Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in Bloomberg’s Businessweek Daily newsletter, in “Trump’s Labor Pick Is a Break with the Past,” by Josh Eidelson.
Following is an excerpt:
In Donald Trump’s first term as president, he filled key labor enforcement posts with almost comically union-repellent types: management-side lawyers who’d helped Ronald Reagan vanquish the air traffic controllers union and challenged the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to address a death-by-killer-whale case at SeaWorld. This time around, Trump is sending a different signal. His pick to lead the Department of Labor is an unusually pro-union Republican whose potential appointment had been urged by the Teamsters union and provoked a coalition of leading business groups to declare itself “alarmed.”
Oregon Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whose selection was among the cabinet picks the president-elect announced Friday night in a social media binge, is one of the only Republicans to have co-sponsored sweeping pro-union legislation. That includes the PRO Act, which would have banned key union-busting tactics like mandatory “captive audience” meetings, abolish “right to work” laws that prohibit mandatory union fees and threaten the business model of companies such as Uber Technologies Inc. by deeming more workers employees rather than contractors. (The bill went nowhere in the Republican-controlled House and fared little better in the narrowly Democratic Senate, though the Teamsters are working with US Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Trump ally, to develop a more GOP-friendly alternative.) …
Choosing Chavez-DeRemer is a striking departure for Trump, a signal he’s serious about trying to retain support from the working-class voters who were pivotal to his victory—and that Teamsters President Sean O’Brien, who turned heads by speaking at this year’s Republican National Convention and refusing to endorse a presidential candidate, has Trump’s ear, at least for now. Her nomination has spurred a slew of terse or tepid reactions from lawmakers, unions and business advocates, and is likely to provoke more pushback from Republicans than Democrats.
But the pick may portend more of a symbolic shift from Trump than a substantive one. Some allies think he can keep his working-class support largely by following through on his promises on mass deportation and muscular tariffs, even while pursuing a business-friendly agenda at the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board. (In his first term, as I discuss in December’s issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, his appointees pushed to give companies more time to fight unionization campaigns, more discretion over who gets overtime pay and more control over workers’ tips.)
New pal Elon Musk, whom Trump praised on the campaign trail for his willingness to ax unruly employees, keeps talking up his plans to take a flamethrower to the federal workforce. Over at the NLRB—the agency that enforces private-sector workers’ right to unionize or collectively protest—Trump is widely expected to immediately fire the general counsel, who has unilateral authority to decide what sorts of cases the agency prosecutes. A new top cop there could work quickly to unwind cases including the agency’s recent efforts to hold Amazon.com Inc. liable for the treatment of its subcontracted drivers, whom the Teamsters are trying to organize.
Chavez-DeRemer’s co-sponsorship of the PRO Act, which helped her earn endorsements from unions in her unsuccessful reelection campaign this fall, is no guarantee she’ll support its most controversial provisions, especially if Senate Republicans urge her to renounce them in the confirmation process. And she won’t be working solo. Trump’s team has already been working to reassure business advocates, saying they’ll find Chavez-DeRemer more palatable once the president-elect’s picks for deputy labor secretary and other posts are revealed, according to a person familiar with the discussions, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the private conversations.
“There may be any number of agreements that have been made about what degree of autonomy she will have or not have,” says Paul DeCamp, who served as the Labor Department’s wage and hour enforcement chief under President George W. Bush. “So I really don’t know who is going to be calling the shots.”
DeCamp, now a corporate lawyer representing employers, says the choice of Chavez-DeRemer “puts everything in doubt” about what the department will be like in the next Trump administration. It could still end up having the same “strong deregulatory focus” both sides had been preparing for. “One thing we have come to expect from the president-elect is the unexpected,” DeCamp says. “It’s actually a fairly normal Trump thing.”
People
Member of the Firm
