With American Workers in Desperate Need, the Ideologue in Charge of the Labor Department Creates a Bottleneck for Benefits
We begin with the most important decision of Trump’s presidency which the president, in typical Reality TV style, announced on Friday he would be making over the weekend, wrestling over whether to open up the economy and risk fueling the coronavirus crisis. As we await the will-he-or-won’t-he decision expected on Monday, this manufactured drama is hardly a cliffhanger since it’s a phony choice because nobody in their right mind would risk worsening a pandemic just as it is about to reach its deadliest climax. But that does not mean Trump will not act with reckless ignorance bowing to pressure from the hysterical right and the loony libertarian fringe who are terrified that the government might have to step in and solve a problem the private sector cannot fix no matter how much public money is thrown at them. A prime example of the failure of right wing free enterprise dogma is what is happening at the Labor Department where Trump put the fox, Eugene Scalia, in charge of the hen house. With unemployment records already broken as the numbers only begin to skyrocket, the billions appropriated for unemployment insurance relief in the $2.2 trillion CARES Act are bottlenecked at the agency supposed to help the American worker, the head of which is implacably opposed to workers and unions and has spent his whole professional life finding ways to screw workers and undo their benefits. Steven Greenhouse, a veteran New York Times reporter who covered labor and the workplace for 19 years and is the author of the new book Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor joins us to discuss how the corporate ideologue Scalia, who recently said “We want workers to work, not to become dependent on the unemployment system”, is making it impossible for unemployment benefits to reach those in increasingly desperate need. Scalia has chosen the narrowest possible definition of who qualifies while inside the Labor Department’s workplace health and safety division, OSHA, frustration builds at the lack of action to help frontline workers like nurses and doctors who desperately need help and protection. Meanwhile even a right wing senator such as Trump’s most ardent defender Senator Lindsey Graham is warning “You could have massive civil unrest if these systems cannot get checks out the door. We’re talking about 20% unemployment, maybe even more. The application process is a nightmare.”