Everyone loves apprenticeships (including me) as a basic model for learning work-related skills, but for the most part, policymakers don’t think very hard about why there’s so little apprenticeship in the United States. For that reason, we’re likely to continue talking about how great apprenticeship is but not making significant investments in it. President Trump’s underwhelming plan to expand apprenticeship, unveiled this past week, won’t change that. His initiative will add $100 million (less than a dollar per U.S. worker) to the budget for apprenticeship and give employers more flexibility (i.e., unilateral control without objective oversight or minimum standards) in structuring new apprenticeships but does little to address the underlying reasons why the United States lags behind our peers when it comes to apprenticeships.

The president likes apprenticeship for some of the same reasons we do. People can “learn while they earn,” without taking on debt—unlike many college graduates. In high-quality apprenticeships, with strong connections to employers and/or unions, people learn skills that are really needed on the job. In a wide range of occupations, including professions, craft and technical work, and caring occupations, a high proportion of critical skills are acquired on-the-job through learning-by-doing and informal mentoring. For that reason, apprenticeship and other models (e.g., internships, coops) that integrate classroom and workplace learning are more effective than years of classroom education followed by work without structured support for learning. Although the president didn’t point this out, apprenticeship also carries with it an implicit message of respect for the occupation—the idea that experienced workers possess significant skills and you need a proven mechanism like apprenticeship to transmit that knowledge to new initiates.

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Today, the Acting Solicitor General switched the government’s position in National Labor Relations Board v. Murphy Oil USA, Inc, from arguing in favor of working people to arguing in favor of big business. The move is deeply disappointing, and represents a stark departure from standard practice. It is the clearest indication yet of where the Trump administration stands: with corporate interests and against working people.

The Murphy Oil case is significant for workers. It will determine whether mandatory arbitration agreements with individual workers that prevent them from pursuing work-related claims collectively are prohibited by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). These agreements have become increasingly common.

The NLRA guarantees workers the right to join together to improve their terms and conditions of employment and prohibits employers from interfering with or restraining the exercise of these rights. In Murphy Oil, the National Labor Relations Board is arguing that agreements that force workers to waive their right to pursue work-related claims on a class or collective basis interfere with workers’ rights under the NLRA and are prohibited. The Solicitor General argued this position just last October, and there has been no change in the law since then. As a matter of fact, just last month the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that these mandatory arbitration agreements and class action waivers are prohibited by the NLRA. The only thing that has changed is the administration.

It is worth noting how unprecedented this move is. The most recent example of the Solicitor General changing positions is a Reagan administration-era case, Bob Jones University v. United States. In that case, the government changed its position to advocate in favor of an institution’s right to adopt racially discriminatory policies while enjoying tax exempt status. It was a shameful switch. And, the Solicitor General lost. Today’s decision is also shameful. The Acting Solicitor General is arguing against workers’ rights to join together to advocate for better wages and working conditions. Like the Bob Jones University about-face, this switch, puts the Acting Solicitor General and the Trump administration on the wrong side of history and, hopefully, the wrong side of the Supreme Court in this important case.

This article was originally posted on Good Jobs First’s blog. 

When the term “Rustbelt” was coined in the 1980s and activists learned the early warning signs of a plant closing, one of those indicators was tax dodging. If a company knew it was planning to close a factory, it would often challenge its property tax assessment or seek other tax breaks. And why not? If it didn’t expect to be hiring locally in the future, why should an employer care about the quality of the schools?

The national trend today looks like the Rustbelt 1980s on steroids. President Trump’s budget proposal follows the playbook that corporate lobbyists have long pushed in state legislatures: tax cuts for companies and the rich, coupled with dramatic cuts to services that benefit everyone. The resulting permanent damage to those public services begs the question: is Corporate America intentionally disinvesting, abandoning our nation?

In recent years, states and localities across the country have made drastic cuts to essential public services. Texas eliminated over 10,000 teaching jobs, and ended full-day preschool for 100,000 low-income kids. The city of Muncie, Indiana eliminated so many firefighter positions that the area of the city that fire trucks can reach within eight minutes was cut in half. In Milwaukee, budget cuts left the public transit reaching 1,300 fewer employers in 2015 than in 2001.

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Last week was “infrastructure week” at the White House. On the face of it, that should be excellent news. But while the president’s rhetoric about the importance of infrastructure was on the mark, his actual plans are empty promises, given that the recently released Trump federal budget plan actually guts infrastructure.

Further, the president did not talk about the men and women who build our roads, schools, and hospitals. He did not talk about the kind of jobs his vague plans would create.

Last month, the Workers Defense Project (WDP), the Partnership for Working Families, and the Urban Planning Policy Institute at the University of Illinois released Build a Better South—a survey of more than 1,400 men and women working in construction in six cities in the South.

Here in the South, WDP and the EARN network think about jobs all the time. We understand that families are constantly thinking about how they will put food on the table, how they will keep a roof over their children’s heads, and maybe, just maybe, they will be able to put a little money away so they can retire at some point.

Build a Better South focuses on those families.

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Yesterday, the Trump administration took yet another step against working people by announcing that the Department of Labor (DOL) will rescind its “persuader rule,” which would have helped level the playing field for workers by letting them know the source of the anti-union messages they receive during union drives.

