President-elect Donald Trump announced that he plans to nominate fast food CEO Andrew Puzder to head the Department of Labor (DOL). Puzder, who makes millions as a low-wage employer, fails every test for a Labor Secretary. DOL’s mission is to improve the wages and working conditions of working Americans, but Puzder wants to keep wages low and threatens to replace his fast food chain’s employees with robots if the minimum wage rises enough to crimp his profits.

He’s opposed to the new overtime rule that gave the right to time and a half pay to millions of salaried employees earning less than $47,476 a year. Walmart has already raised its managers’ pay, as did about half of all big retailers, even before the rule was supposed to take effect on December 1. But Puzder wants to kill it so he can keep working low-paid employees without paying them a dime extra for their overtime hours.

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Last week I argued that the Trump-brokered deal with Carrier industries to keep 700 jobs in Indiana shouldn’t be treated as a triumph, but instead as a sellout of those unlucky workers who hadn’t managed to make themselves useful as PR props for Trump. And yesterday somebody with actual credibility on this—Chuck Jones, a union leader who represents the Carrier employees—buttressed this argument.

One key point here is pretty simple: “doing deals” company-by-company, rather than instituting good policy rules across-the-board, will do nothing for American workers except pit them against each other. The Trump administration’s effectiveness in helping American workers should be judged on policy, not theatrics.

The biggest reason why this is true is that deals don’t scale-up against a recovering economy. A quick example: in the first quarter of 2009 (the first three months of President Obama’s presidency) 2.5 million workers were laid-off. In the most recent three months, 1.5 million workers were laid-off. What does this tell us?

First, that even in normal economic times, there is a ton of churn in the economy. Why do these 700 workers go to the front of the line in getting help from Trump while the other 1.4993 million are left on their own? An ironic note here is pointed out by Harold Meyerson: Trump never would have even heard of the planned Carrier move without the union (and Chuck Jones).

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Donald Trump’s preliminary plans for an infrastructure spending bill include a heavy role for private sector financing. We have argued elsewhere that this raises troubling questions. If our arguments have not yet persuaded policymakers on the dangers of wholly outsourcing infrastructure investment to private developers, perhaps they will be convinced by the result of a public-private partnership (P3) in North Carolina—an exercise in privatization that may have helped swing that state’s gubernatorial race.

Prior to the election, there was some speculation about whether or not an unpopular public-private partnership (P3) infrastructure deal in Charlotte would affect its outcome. The Charlotte Observer explains why initial indications suggest that this unpopular toll road did indeed likely sink the incumbent Governor McCrory’s bid for reelection. The issue is simple: North Carolina voters saw that the P3, which was sold on the basis of having a more innovative and competitive private sector direction, instead just became pure crony capitalism. The company got profits and excessive control in dictating what should be publicly-accountable decisions about public investments. North Carolina residents got tolls and are likely on the hook for taxpayer-funded bailouts. All in all, it is a clear cautionary tale about relinquishing control of infrastructure investments.

The Charlotte P3 financed the building, operating, and maintaining of new tolled express lanes on I-77. With mayors and governors usually hoping that ribbon-cutting on new infrastructure projects will be a boon to their campaigns, it may be surprising that additional lanes to alleviate congestion in a growing region would help sink a campaign. However, as is always the case with P3s, the devil is in the details.

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With a raised hand, my daughter’s teacher can magically line up 20 kindergarteners who are running circles around a loud gym. She’s at school when I drop my daughter off in the morning and still on the job—calling us and other parents from the subway—as my family sits down to dinner. She says she never wanted to do anything else in her life besides teach, and her enthusiasm is infectious: my daughter wants to be a teacher when she grows up.

I encourage my daughter’s aspirations, even though teachers are underpaid and their jobs are challenging, especially in today’s high-stakes testing environment. But teachers have good insurance if they get sick or become disabled, and they are able to enjoy their hard-earned retirements. Though they’re paid significantly less than other workers with bachelors’ or advanced degrees, they’re part of close-knit school communities where almost everyone from custodians to principals is paid a livable wage with good benefits.

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President-elect Donald Trump proposes to nominate Ben Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Mr. Carson has expressed opposition to the Obama administration’s new HUD requirement that cities and suburbs develop plans to end their segregation or face possible loss of federal funds. He calls this “social engineering,” and says that such well-intentioned programs have unintended consequences that their proponents later come to regret. Instead, he says, emphasis should be placed on revitalizing distressed minority neighborhoods in central cities.

What Mr. Carson’s view ignores is that the racial segregation of every metropolitan area in the nation is also the result of “social engineering”—the purposeful efforts of federal, state, and local governments to create and enforce the residential separation of the races. What the Obama administration has begun are plans to undo this social engineering. Failing to continue these plans doesn’t avoid social engineering—it perpetuates it.

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Judge Amos Mazzant, the judge who blocked enforcement of the Department of Labor’s new overtime rule, said many things that aren’t true in his opinion, including misstatements of historical fact such as when a minimum salary for exemption was first included in the regulations (it was right from the beginning, in 1938, not two years later). But Mazzant gets judicial precedent wrong, too.

The decisions of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals control in Judge Mazzant’s Texas district. Importantly, the 5th Circuit ruled in 1966, in Wirtz v. Mississippi Publishers Corp, that the salary level test for exemption is rationally related to the determination of whether an employee is employed in a bona fide executive capacity. In a case against a publisher that claimed its executives were exempt even though it paid them less than the minimum salary for exemption, the Court of Appeals forcefully rejected the argument that the regulations are so ambiguous as to make the salary requirement arbitrary and capricious.

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The decision of a judge in Texas to block the Department of Labor’s new regulations guaranteeing overtime pay to millions of workers is a legal travesty, so poorly reasoned that it invites questions about the judge’s motivation. The decision is more than just bad law, however, it is also a financial blow to people who had every reason to expect that their lives were about to be made a little easier.

The new rules, which were set to take effect today, on December 1, would have required employers to pay time and a half the regular rate of pay for each hour worked beyond 40 in a week to any employee paid less than $47,476 a year. Prior to the Obama rule, employees earning as little as $23,660 could be called “executive” or “administrative” and denied overtime pay even if they spent the majority of their workweek scrubbing floors or stocking shelves. There are 12.5 million salaried workers earning between $23,660 and $47,476, and every one of them would be entitled to overtime pay under the new rule.

People all across America who have been working 5, 10, or even 20 hours of overtime a week without any extra compensation had been told by their employers that that their long hours were about to end, thanks to the Department of Labor’s new overtime rules. Or they were told that they were going to be paid extra for their extra hours of work, or that, at least, they were going to get salary increases to make those kinds of long hours more financially rewarding. Now, many employers have put those plans on hold. At EPI we’ve heard from a number of the affected workers.

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Donald Trump is getting lots of mileage out of the alleged deal that has been struck to keep a Carrier plant from moving to Mexico from Indiana. If any of the reporting about the deal is correct, however, Trump clearly sold out the working class that he claims his deal helped.

First, let’s be clear—if it’s true that 1,000 jobs are kept in the U.S. and these workers are not laid off, that’s great for them and any relief and gratitude they feel about this deal is justified. Losing a job is terrifying, particularly in a country where policy titled towards the already-rich keeps good jobs scarce and makes losing a job so economically devastating.

But, let’s also be equally clear that even if this was somehow a good deal from a public policy perspective, it’s an entirely not-scalable approach to solving the challenges of globalization. A world in which your job depends on whether or not you’re useful as a public relations prop for the President is not a recipe for broad-based security.Read more