YOUR WORKPLACE

The rules that protect you at work — the ones that require your employer to pay you overtime, give you water in the heat, let you organize a union, and report injuries — were not gifts. They were won over decades of struggle. Workers died for the eight-hour day. They organized for overtime. They fought for the right to collective bargaining.

In 14 months, the Trump administration gutted the agencies that enforce these rights, killed the rules themselves, and paralyzed the institutions that let workers fight back. The result is a transfer of power from workers to employers that dwarfs any tax cut: $250-$296 billion per year in suppressed wages from non-competes alone. Four million workers losing overtime. Wage enforcement down 97%. And the agency protecting your right to organize — reduced below quorum.

OSHA — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — is the primary federal agency responsible for keeping you alive at work. It sets and enforces workplace safety standards, investigates deaths, and penalizes employers who create hazardous conditions. Approximately 5,000 workers die from workplace injuries each year and 2.8 million suffer serious injuries or illnesses. Workplace injuries cost the U.S. approximately $250 billion per year.

The Trump administration's most consequential action was killing the proposed heat stress rule. Heat kills more workers than any other weather event — 40-50 deaths per year officially, likely far more unreported. The rule would have required employers to provide water, shade, rest breaks, and heat illness prevention plans for outdoor and indoor workers in high-heat environments. Agricultural workers, construction workers, warehouse workers, and delivery drivers — disproportionately Latino and immigrant workers — are most affected.

Trump fired NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo — who had been aggressively pursuing major cases against Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX, and Apple — and board member Gwynne Wilcox, reducing the board below the quorum needed to decide cases. Thousands of pending cases froze. Workers who had been fired for organizing had no recourse. Companies that violated labor law faced no consequences. Union elections couldn't be certified.

The companies that benefited most are exactly the ones Abruzzo had been pursuing. Amazon was facing warehouse organizing drives across the country. Starbucks had 300+ stores that had filed for union elections. SpaceX had gone further — it had filed a case arguing the NLRB itself was unconstitutional. Trump solved SpaceX's legal problem the old-fashioned way: he gutted the agency instead.

Non-compete agreements prohibit workers from leaving for a competitor or starting their own business, often for 1-2 years. Nearly one in five American workers are bound by them — including fast food workers, warehouse employees, and janitors who have no trade secrets to protect. The FTC's proposed ban would have freed 30 million workers and created 8,500 new businesses annually. States that already ban non-competes — California, Minnesota, Oklahoma — have higher rates of innovation and entrepreneurship. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbied aggressively to kill the ban, and won.

The overtime rule would have guaranteed time-and-a-half pay for salaried workers earning under $58,656 per year. The Trump administration killed it, reverting the threshold to $35,568 — meaning a manager at a fast food restaurant earning $36,000 can be required to work 60 hours a week, effectively making less per hour than their minimum-wage employees. This is the second time Trump killed an overtime expansion — he also killed Obama's 2016 rule.