SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
department of labor
Good Riddance to Trump's Horrible, No Good Labor Secretary
The disgraced Lori Chavez-DeRemer is what you get when you have a president and White House staff who don’t give a rat’s ass about whom they appoint to positions of power except for their loyalty to Trump and how they look on television.
Apr 21, 2026
Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned Monday as secretary of labor [translated: she was told to resign by the White House], after facing investigations by the department’s inspector general into multiple allegations of misconduct.
She’s alleged to have been drinking during the workday from a “stash” of alcohol in her office, arranging official trips for herself that were extended vacations, taking subordinates to an Oregon strip club while on one such trip, showing no interest in the work of the department, and having an affair with a member of her security team.
Sources have described Chavez-DeRemer as the “boss from hell,” saying she demanded staffers run personal errands for her or perform other menial tasks unrelated to their government jobs. More than two dozen department employees from across the political spectrum described in interviews with The New York Times a toxic workplace characterized by an absentee secretary, hostile aides, and a deeply demoralized staff.
In other words, Chavez-DeRemer was turning the great department I once headed and loved into shit. And I hold Trump responsible because he appointed her.
As I shared with you a few weeks ago, I loved the Department of Labor from the moment I entered the Frances Perkins Building on Constitution Avenue as secretary of labor in January 1992. I loved its mission: to protect and raise the standard of living of working Americans.
I loved its history. The first secretary of labor, Frances Perkins — appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 — was also America’s first female Cabinet secretary. She was the guiding light behind the creation of Social Security, the 40-hour workweek, the National Labor Relations Act, and much more.
I hung the painting of Frances Perkins behind my desk in my huge second-floor office. Whenever I felt discouraged, I looked at her, and she bucked me up. (Although I’m Jewish, I called her Saint Frances.)
I admired the Department of Labor’s career staff, who were dedicated to helping American workers. I was deeply impressed by the assistant secretaries, the deputy secretary, the chief of staff, and other appointees with whom I toiled, often six or seven days a week from early morning to late at night.
Never before or since have I had the privilege of working with such talented people who cared so much about what they were accomplishing for the American people, and who made such a positive impact on so many lives.
We raised the minimum wage for the first time in many years, even under a Republican-controlled Congress. We implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act. We fought against sweatshops. We took on big corporations that were cheating their employees. We kept workers safe. We … well, I could go on and on. (And I have, in my book Locked in the Cabinet, which you can also find here, but please don’t order from here.)
But like so much else Trump has done, he’s turned what was once a great department into a fucking mess. And it frankly breaks my heart.
It’s what you get when you have a president and White House staff who don’t give a rat’s ass about whom they appoint to positions of power except for their loyalty to Trump and how they look on television.
Trump and his White House assistants don’t mind if his appointees wreck our government because they don’t care about government. Hell, they came to government to wreck it. If the public loses confidence in, say, the Department of Labor, that’s perfectly fine. If Congress slashes its funding, so much the better.
What they do mind is if a Cabinet member makes Trump look bad, which is why Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi are now history — along with Chavez-DeRemer.
It infuriates me, because I’ve seen government work for the people. I’ve witnessed public servants who care deeply and bust their asses in service to this country. I know how important government can be if it’s doing the job it should be doing.
I loved the Department of Labor because it has improved the lives of millions of Americans. I worked like hell as secretary of labor because I believed in what we were doing. That it’s been treated like crap is an insult to generations of hardworking DOL employees, to American workers, to America.
The least we can all do is flip Congress in November, so senators and representatives who care about this country can oversee the departments of the government and try to remedy some of the wreckage that Trump and his appointees have wreaked on America.
In the meantime, goodbye and good riddance to Madam Secretary Chavez-DeRemer.
Keep ReadingShow Less
May Day—Why We’re Rallying in Liberty, New York
Most of us are workers, and Trump 2.0 is the most anti-worker administration in living memory.
Apr 19, 2026
Nestled in the Catskill Mountains of Sullivan County, New York, Liberty is a village of some 10,000 inhabitants, two hours west of New York City. Last year PepsiCo shuttered its Frito-Lay snack factory, laying off nearly 300 workers. “I don’t know how our town survives this,” a Town Board member remarked. “It’s a bad situation.” The biggest employer now, after the school district, is a chicken farm on the outskirts with a largely immigrant workforce that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sporadically targets.
