Shortly before midnight on February 4, a flyer began to circulate on social media and asked the trade union members and their allies in Washington, DC, to get on the way to a protest in the 200 Constitution Avenue NW – the headquarters of the Ministry of Labor – To end the following afternoon. “Fights for working people: Keep out DOGE from DOL! “It announced.
When the flyer was drawn up, it was generally known that a visit to the Ministry of Government Efficiency, which could spell a fate for a public agency by the billionaire Elon Musk. Such visits have paid among the companies because Donald Trump assumed that an office is the Ministry of Education that Musk swore to close, and USAID, where everyone was brought up to a few hundred workers and cut off for practically all programs. (On Friday, a judge appointed by Trump contested the government's attitude to the United States of the Federal Unions, which the government had already been put up with from its workplaces, on the grounds that they risk the suffering “irreparable harm.”) Dog is not a real agency and the tactics that it has applied – federal payments that the congress has approved to access government systems that contain sensitive personal information and the civil servants by promising them by September if they do their work Cance off – are almost certainly illegal. Trump did not prevent this from praising Musk's performance. “I think he is doing a great job,” the President told reporters last week.
The mining of the Ministry of Labor would be a bold undertaking for a president who owes his second term not least to support the voters of the working class. The DOL mission is to promote the well -being of the workers and to protect their rights and advantages. Like a growing number of technical oligarchs, Musk seems to look at the idea of enable the government to carry out functions such as an affront. Last year, his company SpaceX sued the National Labor Relations Board – which has the task of preventing unfair work practices and works with the DOL to enforce compliance with labor laws – that the agency is unconstitutional. (The lawsuit was issued shortly after the NLRB issued a complaint against SpaceX because the NLRB allegedly released eight employees that Musk had criticized in an open letter.)
It is unlikely that Musk has a more non -profit view of the occupational safety agency and a branch of the Ministry of Labor, the task of which is to protect the employees from dangerous working conditions and to keep employers who take a risk to a risk. In recent years, Osha repeatedly punished companies from Musk's fine for serious security violations, including an incident in a SpaceX facility in Texas, in which a worker fell from a truck to death, the freight of which was not properly secured. The death was first announced in an exposé that was published by Reuters in 2023 and which documented injuries in the company at least six hundred earlier. The facility in Brownsville, Texas, had six times higher injury rate than the industry average. (SpaceX has defended his security practices in written answers to Osha and California Oshawhere an employee was injured during a rocket engine test.) Osha Also suspended a fine of Musk, Tesla, with a fine of workers of dangerous chemicals and issued a fine for several violations with chemical burns and other injuries that have been suffered by employees at a third muscle company, the Boring Company.
Dog'S Incursions in USA and several other agencies were not protested on site, partly because they were carried out at an exciting speed, but another scenario on February 5 in the DOL, in which hundreds of people appeared. Some of the demonstrators were members of the AFL-CIO who contributed to this DogThe upcoming visit. Others came from groups such as the National Employment Law Project, a workers' law organization with an office in Washington.
A large part of the information that the Ministry of Labor Medical Center, Workers Compensation Claims, Pfeifblower-Squicit-Collected-is confidential, a point that emphasized the court in a lawsuit. The lawsuit endeavors to prevent the Ministry of Labor from sharing sensitive information Dog; Some members of the unions who brought it (presumably, DOL employee) said that the department had instructed them DogRequirements. “The Ministry of Labor and its current leadership enter this takeover and order the departments of the department to grant dog access to what they are asking for,” says the lawsuit. A connection with such a guideline would violate the privacy of the employees and uncover the identity of people who submitted complaints about wage theft and other unfair labor practices with the DOL wage and hourly department, the charges of the lawsuit – residents that are confidential, To protect them, people turn them out of reprisals. The unions could be harmful to the surrounding of such files into a “unchecked, unnecessary and temporarily serving civil servants”, argued the unions in an accompanying memorandum that researched a temporary injunction on the DOL
David Michaels, professor at the School of Public Health at George Washington University, the head of War Osha Under President Barack Obama, I told that similar concerns for them apply Osha Files that Dog could access. “Osha Studies are based on confidential information provided by employees, and the names of these employees are always protected, ”said Michaels. He also found that some of these investigations are aimed at Musk's companies. Apart from the presentation of an obvious conflict of interest, the granting of Musk and its employees would probably prevent the employees from submitting future complaints. “You will lose your self -confidence Osha can maintain their confidentiality, ”said Michaels. “If you knew that your name will not be kept secret, you would certainly have thought about reporting anything.”
Every year five thousand workers in America are killed in the job and more than two are killed million Suffer injuries and illnesses. According to a report published by the AFL-CIO last year, one reason is not that Osha Has too many federal inspectors in his salary statement, but too little: only one for all eighty thousand workers in the country. However, Trump never showed a tendency to tackle this problem. On the contrary, during his first term in -house forty -four percent of the management positions OshaIncluding the task of the Chief Administrator, became free. The open positions existed at the beginning of the pandemic when the unions Eugene Scalia, a company lawyer that Trump had appointed as Labor Secretary Covid-19. Scalia, who had dedicated a large part of his career to support companies to withdraw the government's regulations, grazed the appeals aside. The Ministry of Labor issued employers voluntary guidelines. Despite more than ten thousand complaints from employees who claimed uncertain conditions at their workplaces in the following months, Osha issued only two quotes.