Workers paid extra to attend Trump’s speech at Shell plant

Workers at a Royal Dutch Shell plant in Monaca, Pa., were forced to choose Tuesday between attending a speech by President Donald Trump or forgoing overtime pay their coworkers would earn.

Attendance was optional, but contract workers who chose not to stand in the crowd would not qualify for time-and-a-half pay when they arrived at work Friday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Several companies with thousands of unionized workers have contracts with Shell, one the world’s largest oil and gas companies.

Workers at the unfinished Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex had to arrive at 7 a.m., scan their ID cards and stand for hours until Trump’s speech began, the Post-Gazette reported.

“NO SCAN, NO PAY,” a supervisor for one of the contractors wrote to workers, according to the newspaper.

The contractor’s memo also banned yelling, protesting or “anything viewed as resistance” at Trump’s speech, the Post-Gazette reported.

“An underlying theme of the event is to promote good will from the unions,” the document said, according to the Post-Gazette. “Your building trades leaders and jobs stewards have agreed to this.”

The Washington Post on Saturday was unable to immediately reach Shell or the plant’s unions for comment.

Trump has a long history of falsely claiming that liberal demonstrators have been paid to protest. When people angrily flooded the streets of some cities after Trump won the presidency, he accused them of being “professional protesters” who had been “incited by the media.” When women protested Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, he said they were “paid professionals.”

And when protests bubbled up at airports in 2017 in response to Trump’s ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, he alleged the demonstrators were “professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters.”

Trump’s speech Tuesday felt at times like a campaign rally, the Washington Post reported. Between remarks about U.S. energy production, Trump urged the workers to support his reelection and complained about his perceived enemies: the media, the Democrats running for president and the Academy Awards.

About 5,000 workers attended the speech, according to Newsweek.

Shell spokesman Ray Fisher told the Post-Gazette that workers at the plant have a 56-hour workweek, which includes 16 hours of overtime pay — so workers who showed up Tuesday were paid for the week at a higher rate.

Another Shell spokesman, Curtis Smith, told Newsweek that workers who chose to skip the rally received “paid time off,” which does not count as hours worked and therefore does not trigger overtime pay. Trump’s speech was treated as a training that differed from other training sessions only in that it included “a guest speaker who happened to be the president,” Smith said.

“We do these several times a year with various speakers,” Smith told Newsweek in a written statement. “The morning session (7-10 a.m.) included safety training and other work-related activities.”

Ken Broadbent, business manager for the union Steamfitters Local 449, told the Post-Gazette his workers respect Trump for his title, regardless of whether they liked or disliked him. Anyone who did not want to go to work on the day of Trump’s speech could skip it, Broadbent said.

“This is just what Shell wanted to do, and we went along with it,” Broadbent told the newspaper.