Trump Says OK to Anti-LGBT Discrimination

To date Donald Trump's re-election campaign appears to be based on pandering to those who hold hatred towards others and seek to discriminate against or eliminate those they deem "other." On one front, he is fanning the ugly agenda of white supremacists - the El Paso shooter used some of Trump's language in his "manifesto - and one of his spokesmen, Ken Cuccinelli, who was a toxic extremist while attorney general of Virginia, has argued that the poem on the Statute of Liberty only applied to white Europeans.  On a second front, as underscored yesterday, he is fanning the anti-LGBT hatred of evangelical Christians and has given a nod to employers, including government contractors, to discriminate against LGBT individuals in hiring and employment practices if they site religious belief as the basis of their bigotry. Needless to say, Christofascists and professional "Christians" like Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Tony Perkins are near orgasmic over the new Department of Labor rule. Nothing in Trump's agenda seeks to unify Americans.  Instead, it is all about playing to his base and sowing hatred and division. A piece in The Advocate looks at how LGBT individuals are being targeted.  Here are excerpts:

Civil rights advocates are enraged by a proposal released by the Department of Labor today to allow federal contractors to discriminate against LGBTQ people and others who offend the contractors’ religious beliefs. 

The action is a notice of proposed rulemaking by the DOL’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. A DOL press release says a proposed rule on compliance is “intended to clarify the civil rights protections afforded to religious organizations that contract with the federal government” and assure that “conscience and religious freedom are given the broadest protection permitted by law.” But civil rights groups say it weaponizes religious freedom and encourages discrimination.

Basically, any employer, even a for-profit corporation, could claim that sincerely held religious beliefs allow it to deny employment to certain people, including LGBTQ people, single parents, members of other faiths, and more, representatives of several organizations said on the conference call.

The George W. Bush administration had approved an exemption for faith-based contractors, such as, say, Catholic nonprofit organizations, allowing them to favor members of their faith in employment. The Obama order maintained that. But the new proposed rule goes much further, allowing virtually any contractor to claim that religious beliefs allow discrimination against employees who do not follow all of those beliefs, according to the civil rights groups.

The proposal would expand the Bush exemption “by leaps and bounds,” Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said on the conference call. She explained, “Any company could take taxpayer dollars and fire a religious minority” or anyone else to whom it objected. And companies would be taken at their word on whether they’re religious in nature, she said: “If they say they’re religious, they are.”

Today’s news follows on other Labor Department actions. The department issued a memo in August of last year instructing those who enforce antidiscrimination law to take companies’ religious beliefs into account, advising compliance program staff that they “cannot act in a manner that passes judgment upon or presupposes the illegitimacy of religious beliefs and practices” . . . . The proposed rule, which will be published in the Federal Register Thursday, would expand upon and codify the memo, activists said. In both the memo and the proposed rule, the DOL refers to recent Supreme Court decisions involving businesses run by religious conservatives, . . . . But the Labor Department is “cherry-picking” those rulings, which did not establish a broad right to discriminate, the activists said. While business owners have every right to observe their religion in their private lives, when they are engaging in commerce, they should not discriminate, said Steve Freeman, vice president of civil rights for the Anti-Defamation League. “The proposal itself is anti-religious, particularly religious minorities. … We are seeing religious freedom weaponized,” he said.

The move also once again shows that the administration of Donald Trump and Mike Pence “is the most anti-LGBTQ administration in modern history,” Warbelow said.  “At the end of the day, it is those two who are responsible,” added Winnie Stachelberg, executive vice president for external affairs at the Center for American Progress.

Among the administration’s other anti-LGBTQ actions, Tobin said, the Department of Justice is preparing a brief in an upcoming Supreme Court case arguing that a funeral home operator in Michigan had the right to fire an employee because she is transgender. Tobin said she has also learned that the Justice Department has demanded that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission quit defending trans people who’ve lost their jobs. The EEOC is a semiautonomous federal agency tasked with investigating discrimination.

