National Nurses United today submitted formal objections to four Department of Labor regulations that would escalate sweeping multiple Trump administration attacks on workers’ and union rights and protections.

“Taken together with the assault on federal workers that have stripped collective bargaining rights for nearly half a million federal workers, these repressive regulatory changes reinforce the sweeping handouts to the corporate class under President Trump. The overall impact fully brands Trump’s administration as the most hostile to working people in a century,” said NNU President Mary Turner, RN.

The new DOL regulations issued in June and July would abandon anti-discrimination civil rights law and equal opportunity protections for workers of federal contractors, eviscerate disability worker rights, overturn groundbreaking worker and union rights for temporary farm workers established by the Biden administration, and gut basic employment rights for home care workers.  

“We’re experiencing a direct attempt to overturn the most basic labor rights for American workers as a protection against the predatory behavior of rapacious employers dating back to the landmark National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and substantial gains made to expand those fundamental rights to all workers in our nation. 

“It should not be lost on anyone that eliminating these essential protections and voice for workers and unions has long been one of the first acts of dictatorships over the last century. America’s nurses will join with other labor and community organizations to defend our most consequential working-class rights,” said Turner.

Civil rights and equality - Rescission of Executive Order 11246

This order would eliminate non-discrimination and affirmative action obligations of employers that contract with the federal government. “Without these requirements, federal contractors would be free to create policies and implement practices that result in systemic discrimination and occupational segregation,” said NNU in its letter to DOL Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer.  

“By rescinding the non-discrimination and affirmative action obligations of federal contractors, the administration is essentially aiding and abetting discrimination by private employers who are using public funds.”  

The anti-discrimination requirements enacted by President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Executive Order, a product of the Civil Rights Movement and Civil Rights Act of 1964, helped to address a century of Jim Crow segregation discrimination against Black and other workers of color, and other discrimination based on gender, national origin, and other protected classes of workers. “This rescission would be a massive gift to profiteering corporations, and further perpetuate the growing chasm of racial, gender and other income and wealth inequality that is a stain on our nation,” said Turner.  

Disability rights - Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973

NNU opposes rescinding the 2016 rules that were a major step forward to ensure equal employment opportunity for workers with disabilities in the federal contractor workforce. The affirmative action requirements have effectively increased employment of workers with disabilities, who have lagged behind other workers, said NNU in its letter to Chavez-DeRemer.  

“The Act sought to ensure equal employment opportunity for workers with disabilities as long advocated by the disability justice movement for civil rights,” said NNU, and is a disgraceful effort to “eliminate equal employment opportunity protections for disabled workers.” 

Attack on temporary agricultural workers (H-2A visas)

NNU opposes this proposed rule because it would rescind critical health, safety, and labor protections for some of the most vulnerable workers in our economy, H-2A workers. That includes protections intended to help prevent unsafe working conditions, exploitative recruitment practices, and disparate treatment or retaliation for attempting to organize their workplace or speak with service providers, including health care and legal rights providers, said NNU. “This new regulation is especially cruel in coinciding with the draconian Trump administration deportation raids on farm workers that will also have a direct impact on food availability and safety,” notes Turner. 

H-2A workers play a critical role in the U.S. food supply chain and national economy by filling a gap in employment for which there are no U.S. citizen or permanent resident workers available to perform the temporary work, NNU noted in its objections. Farmworkers, who were not covered under the 1935 NLRA, have long struggled to secure the rights available to other workers, having to rely mostly on state actions.  

This DOL regulation would specifically repeal the 2024 Farmworker Protection rule set by President Biden that has been especially despised by corporate agribusinesses and other farm employers. It provided essential protections for temporary farmworkers, noted NNU, in large part due to “the nature of the H-2A program itself (that) makes H-2A workers uniquely vulnerable to exploitation… (including) well-documented cases of egregious labor and human rights abuses committed against H-2A workers.” 

Application of the Fair Labor Standards Act to Domestic Service

The proposed rule would strip minimum wage and overtime protections from home care workers by reverting to an obsolete definition of “companionship services” going back to prior regulations that permitted third-party employers to claim exclusions for home care workers they employ and exempted live-in domestic service workers from the law’s overtime compensation requirement. “Reverting to regulations that allow subminimum wages for home care workers and live-in domestic workers will lead to increased poverty and precarity for an already vulnerable workforce with an overrepresentation of women, people of color, and immigrants,” wrote NNU. 

Home care employees were also excluded from the 1935 NLRA. “After many decades of organizing, home care workers finally won basic employment protections in 2015, including the right to federal minimum wage and overtime,” noted Catherine Ruckelshaus and Mimi Whittaker in a blog last week. “Home care worker wages are abysmally low… which have created high turnover and shortages of these essential workers, at a time when our population is aging and the need for in-home care and services is rising. Excluding them from these bedrock rights rewards for-profit intermediaries, embeds a second-class status of home care workers, and creates severe care and service problems for older adults and people with disabilities,” they wrote.  

“As a gendered workforce where women predominate,” wrote NNU in challenging the regulation, “RNs understand the harms of the occupational segregation and the gendered work of ‘caring.’ RNs have spoken out against the ‘care penalty’ they pay as a result of employer and government devaluation of their labor based on gender… The administration removes wage and hour protections for home care workers and live-in domestic workers with no concern for fair compensation or reduced labor standards. … Without the floor of the minimum wage and overtime protections, home care workers will work more and get paid less, exacerbating the racial and gender pay gap.”  

National Nurses United is the largest and fastest-growing union and professional association of registered nurses in the United States with more than 225,000 members nationwide. NNU affiliates include California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, DC Nurses Association, Michigan Nurses Association, Minnesota Nurses Association, and New York State Nurses Association.