In July, the Department of Labor (DOL) introduced an extensive plan to reduce regulations affecting various labor protections, including important workplace safety regulations. Officials presented the initiative as an effort to “put American workers and job creators first,” a misleading interpretation of policies that enable employers to jeopardize their workers’ well-being and complicate the process for employees to seek accountability.
This movement toward deregulation indicates a readiness to compromise the health and lives of workers, especially Black and brown workers who are overrepresented in the blue-collar industries that would be impacted, in pursuit of corporate profits. If approved, the far-reaching changes will adversely affect working conditions at construction sites and mines and limit the ability of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to penalize employers if workers are injured or killed while performing inherently dangerous activities.
Loosening regulations that ensure health, safety, and dignity in the workplace will not eliminate outdated or unnecessary regulations. Rather, this plan undermines the fundamental right of employees to have safe and respectable working environments; indicates to employers that taking shortcuts is permissible and that the government will ignore the exploitation and subsequent dismissal of worker safety; and seems aimed at reducing expenses for employers by transferring risks and dangers onto employees.
Agencies draft federal rules to implement the specifics of legislation enacted by Congress. Regulations ensure that laws are properly implemented and administered so that workers have meaningful protections. This is especially important given that current labor law already falls short in creating adequate job quality standards. Trump’s deregulatory agenda requires agencies to identify ten regulations to repeal before enacting a single new regulation. This paradigm upholds the false notion that regulations hinder economic growth and burden employers.
Over half of the rules that Trump’s DOL wants to repeal are intended to make workplaces safer for employees. Since the establishment of OSHA, more than 712,000 workers have been saved under the OSH Act, and jobsite deaths have decreased by almost two-thirds, even as the size of the U.S. workforce has more than doubled. OSHA is the only agency that enforces and preserves worker health and safety.
Within this deregulation campaign, DOL intends to revise reporting thresholds and training mandates, and change enforcement priorities and inspection frequencies at OSHA. The twenty-five proposed rules all put worker safety protections at risk. Four of the most concerning are:
A proposed change that would limit OSHA’s ability to cite employers under the General Duty Clause for hazards deemed “inherent and inseparable” from certain professions in high-risk sectors is particularly harmful. Employers already have autonomy over what is “essential” to a job and how to establish workplace standards, especially in nonunionized settings. That makes the General Duty Clause one of OSHA’s most effective enforcement weapons to address the countless dangers workers may face, giving it the authority to address significant workplace dangers that are not covered by more focused rules. Without the clause’s vital safeguards, OSHA would be significantly less equipped to respond to developing risks or hold employers accountable for recognized hazards that lie within gaps in current regulations.
The administration also intends to terminate OSHA’s independent system for monitoring COVID-related deaths and hospitalizations, as well as explicitly remove COVID-19 emergency reporting guidelines for health care settings from federal regulations. This change would mean that employers must only report the usual criteria for workplace risks, under which companies are only required to record hospitalizations if they occur within 24 hours of the job exposure. Since most COVID-related hospitalizations occur days or even weeks after exposure, returning to OSHA’s baseline reporting standard would essentially remove many workplace-related COVID cases from the record. The elimination of separate COVID-19 reporting also signals a concerning de-prioritization of reporting on the exposure of contagious illnesses, even in medical facilities where reporting is crucial for maintaining the safety of those settings, safeguarding access to care, and averting outbreaks that disproportionately affect those who are already at risk. If implemented, this change will harm workers in nursing facilities, assisted living communities, and home health agencies, as well as in other health care environments such as hospitals and medical offices.
Another proposal would remove the need for employers to disclose musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), even though these injuries are among the most prevalent and expensive workplace hazards. MSDs are injuries brought on by or made worse by heavy lifting, repetitive motions, poor workplace ergonomics, and other physically taxing jobs that are often not adequately protected by existing OSHA standards. Not
By Ela Jalil
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Christian Collins, a policy analyst for the Center for Law and Social Policy who focuses on post-secondary education, said that parking citations are just another financial barrier for students to overcome to get a degree.
