Henry Cuellar, the conservative, antiabortion Democratic congressman — who Nancy Pelosi called a “fighter for hardworking families” — has shocked the labor movement with a radical bill seeking to eviscerate workers’ rights.
By Liza Featherstone, Jacobin
Representative Henry Cuellar, one of the most conservative Democrats in the House, has introduced a bill eviscerating labor rights that would make the Koch brothers proud.
Cuellar’s bill bears a gaslighting moniker: the Worker Flexibility and Choice Act — joining the Clear Skies Act and the Class Action Fairness Act in the annals of bills whose names are the exact opposite of their actual intent.
Cosponsored with Trumpian Republican Congresswomen Elise Stefanik and Michelle Steel, the bill creates whole new ways for employers to get out of paying minimum wage and overtime, extending the gig economy’s stress and chaos to millions more workers. As employment law professor Veena Dubal of University of California Hastings Law put it on Twitter, this bill would “make earning a living nearly impossible” for workers without bargaining power.
Cuellar, who represents Texas’s Twenty-Eighth District, gets significant funding from Koch organizations. That’s not surprising, since he’s been working to destroy Americans’ already fragile workplace rights for years. The scandal is that the Democratic national leadership fought hard to help him get elected. They did this not in a general election — against a Republican who might well have been even worse — but in a primary against a challenger, Jessica Cisneros, an immigration rights lawyer backed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Justice Democrats.
Recent Posts
The Data Brokers Fueling ICE’s Deportation Machine—And The Union Shareholders Fighting Back
Take Action Now “As investors, we are thinking about this as a risk to our investments, but also as a social and ethical issue.”By Maurizio…
The Murdering Of Boaters Is Public, Not Secret
Take Action Now Murdering boaters is not legal or illegal depending on whether the emperor has called his victims “terrorists.”By David Swanson,…
Tensions In Latin America Rise As U.S. Threatens Venezuela & Colombia
Take Action Now “There seems to be a much bigger political context behind this than really going after drug traffickers, which seems to be … not at…
Still No Jobs Report, But The Labor Market Doesn’t Look Good
Take Action Now Donald Trump has made it clear he doesn’t care about rules and norms. We can assume that he has seen the report, and based on its…