He’s the self-styled champion of the Forgotten American. But if you’re trying to figure out how billionaire President Donald Trump will square his much-touted business acumen with his concern for the working masses, the clues may lie in a list of broken web links. In a review of the Department of Labor’s website, the Star found that multiple posts about protecting precarious workers, enforcing labour laws, and cracking down on wage theft appear to have vanished from the website. For the charitably-inclined, it might be a mysterious coincidence. For critics, it’s a signal of what’s to come. “The first three actions that Donald Trump took, one was to take down information from the Department of Labor website,” said California-based workers’ rights advocate Carmen Rojas on a recent visit to Toronto. “If we have been living in an overcast period for working people in the U.S., we are about to enter into a dark, dark period.”Gone is Trump’s first pick for labor secretary Andrew Puzder, who withdrew his nomination Wednesday following a public outcry over the business magnate who has trash talked minimum wage hikes and overtime protections.But critics have other concerns. The Star found that many official departmental documents and orders from the Obama administration were still available. Yet there were notable disappearances, including an executive order that lifted the minimum wage of federal contractors to $10.10 an hour — a move that provided an estimated 200,000 low-wage workers with a raise. Numerous links to Department of Labor blog posts also appeared to be broken, specifically on issues related to wage theft, enforcement, and employee misclassification — the practice of wrongly classifying workers as independent contractors to avoid legal obligations like paying minimum wage.All three areas were championed under Obama in an effort to better protect vulnerable workers. T ...
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