If Donald Trump is fighting for the American worker, you wouldn’t know this from the legal brief his lawyers filed on Friday in a major case before the Supreme Court.
As Reuters-Legal reports today, the Trump administration on Friday sided with employers in a Supreme Court case over the rights of workers to bring class action lawsuits against companies, court documents showed.
The case involves a ruling from the National Labor Relations Board that prohibits employers from requiring employees to waive class action claims.
What might that case look like? Let’s say your employer fails to pay you overtime when you are on call for Saturday as a mechanic, a nurse, a delivery driver and so on. Your restriction states that you must be within 20 minutes of reporting to work in case of a “call out.”
Depending on the extent of restrictions, the employee is owed pay for this time.
I discussed this matter with a nurse in Champaign last week.
My hunch is that she lacks the money to fight her employer for overtime pay.
Also, it’s unlikely that a lawyer will take her claim for pay, given its fairly small size.
It’s a different story if the nurse has 50 co-workers who are similarly affected. If they act as a group (called a class, in legal terms), they are on a more even footing with their employer—and they’ll attract good representation.
Donald Trump talks a big game about favoring the American worker, but so far his policy positions are more consistent with being a billionaire businessman.
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