"They're showing their true colors as an anti-worker administration," Andrew Stettner of the Century Foundation told Common Dreams.
By Stephen Prager
In what has been described as a "barrage of attacks on workers," the U.S. Department of Labor under President Donald Trump is planning to overhaul dozens of rules that protect workers from exploitation and wage theft.
The administration announced this month that it planned to change over 60 regulations it deems "unecessary" burdens to businesses and economic growth.
According to an analysis released Tuesday by labor policy experts at the Century Foundation—senior fellows Julie Su and Rachel West and director of economy and jobs Andrew Stettner—most of the changes "reverse critical standards that ensure workers get a just day's pay and come home healthy and safe."
In one of the most sweeping changes, the department plans to reverse a 2013 rule that extended minimum wage and overtime protections to home healthcare workers.
These workers, who care for elderly and other medically frail individuals, already make less than $17 an hour on average.
Stettner told Common Dreams that the changes will "suppress wages" and allow agencies to "put the screws on workers to work 50- or 60-hour weeks."
The Trump administration is also rolling back a Biden-era rule that banned bosses from paying subminimum wages to disabled employees.
This discriminatory practice has been on the wane due to state-level bans in 15 states. But in the absence of a federal ban, nearly 40,000 employees—most of whom have intellectual disabilities—still received less than the federal minimum wage as of 2024.
The Century Foundation report says that by ending the rule, the Trump administration would be once again "relegating workers with disabilities to jobs that pay as little as pennies per hour."
The department is also taking a hatchet to workers' rights and safety. Another major change it proposed would do away with protections for seasonal migrant farmworkers under the H-2A visa program who raise complaints about wage and hour violations.
It was commonplace for farm owners to take advantage of these seasonal employees, whose legal status was tied to their work, and who therefore risked deportation if they lost their jobs.
Cases of exploitation, however, declined to an all-time low after the Biden administration introduced the rule, which banned employers from firing, disciplining, or otherwise retaliating against workers who attempted to participate in collective bargaining.
"These reforms protected the rights of farmworkers in the H-2A program to speak out individually and collectively against mistreatment and prevented employers from arbitrarily firing them from their jobs," the report says.
The department also proposed weakening the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's (OSHA) general duty clause, which allows businesses to be punished for putting their employees in dangerous situations. The proposed change would exempt many jobs that are deemed "inherently risky" from protection.
The administration described it as a way to prevent OSHA from cracking down on workplace injuries among athletes and stuntmen.
However, Stettner suggested that the broad language could allow the administration to go much further in defining what is considered "inherently risky." The report notes that the administration is "crowdsourcing" suggestions from employers about what other occupations to exempt.
"The employer community, they're jumping onto this," Stettner said. "They're telling their members to write in to the Department of Labor about other inherently dangerous occupations they should accept from the general duty clause."
The authors pointed out that the administration has previously rolled back restrictions meant to protect workers from heat-related stress on the job, which results in more than 600 deaths and over 25,000 injuries each year.
As the administration pushes to expand coal mining, it is also weakening protections for the miners themselves. After laying off most of the employees at OSHA's research arm—which monitors cases of black lung disease—earlier this year, it is now weakening safety requirements to prevent roof falls, mine explosions, and exposure to toxic silica.
"The DOL's role should be to protect the most vulnerable workers: farmworkers, people with disabilities, people that have suffered discrimination," Stettner said. "They're showing their true colors as an anti-worker administration."
Experts had expected a key manufacturing index number to tick upward, which makes the massive drop in July a significant and unpleasant surprise.
By Brad Reed
A key manufacturing activity indicator unexpectedly plunged over the last month amid warnings from American automobile giant General Motors that U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs are swallowing its profits.
The Wall Street Journalreports that the Fifth District Survey of Manufacturing Activity's index "sank sharply" in July and fell to -20, which was a drop from the -8 number posted by the index in June. Experts surveyed by the Journal had actually expected the index number to tick upward to -6, which makes the massive drop in July a significant and unpleasant surprise.
The index is a survey of more than five dozen manufacturing firms located in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States that asks them to report activities including shipments, new orders, and employment. A monthly number below zero indicates that activity in these realms has shrunk rather than grown over the last month, and the Journal notes that the index has been registering negative numbers for five months straight.
And the month-over-month dive in manufacturing activity isn't the only signal of trouble ahead for domestic manufacturing. General Motors revealed on Tuesday that its profits took a significant dent in the past quarter thanks in part to the Trump tariffs on vital components such as steel.