On May 1—International Workers’ Day—Sullivan County residents will rally in Liberty, joining nationwide actions as part of the May Day Strong coalition. Why will we be on the streets? It’s simple. Most of us are workers—some unionized, most not; some well paid, most not; some small businesspeople or “independent contractors” and others employees; some retired, some still at it even in our 70s. Whatever our situation, it’s clear that Trump 2.0 is the most anti-worker and pro-oligarch administration in living memory.
Consider this:
- It issued an executive order terminating union collective bargaining agreements for 1 million federal employees.
- It implemented hiring freezes and encouraged resignations, along with mass firings of probationary employees.
- It reinstated Schedule F, which reclassifies civil servants in policy roles, stripping them of job protections and making it easier to fire them for political reasons.
- It fired National Labor Relations Board officials, replacing them with pro-regime hacks who will back employers in contract disputes.
- It promotes state-level so-called "Right to Work" laws and supports a national "Right to Work" law. Together with the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision, these measures undermine unions’ organizing and finances.
- It gutted OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration), endangering workers, especially in high-risk industries like logging and lumber, farming, meatpacking, warehouses, and commercial fishing.
- In the name of rolling back regulation, it rescinded safety rules in construction, mining, chemical, and other sectors, which will increase injuries and fatalities and the disease burden of nearby communities.
- It radically reduced workplace safety and wage violation enforcement. The bosses can now get away with almost anything.
- President Donald Trump’s Department of Labor (DOL) proposed removing minimum wage and overtime protections for an estimated 3.7 million home-care workers.
- It issued rules to make it easier for companies to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees, stripping them of benefits and minimum wage guarantees.
- It rescinded a 2024 rule that protected migrant farm workers from retaliation for reporting safety violations.
- Its threats and mass deportations have created volatility in labor-intensive sectors, such as construction, agriculture, hospitality, and eldercare, which disrupts supply chains, produces labor shortages, and leads to worse outcomes for US-born workers.
- The administration revoked Executive Order 11246, which prohibited federal contractors from discriminating based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
- It has undermined the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, potentially impacting 2.8 million workers.
- It threatened to veto the PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act, which would allow employers to interfere with union elections.
- It slashed federal grant programs that fight child labor and slave labor abroad.
- It requested $1.5 trillion for the Defense Department—a 42% increase—while holding Social Security flat and cutting Medicare and Medicaid personnel.
- It eliminated Community Service Block Grants, the Low-Income Heating Assistance Program, and Senior Employment Services, which provide older people with food assistance, home heating, and job opportunities.
- It proposed a rule that would encourage the addition of dodgy high-risk “alternative” assets—such as private equity, private credit, and crypto—to employer-run 401(k) retirement plans and that would protect management against worker lawsuits.
- The Trump 2.0 administration jacked up the cost of living with unprecedented tariffs and massive deficit spending to fund its tax cuts for the rich, as well as unpopular wars, huge cuts to cheap renewable energy programs, and giveaways to the AI and crypto sectors that sent petroleum and electricity prices soaring.
Over one-third of Sullivan County residents now have “utility debt” to New York State Electric and Gas, an electric company owned by a Spanish multinational corporation that is raking in profits from our skyrocketing bills. This utility debt is often on top of housing debt, medical debt, education debt, credit card debt, automobile debt, and small business debt.
Many people in our region are struggling and economically increasingly precarious. Much of the rest of our country is in similar straits, especially but not only in rural areas. Blood collection centers are moving into middle-class neighborhoods, as even relatively well-off Americans now resort to selling their plasma to make ends meet.
May Day is as American as apple pie, despite what anti-labor talking heads might tell you.
The Trump 2.0 administration is so anti-worker that its Labor Secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, faces formal complaints of creating a “hostile work environment” at the DOL, making subordinates run personal errands and do chores like cleaning out closets in her home, and retaliating against staffers for cooperating with an investigation, including claims of sexual harassment of DOL employees by her husband.
May Day is as American as apple pie, despite what anti-labor talking heads might tell you. It dates to the 1880s, when US workers—many of them immigrants—struggled for an eight-hour workday; a five-day workweek; and an end to dangerous, grueling working conditions. May Day also honors the memory of the labor organizers who died at the hands of the Chicago Police in 1886 and the four who were framed up and sentenced to death by hanging in the aftermath of that violence.
We remember—and we see what’s going on today. Enough is enough. May Day will be a nationwide day of collective action. We’ll be rallying in Liberty.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Labor Department Takes a Page From Hitler’s Playbook
This fascist propaganda dishonors the government agency whose charge is to support the workers of this country. It has no business deifying any President, particularly one already drunk with power.