These come on top of actions involving discrimination in health care. One is a rule, now final, allowing health care workers to opt out of procedures to which they have religious or moral objections, no matter how marginal their involvement in the procedure might be. The administration is also working on a rule aimed at undermining the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition on discrimination against trans people.

“This administration straight-up believes the LGBTQ community should not have rights,” Stachelberg said.

Labor Department Rule Change to Bringing Overtime Pay To Millions Of Workers

One standard way for employers to get around overtime pay (and perhaps even minimum wage requirements) for their employees has been to treat them as salaried employees rather than hourly employees who are subject to minimum wage and overtime pay rules.  Recognizing this, the Labor Department had previously set a threshold for salary incomes below which the overtime pay rules would be triggered.  However, until now, that threshold has been a pathetic $23,660.00.  Now, that threshold will be increased to $47,476.  Expect shrieks and screams from Republicans and those who want to bring back the bad old days of the falsely named Gilded Age.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at this change that may positively impact millions of Americans.  Here are article highlights:

The Labor Department announced Tuesday that it completed one of the most ambitious economic reforms of the Obama era, finalizing a new rule that will extend overtime protections to millions of additional workers.

The administration will accomplish that by raising what’s known as the overtime salary threshold. Nearly all workers earning salaries beneath that threshold are entitled to time-and-a-half pay whenever they work more than 40 hours in a week.

The current threshold is just $23,660. The White House will be doubling that number, to $47,476, guaranteeing overtime rights for salaried workers earning less than that. The Labor Department will now update the threshold every three years to make sure it keeps pace with inflation.

The White House estimates that the change will bring overtime rights to 4.2 million workers who are currently excluded. It will also clarify eligibility for another 8.9 million workers who may or may not have overtime protections under the current rules, officials said.

On a call with reporters Tuesday, Labor Secretary Tom Perez said the reform was meant to address “both underpay and overwork.”

With a minimum wage hike blocked on Capitol Hill, expanding overtime was the most aggressive way for the Obama administration to raise wages for private-sector workers. The White House is making the reforms through the executive rule-making process, under the Fair Labor Standards Act. It doesn’t need congressional approval to do so, although Republicans may still try to block the reforms through the appropriations process.

Passed during the Great Depression, America’s overtime law was meant to protect workers from being worked too long and paid too little. The rules guarantee that workers get paid extra when they work extra. The rules also discourage employers from working employees long hours by making it more expensive to do so, through a time-and-a-half premium.

But under the current regulations, many working-class employees who earn above the low salary threshold are classified as “managers” and therefore don’t have overtime rights. Employers have an incentive to pile work onto these employees, since their extra time essentially comes for free. As a result, in retail some store managers will clock 60, 70 or even 80 hours, but only take home a modest salary in the $30,000 range.

In 1975, 62 percent of salaried workers had overtime rights; now, that share is a mere 7 percent, according to White House estimates.   “And you wonder why the middle class is struggling,” Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday. “If you work overtime you should actually get paid for working overtime.”

“Overworked and underpaid managers, postdoctoral researchers, social workers, insurance claims workers, and many others will have their lives improved one way or another by this rule,” said Eisenbrey, who was one of the most vocal voices for the reform. “It’s great to see the government doing something significant to help the struggling middle class.”

EPI estimates that the effects could be greater than the White House anticipates. The group projects that 12.5 million workers will “directly benefit” from the new rules — slightly more than half of them women, and a disproportionate share of them African-American and Hispanic. The biggest effects will be felt in the South, where a larger share of workers are carved out of protections under the current rules.

Business groups lobbied hard against the new rules, claiming they would lead employers to cut back on hours, and force workers to start tracking their time as hourly employees. What the rules will undoubtedly do is give many employers a hard choice: Either limit workers’ hours to 40 per week so they don’t incur the time-and-a-half premium, or start paying workers more for the extra time they work.

What Republicans and business groups seem to never contemplate is that if workers have increased income, they will spend much of it in the marketplace and boost the economy - and the demand for goods and services.  It is not a zero sum game. I can think of many law firms and title companies that may need to revisit their wage practises.