Executive Session
Floor Speech
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Ms. WARREN. Mr. President, I am here today to urge my colleagues to oppose the confirmation of two Trump nominees--John Ring, who has been nominated to the National Labor Relations Board, and Patrick Pizzella, who has been nominated Deputy Secretary of Labor. These two nominees have been selected to hold critical jobs to protect workers. That is what these jobs are about.
I will be blunt. I start with a pretty high bar here since, despite his campaign rhetoric from 2 years ago, the President's track record on standing up for workers has been absolutely miserable. From the day he nominated Andrew Puzder--an executive who delighted in mocking and belittling his own low-wage workers--to run the Department of Labor, this administration has delivered one gut punch after another to America's working people.
The National Labor Relations Board is responsible for protecting the rights of workers to organize and bargain for better wages and benefits, so as we consider President Trump's latest nominee for the Board, it makes sense to look at what his nominees so far have already done.
Look at the new Republican majority's very first week back on the job back in December. In just 5 days, the Board mowed its way through a giant wish list of areas where giant companies were begging to be let off the hook for violating workers' rights.
Allowing employers to shirk their collective bargaining obligations by contracting out workers? Check.
Making it easier for employers to control the outcome of union elections. Check.
Opening the door for workplace rules that chill workers' ability to join together on the job. Check.
Allowing cases to be ``settled'' without input from the workers whose rights are affected by the settlement. Check.
Just as troubling as these anti-worker decisions themselves are the egregious conflicts of interest behind them.
From the moment he was nominated by President Trump, I have repeatedly raised concerns about Board Member William Emanuel's history of representing big corporations that have abused their workers and about his mile-long list of potential conflicts of interest. Sure enough, after just a few months on the Board, NLRB's inspector general determined that Mr. Emanuel participated in not one but two important decisions involving his former law firm, which directly violated his ethics pledge. In response, the Board vacated one of its most consequential decisions of the last year, and Member Emanuel lost any remaining credibility that he could be an impartial Board member. So I called on him to resign.
Now the President wants us to put John Ring on the Board. I have asked Mr. Ring to provide a list of clients and cases that might require his recusal. To his credit, he has done so. But Mr. Ring's long list of clients is a huge red flag. Either he will ignore the ethics rules when they are inconvenient--like Mr. Emanuel did--or he will likely have to recuse himself from important cases.
A large number of potential conflicts of interest isn't the only thing Mr. Ring has in common with Mr. Emanuel. Like Emanuel, Mr. Ring has also spent his career representing large employers against workers, and his few public statements on the NLRB express a belief that the Board has been too friendly to workers and that corporations have gotten the short end of the stick.
After decades of stagnant wages and skyrocketing corporate profits, does anyone other than insider lobbyists and lawyers think that Washington is working for middle-class families and that big corporations are the ones under attack? I don't think so. That is exactly why an NLRB that looks out for workers is more important than ever. President Trump's NLRB is failing miserably at that mission.
Working Americans deserve Board members with a demonstrated record of fighting for workers, not against them. They deserve Board members who aren't ethically and legally constrained from doing the job. Mr. Ring does not meet those qualifications.
Workers need an NLRB that works for them, and they need leaders at the Department of Labor who are going to be on their side, not on the side of giant employers and extreme, rightwing donors. Patrick Pizzella has been nominated to the No. 2 job at the Department of Labor, and nothing in Mr. Pizzella's resume tells us that he meets the description of being on the side of workers.
In the 1990s, Mr. Pizzella lobbied with Jack Abramoff to exempt the Northern Mariana Islands from Federal labor laws. Do you know what that did? That allowed companies to run sweatshops while slapping ``Made in America'' labels on their products.
Later, when Mr. Pizzella was in charge of data management and other operations at the Labor Department, the Government Accountability Office found that the Wage and Hour Division was egregiously mishandling wage theft complaints, consistently leaving vulnerable low- wage workers out to dry, because of faulty data systems and other operational failures.
After leaving the Department, Mr. Pizzella went to work for secretive, far-right donor groups, such as the Conservative Action Project, which secretly planned out the 2013 government shutdown to sabotage the Affordable Care Act and undermine many workers' access to healthcare, all while Mr. Pizzella was its highest paid employee.
The Deputy Secretary position should be filled by someone who has defended worker rights, not undermined them, someone who will make government work for the American people, not hamstring it for political purposes. Mr. Pizzella is the wrong man for this job.
President Trump talked a big game during his campaign about fighting for workers, but after a year of corporate tax cuts and rolling back commonsense protections for workplace safety, retirement security, and more, we know that those promises have turned out not to be worth much of anything.
The Senate should send a clear message to this administration that we expect agencies like the NLRB and the Labor Department to stand up for working people, not to suck up to corporate lobbyists. Rejecting these two nominees would be a good first step.
Thank you, Mr. President.
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