Jan 27, 2026
Something is rotten in the Department of Labor. I’m not talking about the recent news that Secretary of Labor Chavez-DeRemer is being investigated about claims she used taxpayer money for personal trips disguised as business-related. Or that she allegedly engaged in an improper tryst with a subordinate.
If true, these are serious issues that call for appropriate responses. But, from my perspective as an attorney who committed a 39-year career to a government agency I continue to care deeply about, they pale in comparison to something that’s out in the open, carefully curated for all to see: the Department’s latest social media campaign.
Just take a look at the past few weeks’ postings on the Labor Department’s Facebook or X accounts. One might ordinarily expect to find content that reflects the Department’s worthy mission of lifting up all workers in the United States, regardless of race, religion, or national origin. That might include reminders about employers’ responsibilities under wage and workplace safety laws Congress enacted over the past several decades, or maybe spotlight a series of particularly impactful enforcement actions that vindicated workers’ rights.
Don’t hold your breath. Instead, watching a jarring graphic with a dystopian soundtrack, you’ll be instructed to “Remember who you are, American.” Those words are placed below the header, “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage”—a slogan promptly recognized by visitors to the Facebook site as a haunting echo of the 1930’s Nazi propaganda poster featuring Adolf Hitler and the slogan “One People, One Nation, One Leader.”
That’s only one of a steady drumbeat of similar phrases, like “Faith in God. Law and Order. Pride in Our Homeland…central tenets of the American Way of Life.” We learn that “[u]nder President Trump, the globalist dominance of our government is over,” and that a year ago “our country was dead.” Now, however, we’re “the hottest country anywhere in the world because we finally have a President who puts America first.”
We’re instructed not to “believe the fake news lies.” Multiple entries feature paintings and posters depicting 1940’s-era churchgoers and families with beatifically smiling children, all white. And most prolifically, we’re treated to one hero-like depiction of Donald Trump after another, mostly in bold silhouette, with captions like “Americans First,” “NEVER SURRENDER,” “Second to None,” “Trust the Plan, Trust Trump,” "PATRIOTS IN CONTROL,” and “One of One.” We learn that “No President has cared more about hardworking Americans than President Trump.”
There’s so much wrong with all this it makes the head spin. Most blatant is the unmistakable resemblance to the style and messaging of the Nazi propaganda machine. As described by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, during the Third Reich “public adulation for Adolf Hitler was an ever present feature in the public square of German life.” Hitler was portrayed “as the living embodiment of the German nation,” radiating strength as the savior of a beaten-down German nation, and idolized as a “gifted statesman who brought stability, created jobs, and restored German greatness.” Take a look at the Labor Department’s Facebook page and see if that description resonates.
Add to that: the posts’ repeated targeting of undefined “globalists”—a recognized “dog whistle” for racist, anti-Semitic and anti-government conspiracy theorists—as the shadowy characters responsible for our country’s woes, not unlike Nazi propaganda demonizing Jews and other “outsiders”; the Christian imagery and language, smearing the line that separates church and state, and implicitly, if not explicitly, promoting white Christian Nationalism; the full-on outrageous assertion made on X, just days after the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent, that “Mass Deportations are Improving Americans' Quality of Life.”
Appalling as all this is, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Substantively, in addition to the countless other ways Trump’s presidency has been a disaster for this country, he has been no friend to US workers—undermining their wages and economic security, weakening job creation, and assaulting their rights to organize. Federal worker ranks have been terrorized and dissembled by DOGE, and soon tens of thousands will be judged not by merit alone but by their loyalty to Trump. Religious prayer services have been introduced at the agency’s headquarters. Labor Department employees are demoralized. And for months, an enormous banner with Trump’s face has been hanging off the front of the Francis Perkins Building, sternly looking down at the passersby below.
Still, the Facebook/X campaign brings the Department to a new low. It dishonors the government agency whose charge is to support the workers of this country. It has no business deifying any President, particularly one already drunk with power. Nor should it be promoting a white, Christian nationalist vision for this country, that was built by immigrants -- people of all colors, places of origin, and beliefs. As a Labor Department veteran, I’m ashamed. And as a first generation son of Jewish refugees who lived through the horrors of Nazi Germany, I’m aghast, at seeing history rhyme, if not repeat.
This poem no one should have to recite to their grandchildren.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular