Confirm David Weil. Now.
The business lobby doesn't want Weil to run the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division. That's reason enough for the Senate to confirm him. But there are many others.
The economist David Weil, dean of Brandeis’s School for Social Policy and Management, was administrator of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division during the Obama administration. President Joe Biden has nominated him to return to that job. The business lobby (the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the International Franchise Association, Heritage Action for America, the National Taxpayers Union, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and various others) don’t want Weil back because had an annoying habit of trying to enforce the nation’s wage and hour laws.
Weil is the author of The Fissured Workplace (2014), a sort of update to John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1967 book The New Industrial State, which, like that earlier book, describes in vivid sociological detail how the corporate world is actually structured, as opposed to how we imagine it to be structured. Spoiler alert: It’s structured to insulate corporations from assuming responsibility for any employee who earns less than about $50,000 a year. These workers are sloughed off on staffing agencies, subcontractors, and franchisees, and in some instances they’re treated as independent contractors (i.e., gig workers, though the “gig economy,” despite what you’ve heard, accounts for a comparatively small slice of the fissured workforce).
Weil tried to bring enforcement of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act into the 21st century by demanding greater recognition of these employment structures. His chief crimes, in the eyes of business, were an overtime regulation that sought to extend coverage to a majority of workers, as existed as recently as 1975; a “guidance” document that described his agency’s enforcement actions regarding gig workers; and a second guidance document doing the same for workers at staffing and temp agencies and other subcontractors and at franchise outlets. The Trump administration watered down the first of these and withdrew the second and third.
It’s difficult to do justice to the controversies surrounding Weil’s nomination in a single piece. I discovered that when writing about Weil last week in The New Republic. So I wrote three pieces, which I hope you’ll read:
The Senate should return David Weil to the Wage and Hour Division. His is one of the more important sub-cabinet nominations pending right now. A vote against him is a vote against more decent treatment of low-wage workers.