In all, GM's core profits fell by $3 billion on the quarter and it projected that its third-quarter profits could drop by as much as $5 billion as more tariffs take effect. Although GM is expanding some of its manufacturing in the U.S. to mitigate some of the impact of Trump's tariffs, that likely can only go so far when big tariffs are still being levied on the imported raw materials that the company needs to build cars.
GM's warning about tariffs comes just a day after Jeep manufacturer Stellantis projected that the Trump tariffs would directly lead to $350 million in losses in the first half of 2025.
Trump made raising tariffs on foreign products a key plank of his 2024 election campaign despite the fact that he also ran on lowering inflation, as tariffs historically have led to higher, rather than lower, prices.
"This is preventable starvation," said Alex de Waal. "It is entirely man-made."
By Brett Wilkins
A leading global authority on famine on Monday accused Israel of orchestrating a carefully planned campaign of mass starvation in the Gaza Strip, remarks that came amid a steadily rising death toll from malnutrition caused by the 654-day U.S.-backed Israeli siege and obliteration of the Palestinian enclave.
"I've been working on this topic for more than four decades, and there is no case since World War II of starvation that is being so minutely designed and controlled," Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, told Al Jazeera.
"This is preventable starvation. It is entirely man-made," de Waal added. "And every stage of this has been predicted, and at every stage action could have been taken—by Israel, by the international authorities, [the] international community, those who back Israel—to prevent what is happening now... Those steps have simply not been taken."
The Gaza Health Ministry—whose casualty figures have been deemed accurate by Israeli military officials and a likely undercount by multiple peer-reviewed studies—said Tuesday that 15 more Palestinians, including four children, died from malnutrition over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of starvation deaths in the coastal enclave to at least 101, including 80 children, since October 2023. The ministry said that 21 Gaza children have starved to death over the past three days alone.
When combined with lack of medicine, malnutrition has claimed hundreds of Palestinian lives in Gaza, according to officials there.
"I am so hungry," Ruwaida Amer, a 30-year-old Gaza woman, wrote for +972 Magazine Monday. "We are starving. My body is breaking down. My mother is collapsing from exhaustion. My cousin cheats death every day for a morsel of aid. Gaza's children are dying in front of our eyes, and we are powerless to help them."
Another Gaza woman, Amina Badir, told Amer while clutching her starving 3-year-old: "Tell me how to save my daughter Rahaf from death. For a week she's eaten nothing but a single spoon of lentils each day."
"She's suffering from malnutrition. There's no treatment, no milk at the hospital," Badir added. "They've taken away her right to live. I see death in her eyes."
Gaza medical officials say 17,000 children are severely malnourished in the strip. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, also known as the IPC scale, 85% of Gaza's people are in Phase 5, defined as such "an extreme deprivation of food" that "starvation, death, destitution, and extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition are or will likely be evident."
The "complete siege" imposed on Gaza immediately following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel has fueled widespread starvation and disease, and has been condemned as a war crime. The International Criminal Court last year ordered the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged murder and forced starvation of Gazans. The International Court of Justice is also weighing a genocide case filed against Israel by South Africa.
Amid intense international pressure, Israel partially lifted its siege of Gaza in May. However, de Waal and others say the move is wholly inadequate to prevent the famine taking hold in the strip.
"The partial lifting was not to bring in the kind of humanitarian program that we have been familiar with as humanitarians over the decades," de Waal told Al Jazeera Monday. "It was to bring in a type of rationed program that is simply an arm of the Israeli military."
Israel has also come under intense criticism for its method of delivering aid in Gaza via the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose distribution points have been the sites of near-daily massacres. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers and troops say they were ordered to shoot and shell desperate aid-seekers at GHF distribution centers. Officials said at least 10 aid-seekers were killed on Tuesday alone.
"The killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible."
"As of July 21, we have recorded 1,054 people killed in Gaza while trying to get food; 766 of them were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites and 288 near [United Nations] and other humanitarian organizations' aid convoys," U.N. human rights spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan told Agence France-Presse.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said Tuesday that "the killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible," adding that the "IDF must stop killing people at distribution points."
Overall, at least 59,029 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 2023, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. More than 142,000 others have been wounded, and at least 14,000 more are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed buildings.
Other international humanitarian experts also weighed in on the growing Gaza famine, with Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, tellingAl Jazeera Monday that the "man-made" starvation in the strip "is a war crime."
"Israel has been using aid as a way to bait civilians and has been killing civilians who have been seeking aid," he said. "What we're seeing now is the most horrific stage of Israel's 20-month starvation campaign."
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, toldReuters Tuesday that "our last tent, our last food parcel, our last relief items have been distributed. There is nothing left."