Collins also noted that punishments like a hold on students’ accounts have a larger impact on low-income students who struggle to pay off their tickets, and warned against inequitable policies.
“If it’s coming at the cost of certain students effectively becoming barred from participating in education, educational opportunities and campus in general, then is it really the best design policy that you can offer?” Collins
By Lindsay Lee Wallace
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“The political coercion is a form of threat under the [National Labor Relations Act],” said Lorena Roque, interim director of education, labor, and worker justice at the Center for Law and Social Policy. “Being forced to do any of these things is an unfair labor practice, and then when you throw the political element in there, I think the [National Labor Relations Board] would be very upset.”
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By Christian Collins
The Trump Administration is advancing polices that solely benefit its anti-immigrant, military state agenda. A clear example is the administration’s offering of taxpayer-funded loan forgiveness to incentivize more applicants for openings at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Simultaneously, the Trump Administration seeks to strip loan forgiveness pathways from educational institutions, non-profit organizations, government employees, and others who are deemed obstructors to Trump’s political goals.
>> Read the full fact sheet here
By Diane Harris and Nat Baldino
When workers in the United States face a serious illness or need to care for a loved one, they often have nowhere to turn. Without a national paid family and medical leave program, many are forced to choose between their financial stability and their health and well-being. The Family and Medical Insurance Leave (FAMILY) Act seeks to change this by building on the successes of state programs to create a comprehensive and inclusive federal paid leave policy that meets the needs of workers. We urge Members of Congress to support the FAMILY Act, which would improve the health of workers, reduce poverty for families, increase the U.S. GDP by $775 billion each year, and generate cost savings for employers.
>> Read the full fact sheet here
By Monica Potts
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“Women who might leave the labor force for child rearing or taking paid leave only make 76 cents compared to a man’s dollar,” said Lorena Roque, director of education, labor, and worker justice at the Center for Law and Social Policy. “Not having affordable childcare, not having paid family medical leave—we’re seeing those gaps are widening, and they still exist.”
By Lydia DePillis
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“There was a concerted effort under the Biden-Harris administration to focus on access to not just jobs, but also trying to improve the quality of jobs that didn’t require a college degree,” said Wendy Chun-Hoon, who led the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor and now serves as the president of the left-leaning Center for Law and Social Policy.
Washington, D.C., September 9, 2025—Today’s release of the U.S. Census Bureau’s national Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance data for 2024 shows that while the overall economy is strong, the nation has much more to do to reduce poverty, especially among women and Black Americans.
For the most part, the poverty rate remained largely unchanged from 2023 to 2024. But the poverty rate among Black Americans increased from 17.9 percent in 2023 to 18.4 percent in 2024. And while overall child poverty rates dropped very slightly from 2023, the number of Black children living in poverty increased from 20.3 percent in 2023 to 22.7 percent in 2024, according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure. This measure looks at not simply earnings, but the resources people have after factoring in work and medical expenses, taxes, as well as tax credits and non-cash benefits.
For the second year in a row, women faced a large earnings gap. The median earnings for women in 2024 were $45,380, while the median earnings for men were $60,020. This gap is greater than in 2023, when median earnings for women were $43,200 and $57,740 for men.
“These numbers are not surprising,” said Wendy Chun-Hoon, president and executive director of CLASP. “The wage gap between men and women has existed for decades, as has the disparity in Black poverty rates compared to the rest of the country. While the nation has made incremental improvements, the reasons for these disparities are systemic, and we must do more to disrupt them. There’s no silver bullet to remedy these inequalities; rather, we need sustained investments to close the gender-racial wage gap—higher wages, more equal access to quality jobs, affordable family care, equitable tax policy, and paid leave. We should solve for people’s basic needs, not eviscerate our social safety net.”
