Trump's Labor Department Gives Fast Food Workers a Big "Fuck You"

We all knew from day one that the Trump administration would be hostile to labor. It has now begun in earnest.

Today, the Department of Labor announced that it is rescinding two rules the Obama administration’s Labor Department had put in place: One that made it harder for employers to classify workers as “independent contractors” rather than real employees, and another one, the “joint employer” rule, that had the effect of holding large companies responsible for the practices of their franchisees. The joint employer rule was considered a huge victory for the “Fight For $15″ movement, because it made it possible to hold, for example, the McDonald’s corporation responsible for abuses of workers by their franchisees—rather than allowing companies to push all responsibility off onto the individual stores and avoid any sort of overall liability. The Labor Department’s announcement today is a first step towards completely reversing these policies, taking us back to pre-Obama standards. This reversal is a significant blow to the movement to raise the wages of the lowest-earning members of the working class.

Regular working people in America should understand that the Trump administration today has very explicitly made it easier for their employer to deny them the benefits of being an employee, and has made it harder for low-wage workers to effectively band together and fight for better conditions from the huge companies that employ them. In other words, the “blue collar billionaire” president has again chosen business interests over human interests. Capital over labor. Your boss, over you.

You? He wants you to shut up and eat shit and collect less money and work under worse conditions. There is not another way to interpret these things.