"Hundreds of truckloads have been sitting in warehouses or in Egypt or elsewhere, and costing our Western European donors a lot of money, but they are blocked from coming in," he explained. "That's why we are so angry. Because our job is to help."
"Israel is not yielding," Egeland added. "They just want to paralyze our work."
"The clean energy future is no longer a promise. It's a fact," said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. "No government, no industry, no special interest can stop it."
By Jake Johnson
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Tuesday that fossil fuels represent "the greatest threat to energy security today" and warned that countries clinging to the primary driver of the climate emergency are "sabotaging" their own economies—and futures.
Guterres said the international community is "on the cusp of a new era," pointing to record investments in green energy around the world.
"The clean energy future is no longer a promise. It's a fact," said Guterres. "No government, no industry, no special interest can stop it. Of course, the fossil fuel lobby of some fossil fuel companies will try—and we know the lengths to which they will go. But I have never been more confident that they will fail—because we have passed the point of no return."
"Countries that cling to fossil fuels are not protecting their economies—they are sabotaging them," he continued. "Driving up costs, undermining competitiveness, locking in stranded assets, and missing the greatest economic opportunity of the 21st century."
Guterres' remarks coincided with the release of a new U.N. report showing that "solar and wind are now almost always the least expensive—and the fastest—option for new electricity generation."
"The plummeting costs mean that solar and wind have become the fastest-growing sources of electricity in history, and growth in renewable energy is now outpacing that in fossil fuels in the power sector," the report states. "In 2024, renewables made up 92.5% of all new electricity capacity additions and 74% of electricity generation growth."
Jean Su, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's energy justice program, said in a statement that the report underscores "just how much economic and environmental promise lies in the renewable energy transition, and how badly the U.S. is blowing it."
"The Trump administration is blocking affordable clean energy when the U.S. should be leading the charge," said Su. "With the federal government's twisted time warp trying to force Americans back to the age of coal and oligarchs, states need to take the reins and turbocharge the renewable energy transition. That means ramping down dangerous oil, gas, and coal production and use, boosting solar and storage, and making polluters pay for their devastating climate damage."
The report was published a day before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is expected to hand down a landmark advisory opinion on countries' legal obligations to address the climate emergency, which is wreaking increasingly destructive havoc across the globe as rich nations—led by the United States under the administration of President Donald Trump—continue to expand oil and gas operations.
"This case is about more than just the level of ambition required from individual states in their future climate action," said Joie Chowdhury and Sébastien Duyck of the Center for International Environmental Law ahead of the ICJ ruling. "It is about reckoning with historical responsibility. It is impossible to effectively and equitably address the climate crisis without looking at its origins and drivers."
"Legal arguments presented by a majority of countries in the proceedings affirm a critical truth: Past emissions matter, and loss and damage already endured must be recognized and repaired—not as charity, but as legal obligation," they added. "This means not only halting harmful practices, but also delivering climate reparations."
"The White House AI Action Plan is written by Big Tech interests invested in advancing AI that's used on us, not by us. Today, we are reclaiming agency over the trajectory AI will take."
By Jessica Corbett
In anticipation of U.S. President Donald Trump's Artificial Intelligence Action Plan, over 90 groups focused on consumer protection, economic and environmental justice, labor, and more came together Tuesday to call for an AI blueprint that "delivers on public well-being, shared prosperity, a sustainable future, and security for all."
"We can't let Big Tech and Big Oil lobbyists write the rules for AI and our economy at the expense of our freedom and equality, workers and families' well-being, even the air we breathe and the water we drink—all of which are affected by the unrestrained and unaccountable rollout of AI," says the coalition's website for the new People's AI Action Plan.
"The American people need good, stable jobs, functioning public institutions, safe online spaces for children, and clean, affordable, safe, and reliable energy," the site says. "The American economy needs robust innovation, a level playing field for all, and relief from the tech monopolies who repeatedly sacrifice the interests of everyday people for their own profits."
"The White House AI Action Plan is written by Big Tech interests invested in advancing AI that's used on us, not by us," said AI Now Institute co-executive directors Sarah Myers West and Amba Kak in a statement. "Today, we are reclaiming agency over the trajectory AI will take: It's time for a People's Action Plan for AI that puts the needs of everyday Americans over corporate profits."
Trump started the process for his AI Action Plan with a January executive order. It is expected to be released on Wednesday.
Citing unnamed sources, Axiosreported last week that "the plan largely lays out the Trump administration's aspirations for AI, some of which officials have already stated, including: promoting innovation, reducing regulatory burdens, and overhauling permitting."