Unions help union and nonunion workers in countless ways. They raise wages, make workplaces safer, and close the gender pay gap. Most importantly, unions let workers have their voices heard on the job. The ability of people to join together to negotiate for better working conditions and pay is even more important in an era of forced arbitration, where women who are sexually harassed often cannot get justice in a courtroom and workers who are being cheated out of minimum wage often cannot file class action lawsuits. All workers deserve a voice in their workplaces, and a union is one of the best ways for working people to make sure they are getting treated fairly on the job.

But many employers fight unionization efforts at every turn, by hiring professional anti-union consultants—“persuaders”—to bust their employees’ organizing drives with sophisticated anti-union campaigns. Union-busting firms promise to equip employers with “campaign strategies” and “opposition research,” and produce anti-union videos, websites, posters, buttons, T-shirts, and PowerPoint presentations for employers to deploy against their workers’ unionizing efforts. Employers spend large amounts of money to hire anti-union consultants—sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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Yesterday, the Financial CHOICE Act of 2017 passed the House of Representatives along party lines, with 233 Republicans and no Democrats voting in favor of the bill, and 185 Democrats and one Republican voting against it. In the event it were to also pass the Senate and become law, the CHOICE Act would do profound, broad-based damage to the future financial security of America’s working families.

Among the many damaging things the bill does is to repeal of the Conflict of Interest rule, aka the “fiduciary” rule. The fiduciary rule is the regulation that requires that financial professionals advising retirement savers act in the best interest of their clients—like doctors and lawyers are already required to do. The rule prohibits financial advisers from doing things like steering clients into investments that provide the adviser a higher commission but provide the client a lower rate of return. This rule is sorely needed—conservative estimates put the cost to retirement savers of “conflicted” advice at $17 billion a year. It is noteworthy that today is the day that the fiduciary rule was implemented. This is a huge win for retirement savers, though this big step forward comes with a couple of glaring catches.

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Today the U.S. House of Representatives begins consideration of the Financial CHOICE Act of 2017, a sweeping bill that would make a number of extensive changes to the institutions that oversee the American monetary and financial system.

The CHOICE Act is frequently (and accurately) described as an effort to undo much of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which is the critical banking regulation passed under President Obama after the financial crisis of 2008/2009 to help avert future crises. The provisions in the CHOICE Act that repeal major parts of Dodd-Frank have rightly received a great deal of attention. But, there is more to the CHOICE Act than rolling back Dodd-Frank. Below we highlight two lesser-known but highly concerning components of the bill.

The CHOICE Act would make major and undesirable changes to the governance and conduct of the Federal Reserve.

The status quo of the Federal Reserve should not persist. Governance should become more transparent and representative and policy should weigh the economic interests of low and middle-wage workers more highly. But the reforms proposed in the Financial CHOICE Act go in precisely the wrong direction regarding both governance and policy conduct of the Fed.

Fed Governance

In regard to governance, the Financial CHOICE Act proposes expanding the influence of regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), at the expense of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors (BOG). Regional presidents are chosen through largely opaque processes led by regional Federal Reserve Bank boards of directors. These regional boards are dominated by financial and corporate interests. Fed Governors, conversely, are nominated by the President and must be confirmed by the Senate. This insures at least some modicum of democratic accountability. Voting rights on the FOMC are supposed to be split 7-5 in favor of the BOG (currently there are two vacancies on the BOG, so the regional banks already have parity).

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As the Trump administration considers weakening the long-awaited “fiduciary rule”, industry-backed groups continue to release transparently self-serving “research” purporting to show that the rule, which protects retirement savers against sales pitches disguised as financial advice, will do more harm than good.

Most recently, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a report misleadingly entitled, The Data Is [sic] In: The Fiduciary Rule Will Harm Small Retirement Savers. The data actually show nothing of the kind. As the Consumer Federation of America has pointed out, even comparing a partial estimate of the harm done to savers from conflicted advice with an inflated estimate of the cost of implementing the rule shows that the rule’s benefits vastly outweigh its costs.

This hasn’t prevented the Chamber and others from claiming that the rule will harm investors by restricting access to retirement services, limiting investment options, and increasing fees paid for investment advice. These claims are based on surveys of firms with an interest in weakening or overturning the rule, conducted by industry associations and conservative groups who are in many cases ideologically opposed to government regulation. As EPI Vice President Ross Eisenbrey recently told the acting Solicitor of Labor, affected industries invariably predict dire outcomes from regulations they oppose since they are rarely called to account when their predictions prove unfounded.

Even if the industry’s questionable predictions that the rule could cause some retirement savers to experience reduced access to investment products or advice are borne out, it doesn’t follow that investors will be harmed by the fiduciary rule. The rule’s purpose is to ensure that any retirement investment advice serves the investor’s best interest, not the adviser’s self-interest. The fact that salespeople masquerading as financial planners will no longer be able to offer conflicted advice that steers people to costly products doesn’t mean investors will be harmed—to the contrary. And since bad products and services crowd out good ones, the anticipated fiduciary rule—despite the Trump administration’s delay in implementing it—has already expanded the market for low-cost investment options.

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