Signs already point to a weakening economy in 2025. For instance, the August 2025 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) jobs report showed an addition of only 22,000 jobs last month, well below economists’ expectations, and unemployment at a four-year high of 4.3 percent.
Black families are the last to do well, even when the economy is growing. The most recent BLS report made that clear, showing the unemployment rate for white men was 3.7 percent, but was 7.1 percent for Black men. The report also showed the unemployment rate for Black women was 6.7 percent, compared to 3.2 percent for white women.
The gender wage gap persists for a variety of reasons, notably that women are still concentrated in some of the lowest-paid jobs, the price of child care remains out of reach for families, and employers are implementing return-to-office policies. The real-world effects of inflexible work policies and unaffordable care are already being felt: the share of working mothers ages 25-44 in the labor market has fallen every month in 2025 and dropped three percentage points between January and June. This is the lowest level of labor force participation from women with children in more than three years.
Increased poverty in 2025 is all but assured due to the severe restructuring of programs that support basic needs in July’s reconciliation bill and the Trump Administration’s executive actions aimed at people with low incomes, immigrant families, women, people of color, and other historically marginalized communities. Congress, with the administration’s approval, has consistently chosen to exclude many families with low incomes and immigrants from the Child Tax Credit, cut Medicaid and SNAP, increase immigration enforcement, and boost tax breaks for the ultra-rich.
“The president promised to lower costs. He and this Congress have clearly broken that promise for so many, making it more expensive for families to afford not just gas and milk but other family basics like housing, health care, and child care. This is not just a broken promise. It’s a breach of contract to the American people,” said Chun-Hoon.
Poverty is not inevitable. It’s the direct result of policy decisions. We know how to reduce it, and now it’s time for policymakers to choose dignity for all and invest in our communities.
By Lulit Shewan
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a legal status that was created by Congress in 1990 to provide work permits and protection from deportation to migrants from designated countries where conditions like war and natural disasters can make it unsafe for people to return. While this program was initially intended to be temporary because it does not provide a pathway to permanent legal residence (green card) or citizenship, over a million people have relied on the program and built enduring ties to the United States. TPS has allowed them to better adjust to life in the U.S., earn money to support themselves and their families, and contribute to their communities.
The Trump Administration and its Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are following through on their plans to come after TPS and strip hundreds of thousands of migrants of their legal status. Discontinuing TPS status will immediately render beneficiaries undocumented, deprived of legal standing, and exposed to the threat of detention and deportation. Curtailing TPS is yet another instance of the Trump Administration demonizing a humanitarian program to satisfy its anti-immigrant agenda and create new deportation pathways for those who have established their lives here.
The author would like to thank CLASP colleagues Lorena Roque and Suma Setty for their data extraction of TPS-eligible individuals by state, as well as Sivan Sherriffe for the design of this paper. The author would also like to thank former Hunger Fellow Emily Rodriguez for her thoughtful contributions to the writing and data analysis in this paper.
CLASP recently submitted comments in opposition to the Department of Labor’s proposed rule, “Occupational Safety and Health Standards; Interpretation of the General Duty Clause: Limitation for Inherently Risky Professional Activities,” which would modify or remove more than 25 “obsolete” employment regulations, particularly the effort to further dismantle OSHA enforcement power by limiting their use of the General Duty Clause. This rule proposes a change that would restrict OSHA’s ability to cite employers under the General Duty Clause for workplace hazards deemed “inherent and inseparable” from certain professions in high-risk sectors. The General Duty Clause must be understood as a foundational part of our worker safety system. It provides workers with a baseline level of protection against preventable hazards when OSHA standards do not dictate specific and necessary safety protocols. Limiting this standard will allow employers to overlook known hazards in the workplace without requiring them to take reasonable steps to prevent or regulate the environment. The protection and enforcement of this clause safeguards hundreds of thousands of people, and its weakening is a clear threat to the state of occupational safety.