Trump for the working class..

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Labor Secretary Alex Acosta convinced Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Mick Mulvaney to overrule the nation’s regulatory czar and release a controversial tip pooling rule despite data showing workers could lose billions in gratuities, according to a new report. Bloomberg Law, citing three current and former executive branch officials, reported that Mulvaney sided with Acosta over the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which is led by Administrator Neomi Rao.

Report: Trump officials overrule regulatory czar in releasing tip pooling rule | TheHill

Trump for the working class, right? Hahahaha

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Remember Trump's promises during the campaign he wouldn't touch social security, medicaid, etc.? Hahaha..

The Trump administration is seeking to completely revamp the country’s social safety net, targeting recipients of Medicaid, food stamps and housing assistance. Trump is doing so through a sweeping executive order that was quietly issued earlier this week — and that largely flew under the radar. It calls on the Departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture and other agencies across the federal government to craft new rules requiring that beneficiaries of a host of programs work or lose their benefits. Trump argued with the order, which has been in the works since last year, that the programs have grown too large while failing to move needy people out of government help.

Trump order targets wide swath of public assistance programs | TheHill

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Scammers get a free reign..

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is taking it easy on payday lenders accused of preying on low-income workers. In the agency’s first report to Congress since Mick Mulvaney took the helm in November, the CFPB said it is dropping sanctions against NDG Financial Corp, a group of 21 businesses that the agency, under President Obama, had accused of running “a cross-border online payday lending scheme” in Canada and the United States. “The scheme primarily involved making loans to U.S. consumers in violation of state usury laws and then using unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices to collect on the loans and profit from the revenues,” the CFPB lawyers argued in the complaint filed in the Southern District of New York in 2015..

CFPB Payday Loans: payday lender is accused of stealing millions from customers. Trump’s CFPB is now letting them off the hook. - Vox

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Ok, it's not Trump himself, but still..

Two Republican state lawmakers are trying to shut down a potential teachers strike in Colorado with the threat of jail time. The bill, introduced in the state Senate Friday, prohibits districts from supporting a teachers strike and requires schools to dock a teacher’s pay for each day they participate in a walkout. The teachers could also face up to six months in jail and a $500 daily fine if they violate a court order to stop striking. Under the new law, sponsored by state Sen. Bob Gardner ® and state Rep. Paul Lundeen ®, a teacher could be immediately fired without a hearing.

The harsh punishment comes in reaction to the teacher strikes sweeping red and purple states, including Oklahoma, West Virginia,  Arizona, and  Kentucky. Thousands of teachers in Colorado have joined the grassroots movement, holding rallies at the state capitol in recent weeks to demand a pay raise and more funding. Teachers are planning to walk out of class on April 27 to protest low teacher pay and school spending. Several school districts, including Denver schools, have announced they will close that day. Colorado teachers are among the lowest paid in the country, earning an average $46,155 in 2016 — ranking Colorado 46th in average teacher pay according to the National Education Association. The state also spends about $2,500 less per student each year than the national average.

Colorado teachers strike: Republican lawmakers propose a bill to punish striking teachers with jail time - Vox

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The Supreme Court held on Monday that employers can force their employees to sign away many of their rights to sue their employers. As a practical matter, Monday’s decision in Epic Systems v. Lewis will enable employers to engage in small-scale wage theft with impunity, so long as they spread the impact of this theft among many employees. Neil Gorsuch, who occupies the seat that Senate Republicans held open for a year until Donald Trump could fill it, wrote the Court’s 5-4 decision. The Court split along party lines.

Epic Systems involves three consolidated cases, each involving employment contracts cutting off employees’ rights to sue their employer in a court of law. In at least one of these cases, the employees were required to sign away these rights as a condition of starting their job. In another, existing workers were told to sign away their rights if they wanted to keep working.

Each contract contained two provisions, a “forced arbitration” provision, which requires legal disputes between the employer and the employee to be resolved by a private arbitrator and not by a real court; and a provision prohibiting employees from bringing class actions against the employer.

Neil Gorsuch’s first major opinion is a decision allowing bosses to steal wages from their workers – ThinkProgress

For the full enormity of this, one should read the whole article.

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The Trump administration’s announcement that it will prohibit federal funding to any medical entity that provides or refers women for abortion care — the gag rule — is a straight-up attack on low-income women. And it is an attack on my obligation as a physician to give my patients unbiased advice on their health care options. The gag rule, which the Department of Health and Human Services is now collecting public comment on, is little more than an extension of the Hyde amendment. The Hyde amendment  bars Medicaid coverage for low-income women seeking abortion care. Its author, Henry Hyde, said in 1977, "I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman. Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the…Medicaid bill." So, it’s all about punishing the poor women — the women who can least afford another child. Meanwhile, the government cuts back on social services including healthcare, childcare, education — all the financial help to encourage stable, thriving families.

