The New Regime

President Trump’s first afternoon in office was short on major developments for labor rights.  The big news was that shortly after noon, a U.S. Department of Labor webpage about LGBT rights suddenly disappeared from the government’s website.  You can read the deleted report here.

Now, a Google search on the DOL.gov site for LGBT produces the following item on the list of search results:

But clicking on the link produces this:

The other labor news from the new Trump Administration comes from his Inaugural Address.  In dark tones, he hit on his populist campaign themes about the decline of American manufacturing and American jobs.  The annotated transcript of his address is on the New York Times website.

President Trump said:

“Politicians prospered, but the jobs left, and the factories closed.”

“For many decades we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry ….”

He said that the U.S. has:

“spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. […] One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world. But that is the past, and now we are looking only to the future.”

While President Trump was on the steps of the capitol suggesting the Administration cares about good middle class jobs, some staffer had been tasked, in the first moments of his administration, with removing from the government website the DOL statement on LGBT workplace rights.