Unnecessary, job-killing rules against wage theft and hazardous conditions
President Donald Trump on Monday signed new legislation repealing a regulation protecting workers from wage theft. The new law undercuts the Obama-era policy that encouraged businesses to follow workplace safety guidelines and pay their workers fairly by terminating federal contracts with companies that accrued too many violations. The new Trump-era legislation, however, undoes those employee protections, as Republicans in Congress said the Obama rules were restrictive and job-killing. Trump referenced the bill in a Monday tweet: “Today I’m signing 4 bills under the Congressional Review Act that cancels regulations & eliminates unnecessary, job-killing rules,” he wrote. “#MAGA”
Yeah, because what worker doesn’t want a dangerous job working for a boss who steals her wages?
One thing that’s notable as a tradesman: guys that I am pretty sure voted for Trump have also emphasized repeatedly that if employers advise you to do something unsafe, you should always refuse to do so. Safety is king even amongst the trogs (job-killing, fshaw, none of the trogs actually view this sort of thing as legit).
Re BKSA #1 – Well yes. What Trump voters wanted, in many cases, is not what they are getting. This is simply one more case, where he’s delivering on the shallow rhetoric and shafting common sense, professional considerations, and genuine human interests. The people who liked the sound of the shallow rhetoric didn’t believe this “successful” businessman – who they viewed as a shrewd, competent, reasonable straight-shooter like themselves writ large – would service that without regard for good sense. Oops.
(None of which is to disregard the support for, or at least acceptance of, the sheer simple hatreds embodied in the Trump campaign and administration among Trump voters – they’re just not the whole story.)
I’m not sure that’s true. A lot of Trump voters wanted the Muslim ban, and they are getting that from Trump. He can blame the courts now when the next person gets shot (but not by a white terrorist, which is more likely. We can ignore those as individual bad apples).
In addition, my experience living in Trump central is that most of the people around here do want the regulations to go away. They think they are job killers. They think that businesses will be more safe without them, because if companies aren’t required to follow onerous safety regulations, they will make the right choice and provide good, safe working environments.
I hear hundreds of complaints about how “OSHA wouldn’t let us pick that box up – it only weighed 100 pounds, and they said we had to move it this way, rather than just picking it up. What idiots!”
So BKiSA is right that Trump voters want safe working environments; they just don’t think the government is providing that, they have the idea that the government is simply doing everything possible to ensure that the business goes broke.
Huh. I suppose I’ve got a rosier view of where some large portion of Trump voters are mistaken – I figure they have in mind vague, nebulous regulations that somehow do Bad Things but do assume that the ones that make plenty sense in their own immediate experience are good things that they wouldn’t expect their idol to touch. You’re saying they (at least, that large portion) really do think that government is forcing unnecessary, counter-productive regulations where it comes to their own safety, and that their employers would otherwise be making the place some combination of safer and more profitable.
So, government isn’t just a well-meaning fussbudget but is… what, a malicious force bent on destroying businesses for the evulz?
I know there’s a certain segment of the right-wing crazy-sphere that thinks so. I guess it’s just hard for me to believe that many people believe that in specific instances in their own competent working experiences.
There’s a macho thing that fights with what you would think would be self-interested safety firstism. When I worked for the Parks Department I knew guys who had to be forced to wear the osha-mandated chaps when working with chain saws. A Real Man don’t need no stinkin chaps. There’s a lot of that kind of thing – blowing off ear plugs, safety goggles, weight restrictions as iknklast says, limits on working in extreme heat, etc etc etc.
And it doesn’t help that bosses from time to time use regulations as an excuse to not give raises. ‘Well, I could give you more money if it wasn’t for having to meet all these regulations’. Never mind that this is almost always not true. It sounds true to the workers.
Businesses around here raise prices because of a bad tomato crop or for whatever other reason, and they put up a sign saying ‘We had to raise prices because of environmental regulations’. That has never been the case with any of these price increases, but the average shopper doesn’t know the difference.
So when Trump brands regulations that protect our water, our air, our food, or our workplaces as wasteful, people have already been primed to listen and applaud.
The Opera had to pay us an extra fee if we had to lift anything, or anyone, that weighed more than 20 lbs. You can’t imagine how carefully they avoided every possible prop…
The ‘regulations’ that libertarians and Trump victims whinge about aren’t real. They’re engineered anecdotes shoveled into their ears by the tabloid media. Rather like all those ‘lawyer’ stories that are spread about to discourage representation against industry.
They put up signs!?
Lordy, no wonder there’s so much bullshit around.
Yes, they put up signs. My husband and I laughed about how much power people perceive the “environmentalists” (a rather nebulous term that encompasses everything from hard science to new age nonsense) are able to wield.
I still hear about how a “tiny little fish” stopped a major dam project, and how stupid that was. Never mind that the dam went ahead anyway – nothing was stopped, just slowed a little. And since when is size a measure of value? (Oh, wait, we’re living in Trump world, where it must be reiterated what enormous hands he has).
People perceive the social justice and environmental side to have won every battle, to have made laws against everything they love doing (even though they’re still doing it – I can’t figure that out. Do they think they’re breaking the law by eating meat or going to Nascar?).
I was in an argument the other night with a young man who insists that the national policies requiring that all white men be called racists and sexists are wrong and evil. I would agree that such a policy would be wrong. But I couldn’t get him to actually name a single policy that does that…he just kept sputtering about third wave feminists and how he is tired of being called a racist and a sexist just because he’s a white man. (Not the same as having a policy or law, I might point out). If we hadn’t had students present at our meeting, doing research on atheism, I would probably have pointed out to him that people call him a racist and a sexist because he is, in fact, a racist and a sexist, not because he is a white man. Since at our earlier meeting he had been going on about how women use abortion to “manage their sluthood”, this attack on feminism (he informed me that first and second wave feminism as ‘legitimate’ – glad I have his permission, not) did not come as a surprise.
TL/DR: People have some peculiar ideas about what is and isn’t allowed in this country.
Urrrgh.