemic. The rush to claim unemployment benefits occurred as the number of people testing positive for the coronavirus rose above 200,000 and government measures to contain the epidemic shut down increasing …

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Trump’s Labor Dept. Has Declared War on Tipped Workers

In October, the Trump administration published a proposed rule regarding tips which, if finalized, will cost workers more than $700 million annually. It is yet another example of the Trump administration using the fine print of a proposal to attempt to push through a change that will transfer large amounts of money from workers to their employers. …

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Labor Department tells senators it’s too ‘complex’ to collect sexual harassment data

The Labor Department told Democratic senators that it can’t collect data on sexual harassment in the workplace because it would be “complex and costly.” On Monday, Democratic senators dismissed that justification. In January, 22 Democratic senators sent a letter to labor department officials requesting the department act on studying sexual harassment. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) signed …

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Trump Administration Should Rescind Proposal That Allows Bosses to Pocket Working People’s Tips

As we previously reported, President Donald Trump’s Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta announced a new proposed regulation to allow restaurant owners to pocket the tips of millions of tipped workers. This would result in an estimated $5.8 billion in lost wages for workers each year?wages that they rightfully earned. And most of that would come from women’s pockets. Nearly 70% of …

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Madeline Messa

Madeline Messa is a 3L at Syracuse University College of Law. She graduated from Penn State with a degree in journalism. With her legal research and writing for Workplace Fairness, she strives to equip people with the information they need to be their own best advocate.