White House Office of Science and Technology Policy spokesperson Victoria LaCivita said in an email to Axios that it "will deliver a strong, specific, and actionable federal policy roadmap that goes beyond the details reported here and we look forward to releasing it soon."
According to Monday reporting from Politico, "The AI Action Plan will include cutting back environmental requirements and streamlining permitting policies to make it easier to build data centers and power infrastructure."
Also on Monday, Nextgov/FCW—which obtained documents and spoke with unnamed sources—reported that "Trump plans to sign three AI-focused executive orders in the runup to the release of the administration's sweeping AI Action Plan."
"Each order focuses on one of three aspects of artificial intelligence regulation and policy that the administration has prioritized: spearheading AI-ready infrastructure; establishing and promoting a U.S. technology export regime; and ensuring large language models are not generating 'woke' or otherwise biased information," according to Nextgov/FCW.
J.B. Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, stressed on Tuesday that "AI is already harming workers, consumers, and communities—and instead of enforcing guardrails, this administration is gutting oversight."
Branch pointed to a recent vote in the U.S. Senate to remove a controversial provision that would have prevented state-level regulation of AI for a decade from Republicans' budget reconciliation package, which Trump signed on July 4.
"After the AI moratorium was defeated 99-1 under massive public pressure, the message from the public was clear: No more handouts for Trump's tech bro buddies," Branch said. "We need rules and accountability—not a Silicon Valley free-for-all."
"Who's he gonna pick?" Republican Thomas Massie asked of Speaker Mike Johnson. "Is he going to stand with the pedophiles and underage sex traffickers? Or is he gonna pick the American people and justice for the victims?"
By Stephen Prager
Republicans on the House Rules Committee have ground business in the chamber to a halt to avoid having to vote on Democratic amendments calling for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
For weeks now, Republicans in Congress, facing pressure from the White House, have dodged efforts to force the release of the files, which may implicate U.S. President Donald Trump in crimes committed by the convicted sex criminal.
According to Axios, the House had been scheduled to vote on GOP legislation involving immigration and environmental legislation this week. But in order for these votes to reach the floor, they'd first need to pass through the Speaker-controlled Rules Committee, which has also been presented with multiple Epstein amendments.
Republicans on House Rules "don't want to vote no because they're then accused of helping hide the truth about Epstein," Punchbowl News reported Tuesday morning. So instead, they've chosen to simply stop work for the week to avoid having to vote at all.
This has essentially ground all business in the House to a halt, potentially until after Congress gets back from its August recess.
On Monday, the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), told Politico reporter Mia Camille, "We're done in [the] Rules Committee until September."
"The Rules Committee decides what gets voted on in the House. It's where Republicans have already voted six times against forcing the release of the Epstein files," said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-N.M.). "They'd rather shut down Congress than vote to release the files. What are they hiding?"
The Epstein cloud has only grown thicker over the White House over the past week after The Wall Street Journalreported that in 2003, Trump gave Epstein a salacious letter for his 50th birthday containing talk of a "secret" between the two men and a drawing of a nude woman. Trump has sued The Journal, calling the letter "a fake thing."
The New York Times later reported that a decade earlier, Trump hosted a party full of young women where Epstein was the only other guest.
Amid the drip of scandal, the White House has remained dismissive of calls, including from the president's own supporters, for the Department of Justice to release all its files related to Epstein.
Not long ago, officials in his administration made promises to release the files themselves, assuring damning revelations. But now, Trump describes the files as a "hoax" by the "radical left." Of the Trump-faithful who have called for their release, he said, "I don't want their support anymore!"
Late last week, Trump called for the DOJ to release grand jury transcripts pertaining to the investigation. But many other critical pieces of information, including ones that could implicate the president, would remain hidden.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has closely coordinated the House GOP's response to the Epstein fiasco with the White House, saying repeatedly that there is "no daylight" between his position and that of the administration.
Johnson last week introduced a non-binding resolution to provide the public with "certain" Epstein-related documents, but it had no legal weight, allowing the White House to have total control over the information they disclosed. But even that resolution, Johnson said, would not be brought forth for a vote until after the August recess.
This has provoked the ire of a fellow Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who—along with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.)—drafted a discharge petition last week in an attempt to force a vote on the Epstein files onto the House floor.
"I think this is the referendum on [Johnson's] leadership," Massie said. "Who's he gonna pick? Is he going to stand with the pedophiles and underage sex traffickers? Or is he gonna pick the American people and justice for the victims?"
Last week, a CNN/SSRSpoll found that just 3% of Americans were satisfied with the amount of information the government had released about the Epstein files, while more than half said they were dissatisfied.
"This is the ultimate decision the speaker needs to make. And it's irrespective of what the president wants," Massie said.
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