Monday morning musings for workplace watchers.
Labor Agency Odds and Ends|Tracking NLRB Funding Boost
Rebecca Rainey: While you’ve probably been paying attention to the minutiae of major regulations from the US Department of Labor—think the independent contractor proposal or the still-to-come overtime rule—the agency was doing other work. Here’s what you may have missed.
M-POWER: The DOL earlier this month announced Argentina, Canada, Germany, South Africa, and Spain have joined its Multilateral Partnership for Organizing, Worker Empowerment and Rights initiative or M-POWER, an effort aimed at boosting labor rights and union organizing internationally.
The initiative, launched last year by the Biden administration, has allocated roughly $230 million to provide technical assistance to workers and labor organizations across the globe. DOL officials say that because of the nature of our global economy, efforts like M-POWER can also lift up American workers by helping to fight exploitation that could undercut the domestic labor market.
“American workers are increasingly in direct competition with workers in other parts of the world,” Thea Lee, deputy undersecretary for international affairs at DOL, told Punching In. ”It is the vulnerability and the lack of power, lack of voice of workers in other parts of the world that makes global competition so toxic, and it doesn’t have to be that way.”
IC Enforcement: We wrote earlier this year about how DOL’s Wage and Hour Division had...
A fake BBC News report that falsely accuses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of displaying a stolen painting has been circulating on X since April 21. The footage appears to show the Ukraini...