Summer has officially arrived, and with it an influx of interns has come to the nation’s capital. Many of these young men and women will spend the summer working in congressional offices for no pay. While information on the use of unpaid interns is not available for every congressional office, EPI conducted an informal survey and found that at least three-quarters of all House offices use unpaid interns. More than half of all Senate offices, meanwhile, have unpaid interns, according to a survey by the advocacy group Pay Our Interns.

Congress is not alone in its practice of offering unpaid internships—in fact, far from it. Unpaid internships are common in every sector, and have come to be considered a necessary prerequisite for getting a job—despite the fact that most unpaid internships are actually against the law. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)—the foundation of modern labor law in the United States—requires that anyone doing work for an employer, including interns, be paid at least the minimum wage.

The Department of Labor (DOL) is tasked with enforcing the FLSA and has developed a six-point test to determine whether an internship must be paid as employment covered by the FLSA or is, instead, training or education. In recent years, in a number of high-profile cases courts have upheld and applied the DOL’s test, and determined that an employer had violated the FLSA when it failed to pay its interns for their work. While Congress is exempted from the laws protecting interns, it sets a powerful example by not paying its interns, and the practice has a far-reaching impact on society as well as public policy.

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While the new administration in Washington appears to be in a rush to use its executive branch power to undo all the efforts of the previous administration to protect hourly paid employees, a more worker-friendly, forward-looking group in the U.S. Congress has decided it’s time to push back by offering a clearer, alternative approach—by re-introducing the Schedules That Work Act (SWT)—previously S. 1772 and H.R. 3071. The purpose is to address both the causes and consequences of the intensifying use of more unpredictable, last minute scheduling of work—well documented recently in an article in The New York Times.

The national bill attempts to create elements of what some other states and cities in the United States, and developed countries around the globe, have already proposed, legislated or implemented. The Schedules That Work Act entails three main features, with the overarching idea of setting a minimum floor standard that reduces any short-term cost advantage for employers who rely on scheduling practices that shift all the costs of uncertainty in their business on to hourly paid employees.

One, it grants an employee the right to request that his or her employer modify the number of hours or times the employee is required to work or be on call, the location of work, and the amount of notification time he or she receives of work schedule assignments. The process would ensure that employers give due consideration to these requests, in a timely, good faith, and interactive manner. And it protects against employer retaliation for making such adjustment requests. It outlines the grounds for denying a change, if there is a bona fide business reason for denying it, particularly if the request is made because of the employee’s serious health condition, caregiver responsibilities, or enrollment in a career-related educational or training program, or if a part-time employee requests such a change for a reason related to a second job. Such a right to request has worked well in countries such as the U.K. and Australia, and is so successful and harmless for employers that it has been expanded to cover all employees, not just those with caregiving responsibilities. With a recent national survey showing that almost half of U.S. workers have no input into their work scheduling—and only 15 percent can set their own daily start and end times for work—this will help provide workers some voice, if not say, in the scheduling of their daily and weekly work schedules.

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For millions of hourly workers, a predictable, stable work schedule is rare. Work hours can vary not just week to week, but even day to day for millions working in retail, restaurant, hospitality, and building cleaning jobs. Two scheduling techniques often used in these industries can wreak havoc on workers: just-in-time and on-call scheduling. Employers use just-in-time scheduling to account for predicted consumer demand, which often leaves workers with just a few days’ notice of their hours. On-call scheduling provides even less notice, as workers know the length of their schedule just hours before a shift starts. These methods make it impossible for people to balance their work with personal responsibilities like taking classes, maintaining another job, caring for a sick relative, or arranging child care. The Schedules That Work Act, which is being introduced today by Representative Rosa DeLauro provides hourly workers with protections they are not often given by their employers: advance notice of schedules and the right to request a schedule change.

Workers in retail and food services are less likely on average to be able to decide, or have any input into, their own schedules. Nearly half of low-wage and/or hourly workers have no input into their work hours, including the inability to make even minor adjustments. Nine-out-of-ten workers in retail and fast food service jobs report variable hours, and part-time workers are even more likely to have variable and unpredictable schedules. The lack of fair scheduling shifts the cost of uncertainty from employers to employees who already carry the burden of low wages and minimal benefits. At the same time, unpredictable schedules lead to higher turnover as workers leave to find a more stable work schedule or are fired due to the inability to meet on-call demands. This turnover is a significant cost to employers in terms of profitability, productivity, and service.

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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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