LABOR/LEGAL/POLITICS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Not long before a deluge of sexual harassment claims engulfed Capitol Hill, congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump quietly repealed safeguards to protect hundreds of thousands of American workers from such harassment.
Their target was an August 2016 regulation issued by the Obama Labor Department that required businesses to disclose certain labor violations — including sexual harassment — whenever they bid on large federal contracts.
The vote last year is especially relevant now that Congress, under immense public pressure, is weighing legislation to outlaw the very same secrecy agreements that it voted to keep legal less than a year ago.
The regulation in question was one of 14 reversed by congressional resolutions that Trump signed into law last year as part of his much-touted war against ‘job-killing regulations.’ Besides requiring disclosure, the rule forbade the biggest federal contractors from forcing workers to take their grievances to arbitration, where employees are likelier to lose, than in the courts; in addition, the private proceedings are typically kept secret…
The earlier Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule followed a 2014 executive order from former President Barack Obama. It was predicated on the notion that the federal government had an obligation to consider whether a private company had a record of ‘serious, repeated, willful and/or pervasive’ labor violations before awarding it a large contract. Before the rule, such background checks were not required…
Republican lawmakers didn’t vote to repeal the contractor rule last winter to cover up sexual harassment, of course, and that isn’t why Trump signed the repeal. The topic scarcely came up at the time. But the legislation, advocates and former government officials say, left contract workers more susceptible to sexual harassment. The vote is especially relevant now that Congress, under immense public pressure, is weighing legislation to outlaw the very same secrecy agreements that it voted to keep legal less than a year ago.”
-Ian Kullgren, “The sexual harassment vote the GOP would like to forget,” Politico, Jan. 2, 2018 06:48pm