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**JANUARY 21, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Biden and Workers: A Good Start

With the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 rising relentlessly toward half a
million, President Biden signed multiple executive orders

today to slow its grim reaping. One of them required Occupational Safety
and Health Administration (OSHA) to enforce workplace safety rules to
which it turned a blind eye during the Trump presidency and requested
OSHA to develop enforceable safety standards to counter the pandemic's
spread in workplaces.

Under the leadership of Trump's labor secretary, longtime anti-union
attorney Eugene Scalia, OSHA considered the preservation of
laissez-faire ideology to be more important than the preservation of
American workers' lives when confronted with businesses' refusal to
adopt pandemic safety standards. OSHA established no enforceable
standards for such matters as the distancing between workers (which is
why the virus spread like wildfire in meatpacking plants) and levied few
serious fines on employers whose workers were subjected to COVID
exposure. Its response to calls to investigate particular plants was
similarly minimal. (In one reported instance, an OSHA field investigator
declined to visit a plant where the workers were packed together because
she feared exposure to the disease. The agency took no action on behalf
of the endangered workers, however.)

In another action signaling he's well aware of the challenges facing
American workers, Biden fired

National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Peter Robb yesterday.
Robb's tenure at the NLRB-the agency established during the New Deal
to enable workers to form and join the unions of their choice-was
marked by his consistent efforts to keep workers from joining unions and
to keep unions from representing workers. Noticing this apparent
contradiction between the NLRB's mission and Robb's own, Biden
offered Robb the opportunity to resign-something that most Trump
appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president already had done.
Robb, however, was so zealous in his commitment to blocking workers'
wishes that he refused; I believe he may have been the only Trump
official with a comparable appointment status to do so. At which point,
Biden immediately showed him the door.

On the continuum of worker-friendly actions, dumping Robb and telling
OSHA to do its job are low-hanging fruit. The speed with which Biden
acted, however, was not just encouraging but a welcome break from the
studied slowness which frequently marked other Democratic presidents'
approach to promoting workers' interests. It's a good beginning.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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Garbage Out; Government In

Joe Biden's call for unity is a stretch, but that doesn't mean
progress is off the table. BY HAROLD MEYERSON

A Quiet Inauguration in the Capital

Without the crowds, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn in. Some
still wanted to be in Washington for the event. BY MARCIA BROWN &
BRITTANY GIBSON

The Future of American Politics

A party built on whiteness is collapsing; two-party dominance may go
with it. BY KATHLEEN J. FRYDL

As the Revolving Door Turns

Corporate America is ready to put the past behind them and hire former
Trump staffers. BY ALEXANDER SAMMON

A Shot in the Arm

How government succeeded in coronavirus vaccine development, and failed
in distribution BY OLIVIA WEBB

The Checks and Shots Strategy

Plus, Biden gets out his firing sunglasses. BY DAVID DAYEN

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