Labor’s love lost

Labor Day 2017 will not be the first or, sadly, the last occasion to bemoan the dwindling power of the American worker in a nation where just 6% of private-sector employees presently belong to a labor union, and where productivity growth far outpaces wages. But this year marks a likely turn for the worse for those hoping to assert their collective bargaining rights or, just imagine, band together with colleagues to negotiate fairly with management.

Last month, the Senate confirmed one presidential appointee to the National Labor Relations Board, a five-person body charged by Congress with protecting the rights of workers to improve their wages and working conditions.

Marvin Kaplan led the charge against President Obama’s attempt to expand the number of workers eligible for overtime pay — a rule blocked by a Texas federal judge on Thursday as exceeding the U.S. Department of Labor’s authority.

A second nominee awaiting Senate confirmation, Bill Emanuel, is an attorney who represents management — in cases such as one where security guards alleging they had to work hours off the clock got shoved papers forcing them into arbitration even without their signatures.

With a third sitting member likely to leave at year’s end, a new NLRB majority picked by President Trump will be poised to reverse more Obama-era actions advancing worker rights — including a 2015 board decision that labor advocates hope will help them organize fast-food workers, by holding corporate parents of franchises and other contractors responsible for coming to the bargaining table. The rule, presently tangled at the D.C. U.S. Court of Appeals, could vanish entirely.

Also on the chopping block now are past board decisions that made it easier for employees to form unions and have their complaints heard by a judge, the latter now before the U.S. Supreme Court — and that’s before the board gets to its own agenda-setting.

While organized labor braces for the onslaught, workers meanwhile suffer the insults of a Department of Labor advertising its allegiance to management and indifference to the hazards suffered on the job every day.

Until last week, the main web page of its Occupational Safety and Health Administration memorialized men and women fatally injured on the job, doubling as reminder to the living to exercise care.

Just in time for Labor Day, just to show who’s boss, OSHA replaced the box with an honor roll of employers.

Rest up on this day off, if you’ve got it, because it’s going to be an uphill battle from here.