Withholding information from patients who seek care at clinics and facilities that receive Medicaid or Title X funding creates a two-tiered system that prohibits poor women from receiving the same legally-required and medical-ethics driven concepts available to women of means: patient-centered, non-directional, options counseling and informed consent.

The impact will inevitably be punishing poor women and their families, pushing them farther to the economic margins. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health in January 2018, as Reuters reports, found “Women who want an abortion but are denied one are more likely to spend years living in poverty than women who have abortions...Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term quadrupled the odds that a new mother and her child would live below the federal poverty line.”

The 2012 turn away study from Advancing New Standards in Public Health found that not only were women denied an abortion more likely to be living in poverty, “women who were turned away were more than twice as likely to be a victim of domestic violence as those who were able to abort.” There’s also a substantial health risk in forcing women to carry a pregnancy to term. Overall, any woman is about 14 times more likely to die in childbirth than from an abortion.

I’m an abortion provider — Trump administration’s gag rule is an attack on poor women | TheHill

One of the first measures of the Trump administration is to introduce this gag rule internationally, which really affects healthcare in many poor countries, especially in Africa.

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The House of Representatives narrowly passed the farm bill Thursday afternoon 213-211, with 20 Republicans joining all Democrats in voting no. The House version of the farm bill dramatically cuts funding for food stamps, officially known as Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). More than 1 million low-income households, totaling than 2 million people — particularly low-income working families — are in danger of losing their benefits altogether or have them reduced under the bill. President Donald Trump tweeted after the vote that he was “so happy” to see work requirements included in the bill. Trump has stated previously he would veto any farm bill that neglected to impose tougher work requirements..

House Republicans pass a farm bill that guts food assistance for working families – ThinkProgress

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Nikki Haley made a similarly defiant declaration this week.  According to Haley, “[i]t is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America” and went on to argue that “the Special Rapporteur used his platform to make misleading and politically motivated statements about American domestic policy issues.” 

The U.N. report notes that despite the country’s wealth, “[a]bout 40 million live in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty.” Moreover, the United States “has the highest youth poverty rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the highest infant mortality rates among comparable OECD States.” Americans “live shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies,” and the country “has the world’s highest incarceration rate.” These are facts, and not particularly controversial ones at that. The United States is an outlier when it comes to government anti-poverty programs.

While the U.N. report does attack Trump and Republicans for dismantling social protections, the fact that, as the report notes, the “United States now has one of the lowest rates of intergenerational social mobility of any of the rich countries” should be an issue of bipartisan concern.

The Trump administration doesn’t really care about poverty | TheHill

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House Republicans have joined the fight to stop the District of Columbia from raising wages for restaurant servers and other tipped workers in the city. Two GOP lawmakers, Reps. Mark Meadows (R-NC) and Gary Palmer (R-AL), quietly introduced an amendment Tuesday to the House’s government spending bill for 2019, which would essentially block a local ballot measure, called Initiative 77, from going into effect. In June, voters in the nation’s capital approved Initiative 77 to require DC businesses to pay restaurant servers and other tipped workers the full minimum wage. The new law would slowly raise the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers from $3.33 to $15 an hour by 2025..

Initiative 77 repeal: Republicans in Congress try to block DC’s ballot measure - Vox

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As Labor Day approaches, my CBPP colleagues Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg detail in the Washington Post how — notwithstanding his pro-worker rhetoric — President Trump is pursuing an agenda that at nearly every turn would undercut workers’ wages, health, and financial security. Much of this activity is taking place behind the scenes. Little-reported administrative actions have delayed or scaled back the implementation of safeguards that the Obama Administration adopted to:

• boost overtime pay for workers with low or modest salaries; 
  
• ensure that financial advisers place workers’ retirement funds in the best investments instead of those giving advisers the highest fees; 
  
• protect shipyard and construction workers from lung disease due to exposure to beryllium; 
  
• reduce the exposure to harmful crystalline silica for 2 million construction workers; 
  
• and require mine owners to identify and inform miners of potential hazards before sending them into a given area. 
  

It’s unclear to what extent the Trump Administration will further extend the various delays that it’s put in place, some of which are already as long as 18 months, or even make those delays the first step towards killing the new rules altogether. But at a minimum, workers’ wages, health, and safety will suffer in the meantime.

the budget and health care proposals that President Trump has endorsed would seriously harm workers. The Trump budget hits programs that help workers advance exceptionally hard, proposing to cut core job training grants by two-fifths in 2018 alone, for example.

Trump’s Pro-Worker Rhetoric – and Anti-Worker Agenda | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities