ORLANDO, Fla. —
In the span of a few days, Acting Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling went from his first cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump to traversing hundreds of miles in his home state of Florida, speaking directly with workers and with management about how the Trump administration is working to cement Trump’s historic 2024 gains with union and non-union workers alike.
Sonderling capped off a marathon tour of south and central Florida, which included stops in Boca Raton, Deerfield Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa Bay, Pinellas Park, St. Petersburg, and Orlando, by telling the Washington Reporter what his priorities are in his new role.
While Sonderling’s title currently includes “acting,” he looked the part of a Senate-confirmed Labor Secretary during the hundreds of miles he traveled, praising Trump’s economic agenda and explaining how the president remains “the greatest president for American workers, including union workers.”
Sonderling’s praise of Trump’s relationship with American workers is not theoretical; a recent report from the Coalition to Protect American Workers found that Trump received 45 percent of the vote from union households, despite 95 percent of PAC money from the 10 largest unions opposing him in 2024.
That finding did not surprise Sonderling. “I saw [that] in the first Trump administration,” he said. “The president’s policies were really preserving and helping all American workers, including union workers…We believe that shift has always been there with union workers supporting him, because the policies we’re doing really are putting more money in all workers’ pockets, including union workers, providing them with more safe work environments, providing more flexibility at work, and the American worker expressed that in the 2024 election, and I think the union leaders are really surprised about that.”
Sonderling’s Florida visit included stops at factories, shipping hubs, and construction sites. “When I go and visit, whether they’re unionized workplaces or not, a lot of industries, like in construction, like in manufacturing, that are heavily unionized, these are President Trump voters,” he said. “These are the people who want him to succeed, and I think that shift is continuing to happen pretty significantly almost two years into his administration.”
That success is something that he brought to his first cabinet meeting, which he told the Reporter was “an amazing experience.”
“What I really found is the collegiality between the cabinet secretaries is very strong,” Sonderling explained. “Every single person in that cabinet room was dedicated to the president and to the American people, and it was really apparent that everyone wants to be there for the president and everyone wants to be there for moving the president’s agenda in our agencies. What was important to him is that all of our success as a cabinet is the success of the administration and works for the benefit of all Americans; that was really my key takeaway: everyone’s in it really for the love of the country and for the love of his agenda.”
Sonderling prepared for his first meeting like a college student before final exams. “I had all statistics memorized about how the economy is going and how the job numbers are going too,” he said. While Sonderling is the youngest member of Trump’s cabinet other than Vice President JD Vance, his prep work focused far more on facts and figures than it did modern slang. He told the Reporter that, while he is not familiar with the word “glaze,” which means to excessively praise someone, he did want to glaze both his ever-present traveling press secretary, Emily Fehsenfeld, and one of his top international labor lawyers, Lorenzo Riboni.
In part due to his excessive prep work ahead of the latest cabinet meeting, he pointed to a disconnect between what economists report about the Trump economy and what is happening on the ground. He told the Reporter that he wants Trump to see a previous article from his first jobs day, which showed that “94 percent of economists surveyed by Bloomberg said that the job numbers are going to be half of what they were, so they just continue to doubt these policies.”
“The key is that you can’t doubt his economy, and you can’t doubt what the administration is doing, he said. “They continue to doubt both the short and long term goals of ours, and every single time we prove them wrong.”
At the forefront of those policies is TrumpRx, which Sonderling said he hears constantly is “driving health care prices down.”
“People were sick and tired of seeing how much they were paying for drugs and how much other countries were charging, and the president made it one of his missions to lower health care costs in both his administrations, and this time with TrumpRx, it’s really happening,” he said. Sonderling also noted that even Trump critics are seeing the program’s merits. “You’re seeing that with Mark Cuban, who’s been championing this issue for a very long time, coming to the White House and praising the president, putting all the politics aside and just saying ‘this is the right thing, this is how we’re going to lower health care costs.’”
But Sonderling noted that his department is focusing on affordability issues too. He also highlighted efforts to expand 401(k) investment options, describing a proposed update to the PTE-774 rule that would open alternative investments like private equity and private credit to retirement savers under strict fiduciary standards. “You can literally be in the same household where the husband works as a teacher and is invested in the state pension fund, and it’s completely diversified in private equity, in private credit, in real estate, in the stock market, and then the wife can work at a Fortune 500 company, and the 401(k) is only limited to certain stocks,” he said. “We’re democratizing that.” Outside analysts have made the same case; the American Council for Capital Formation column argued that modernizing retirement account rules would extend to everyday savers the diversification that wealthy and institutional investors have long enjoyed.
“We’re doing that too at the Department of Labor in two different ways,” he said. “Number one, we have a proposed rule relating to pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), and for the first time we’re getting transparency in how that system works, and we believe that it’s going to significantly also lower health care costs for employers offering those benefits. When that rule comes out, it will be the first time that there’s going to be disclosure requirements and transparency for those pharmacy benefit managers, so when they’re negotiating with the company’s insurance plans, offering those, they’re going to be able to see the whole chain of the costs, and they’re going to have to, for the first time, be able to negotiate to lower those costs down.”
“The other part,” he continued, “is the president is committed in healthcare to families and growing the American population, and the Department of Labor is playing a key role in the fertility benefits world. We have a really groundbreaking rule related to fertility benefits. 60 percent of employers right now do not offer fertility benefits, and this is a benefit that people want, that workers want, that families want. You may think it’s just IVF, but it’s more than that; it’s the entire process of diagnosing fertility, both for men and women, to have more American babies to help build our workforce and population.”
“The Department of Labor has a proposed rule now that it’s going to make a new category of health care benefits related to fertility benefits,” he explained. “Right now employers have their health care plans, and then separately they have dental and vision plans, and those dental and vision plans are separate because you may not need dental insurance, you may not need vision insurance in your plan, so those have been separate, not to raise the cost. We’re making a third category now for fertility benefits, so that allows employers to voluntarily offer this new benefit program, by not having to put it in the main health care plan, which would drive up the cost for everyone. So if you want that benefit, you can get it separately, and we believe when this rule goes final, it’s going to double the amount of employers who offer fertility benefits, including IVF. Not only is going to double it, it’s going to make 750,000 people, which we believe is potentially 20 percent of the working population now, that will now have these benefits, whether it’s IVF, whether it’s other treatment, whether it’s diagnosis, that their employer has a healthcare plan for….We’re trying to make that transparent to drive down costs, which has never been done before. Then, offering the fertility benefits as a side benefits, we think it’s going to really continue to help the American worker.”
Another Trump-aligned priority of the Department of Labor is the gig economy, and making it possible for workers to have flexible schedules that they want. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) recently rolled out legislation to protect independent contractors — which has long been a Sonderling specialty.
“The most important thing from the Department of Labor’s perspective is to offer clarity to both employers and employees or to independent contractors on how that model works and what their roles are, and this is something that was a big initiative of ours during the first Trump administration,” he said. “It relates to the entire gig economy. What you saw was a new way of working, where employees and workers wanted that flexibility. If they want to work one hour a day, they can. If they don’t want to have a boss, they can do that. Being in the gig economy allows that, but Democratic administrations, specifically California, didn’t like this business model. They always attacked it, and they believe that everyone, whether you’re a vendor or an independent contractor, you are an employee of your employer, and that’s not what workers wanted.”
But the Biden administration rolled back a lot of progress Trump made in his first term. Now, Sonderling and his agency are reinstating Trump priorities. “During the first Trump administration, through our historic opinion letter and rules, we were able to really go back to what the law originally said in the 1970s and make a very clear standard, and then California came out with their AB5 legislation, and then the Biden administration made it very difficult to implement our previous work, so that’s something a big initiative of ours that is coming back, and we have a proposed rule out there that really goes back to the basics,” he explained. “It’s just a two-factor determination with some other factors for additional clarity, as opposed to where the Biden administration was, where they basically had six factors, and if somehow you were still not an employee, there was an imaginary seventh factor that came in, and that’s really what’s going on. We believe employees and job creators should be able to enter in the business model they want and not be subjected to the Department of Labor saying ‘this works and this doesn’t.’ It’s the same with the franchise industry and our joint employer role. It was an industry that had worked for decades without any problems, just like independent contractors, and a Democratic administration comes in and says, ‘we don’t like this model, we believe that if you’re a franchisee and you own one store in one part of the country, whoever the franchisor is, they’re liable for you too.’ That’s another way we’re bringing back to the basics, back to what the law says, not to dictate, but just to say, ‘here are the rules of the road.’”
Another priority of Cassidy and his fellow Senate Republicans is clarity on, if not an outright repeal of, is one of the few remaining Biden-era rules that is making its way through the DOL’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The rule, called the Heat Injury and Illness Prevention and Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings Rule, has flown under the radar for most, but not for Sonderling.
“Stand by” on a potential repeal of it, Sonderling said. But he noted that “out of everything we do at the Department of Labor, the most important mission is to make sure that every worker goes to work and comes home safe every single night. In everything we do in the OSHA and in the safety space is to ensure that workers have safe, healthy work conditions, and we know specifically related to the Heat rule, that is an issue that has been going on, we’re certainly looking at it and certainly have a lot of guidance to make sure that employers in the summer and other hot climates are providing the adequate water, shelter, and are otherwise protecting their workers during that time, but having a federal rule of imposing a nationwide standard, certainly it is well documented, that there are a lot of issues, and the lens we’re looking for is how do we balance the need to protect workers versus also not putting companies out of business because they can’t actually operate due to weather conditions.”
Throughout the interview, which covered domestic and international labor policy, Sonderling was fully aware of every legislative priority of House and Senate Republicans, including relatively obscure ones favored by lawmakers like Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.).
For Cotton, preserving the 14(c) program that exists under the Fair Labor Standards Act is imperative. For Sonderling, it is too. Sonderling described the program as one that “allows workers with a disability to be paid a sub minimum wage; it is an exception to the minimum wage based on that individual worker’s need and ability, and the 14(c) program allows those who otherwise would be unemployable because of their disability a chance to get into the workforce, and it allows employers to pay them at a rate acceptable to the amount of work that they’re doing.”
“Otherwise,” he explained, “if these employees had to be paid minimum wage, they would never be able to work in the workplace, and they would never be given that opportunity, because from a productivity standpoint, those employers wouldn’t be able to afford it at their work. A lot of nonprofits and others come to the Department of Labor and say ‘we want to help these individuals, we want these people to have a sense of purpose, we want these people to be in the workplace, so we’re going to apply for a certificate at the Department of Labor to allow us lawfully to pay that individual worker less than the minimum wage at about what their individual productivity is,’ and it is a sense of community for these workers. We hear from parents all the time that their child would be home, that they wouldn’t be able to integrate into society. We should go to one some time. It’s very inspirational, because you see these people, and they are sometimes very small manual tasks, but they have a sense of community, they earn a paycheck, and it means a lot.”
But the program is not without its detractors, which included the Biden administration’s Department of Labor, which Sonderling said went all-out to eliminate its existence.
“This program has been attacked for many years,” he said, “because there are some who say this has been a way to get forced labor or to pay people unfairly, and that everyone should just be paid the minimum wage, but the issue is, Congress has allowed this exception to the minimum wage. During the Biden administration, towards the end, they created a rule to essentially eliminate the program, even though it’s a law written by Congress. But, they did a rule saying the Department of Labor is no longer going to issue these certificates, even thoughts it’s literally in section 14(c) of the the Fair Labor Standards Act that we have to do it; that was something that we immediately pulled back, and if Congress wants to make those changes, they can, but it’s not something the Department of Labor should interject itself in. The only thing that we should be concerned about is making sure that everyone has the opportunity to enter the workforce, and individuals with disability are historically on the sidelines for a whole host of reasons, and those with severe disability who need to use the 14(c) program should be able to until Congress repeals the law.”
But the department also takes a “broader” look at working with disabled Americans and ensuring that they can participate in the workforce. “Through our Office of Disability Employment Policy, we have reinvigorated a program called the Job Accommodation Network, and what that does is it allows employers to go in and type in the type of disability that applicant or that employee has, and it gives them the exact types of accommodations to allow that employee to work with their disability in the workplace,” Sonderling said. “A lot of employers just think that hiring a worker with a disability is going to cost too much, and they’re not going to be productive, and that’s not true. So, through this website, askjan.org, we allow employers to see the accommodation, and most accommodations cost nothing, and allow that employee to get in the workforce and work productivity. So, in addition to the 14(c) program, we’re also making sure that employers know that they can hire disabled workers and have the programs to allow them to work.”
Sonderling and the Department of Labor are also attune to what House Republicans are doing, especially when it comes to cracking down on forced labor, human trafficking, and slave labor.
“There are two points about human trafficking in the United States,” he said. “We do enforce laws related to ensuring that there are no victims of human trafficking in the United States, because our investigators go into work sites, and if they see human trafficking, the most important thing for us is to refer it to the proper authorities, but when you have workers who are human trafficked and who are not getting paid at all, and they have their passports taken from them, that undercuts other American businesses, because if that one American business is having victims of human trafficking, and not paying them anything, or paying them $1 an hour, that is a competitive advantage that they have over good faith employers who follow the law, who are paying the employees their normal rate too.”
“Stopping human trafficking helps American businesses by raising the standards, and as far as overseas, the Department of Labor does have a Bureau of International Labor Affairs, and that has a significant role working with the Department of Homeland Security to make sure that the supply chains that are coming into the U.S. are free of child labor and are also free of human trafficking,” he continued. “That’s a very big role we play, and we work with USTR and DHS to make sure that companies have the tools they need to understand that their entire supply chain, whether it’s vendors in China or in other countries, is transparent, because ultimately, if you’re a big brand in the U.S., and one of your supply chains is made with forced labor in the United States or overseas, not only does that harm workers, but it’s also illegal and it hurts American competitiveness, but also it is a really stain on that company. We do everything we can to make the American companies who have the purchasing power to ensure that they don’t have any slave or human trafficking within their supply chains.”
While Sonderling remains new to running DOL, he is already up to speed on the nuances of agencies that fall under its purview, like the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and the status of its nominees.
“We’re very excited from an administration perspective that we have a Senate confirmed general counsel there, Crystal Carey, and we have two Trump-appointed members, and Scott Mayer and Jim Murphy, and James Macy is the third Republican who will be coming there, and under the NLRB’s precedent, they don’t overturn major cases until they have three members, so when the third member comes through the HELP Committee hopefully this summer, you’re gonna see a lot of action, a lot of Biden-era policies that will start to be taken a look at, a lot of ones that are being challenged in court and have potentially fundamentally changed labor law, will be taken a look at,” he said. “I can’t predict about how I think that’s going to occur, but that agency is really reliant on a full slate of members to be able to move policy. At the Department of Labor, we can move policy, but with those voting agencies, they’re quasi-judicial. So we look forward to seeing what a full board is going to do with a lot of the backlogs.”
Another priority of both Trump and of the Department of Labor has been the expansion of American investment opportunities into retirement accounts. Sonderling said that there are “absolutely” more moves to come in that space.
“This is one of the most exciting roles we’ve had because of the president’s executive order,” he said, explaining the diverging paths that the Trump and Biden administrations took on crypto. “401(k)s are where most people’s retirements are, and the way that it has been lately due to litigation fears is that for most companies, 401(k)s are just completely in index funds in the stock market, and we’re very reliant on the stock market, but there are so many other types of investments out there that could really help Americans build wealth, and they are not allowed to have access to that because companies have fears of the Department of Labor’s rules and litigation, but we’re democratizing that.”
Now, the department has a “proposed rule out there related to allow certain types of alternative investments responsibly and prudently in 401(k)s, but not dictating, and not doing what the Biden administration did in DOL, saying ‘we like this product, we don’t like this product.’ They had put out a guideline, basically saying ‘you’re violating the Department of Labor’s laws if you’re looking at crypto in a 401(k).’ We removed that, because we don’t think that we should be pro or against any type of investments in the 401(k). We just want to lay the framework out there on how to make the best investment for your workers, and offer the best products for your workers, and then let the market decide which products should go in. So that’s really what this rule is all about. It’s not dictating, it’s not saying what’s good or bad, it’s just allowing everything in under strict rules, and the investments that will meet that scrutiny will hopefully become products within 401(k)s and help American workers build wealth, because they just have not had access to those private markets where other individuals do.”
While Sonderling repeatedly emphasized the great work that Trump himself is doing at the White House, he also said that his department copies the work of Trump’s digital team, because “imitation is the most sincere form of flattery…We look to see what they’re doing, and we’re just basically copying it, and every time we get a retweet from them, we know that we are doing a good job copying what they’re doing.”
“They do a fantastic job getting the president’s message out,” he said of the White House digital team, which is led by Kaelan Doerr and Brianna D’Apuzzo. “Especially at agencies like the Department of Labor, we deal with federal labor law that is so complex, and we need to get it out to the American workers and job creators to see how these very complex labor policies are not only putting more money in the workers’ pockets, but are also allowing companies to invest in their workforce and invest in America, and the White House digital team does a great job taking all of our legal jargon and making it very simple, and getting Americans excited about it.”
Below is a transcript of our interview with Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
Secretary Sonderling, you recently joined your first cabinet meeting with President Trump. What were you expecting, and what were your thoughts on it?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
It was an amazing experience, and what I really found is the collegiality between the cabinet secretaries is very strong. Every single person in that cabinet room was dedicated to the president and to the American people, and it was really apparent that everyone wants to be there for the president and everyone wants to be there for moving the president’s agenda in our agencies. What was important to him is that all of our success as a cabinet is the success of the administration and works for the benefit of all Americans; that was really my key takeaway: everyone’s in it really for the love of the country and for the love of his agenda.
Washington Reporter:
Did you do anything special to prepare for this? Did you have any energy drink combination to get you through the meeting?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
I was prepared and was ready; you never know if you’re going to get called on, and if he was going to call on me, I had all statistics memorized about how the economy is going and how the job numbers are going too.
Washington Reporter:
As you’ve seen from the White House sharing one of our interviews from this trip already, the White House obviously reads what we write here. Was there anything that you wanted to say to the president that you didn’t have a chance to convey to him at the meeting?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
Actually, I would like him to see the article you did about my first jobs day. The key is that you can’t doubt his economy, and you can’t doubt what the administration is doing. You already wrote about my favorite stat in it, which is that 94 percent of economists surveyed by Bloomberg said that the job numbers are going to be half of what they were, so they just continue to doubt these policies, they continue to doubt both the short and long term goals of ours, and every single time we prove them wrong.
Washington Reporter:
One of the things that we saw in 2024 during the election that you’ve been talking about on this trip, for example, was the union workers’ support for the president for his agenda; there was just a report from the Coalition to Protect American Workers that had a white paper about how Trump received 45 percent of the vote from union households, despite 95 percent of PAC money from the 10 largest unions opposing him. Is that something that you’ve seen as you meet with union workers and management traveling the country?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
I saw this in the first Trump administration; the president’s policies were really preserving and helping all American workers, including union workers, and he’s been the greatest president for American workers, including union workers, and during the first administration, a lot of that never rose to the point where the leaderships of unions had to recognize or support that, and then during the 2024 election, he did receive absolutely historic support from the union members to the point where that union management that potentially didn’t support him really had no option but to not support Kamala Harris and to not support the Democrats too. We believe that shift has always been there with union workers supporting him, because the policies we’re doing really are putting more money in all workers’ pockets, including union workers, providing them with more safe work environments, providing more flexibility at work, and the American worker expressed that in the 2024 election, and I think the union leaders are really surprised about that. When I go and visit, whether they’re unionized workplaces or not, a lot of industries, like in construction, like in manufacturing, that are heavily unionized, these are President Trump voters; these are the people who want him to succeed, and I think that shift is continuing to happen pretty significantly almost two years into his administration.
Washington Reporter:
You’ve heard about affordability on every single visit that you did on this trip and beyond. One of the White House’s initiatives was the TrumpRx initiative on lowering prescription drug costs. What have you heard from workers, retirees, businesses, about that rollout so far?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
That it is driving health care prices down. People were sick and tired of seeing how much they were paying for drugs and how much other countries were charging, and the president made it one of his missions to lower health care costs in both his administrations, and this time with TrumpRx, it’s really happening, and you’re seeing that with Mark Cuban, who’s been championing this issue for a very long time, coming to the White House and praising the president, putting all the politics aside and just saying ‘this is the right thing, this is how we’re going to lower health care costs.’ We’re doing that too at the Department of Labor in two different ways. Number one, we have a proposed rule relating to pharmacy benefit managers, (PBMs), and for the first time we’re getting transparency in how that system works, and we believe that it’s going to significantly also lower health care costs for employers offering those benefits. When that rule comes out, it will be the first time that there’s going to be disclosure requirements and transparency for those pharmacy benefit managers, so when they’re negotiating with the company’s insurance plans, offering those, they’re going to be able to see the whole chain of the costs, and they’re going to have to, for the first time, be able to negotiate to lower those costs down. The other part, too, is the president is committed in healthcare to families and growing the American population, and the Department of Labor is playing a key role in the fertility benefits world. We have a really groundbreaking rule related to fertility benefits. 60 percent of employers right now do not offer fertility benefits, and this is a benefit that people want, that workers want, that families want. You may think it’s just IVF, but it’s more than that; it’s the entire process of diagnosing fertility, both for men and women, to have more American babies to help build our workforce and population. The Department of Labor has a proposed rule now that it’s going to make a new category of health care benefits related to fertility benefits. So, right now employers have their health care plans, and then separately they have dental and vision plans, and those dental and vision plans are separate because you may not need dental insurance, you may not need vision insurance in your plan, so those have been separate, not to raise the cost. We’re making a third category now for fertility benefits, so that allows employers to voluntarily offer this new benefit program, by not having to put it in the main health care plan, which would drive up the cost for everyone. So if you want that benefit, you can get it separately, and we believe when this rule goes final, it’s going to double the amount of employers who offer fertility benefits, including IVF. Not only is going to double it, it’s going to make 750,000 people, which we believe is potentially 20 percent of the working population now, that will now have these benefits, whether it’s IVF, whether it’s other treatment, whether it’s diagnosis, that their employer has a healthcare plan for. So we’re very excited about that. So DOL has a role in healthcare, both on transparency and in healthcare plans. If you think about it, most people get their health insurance from their employer, and those are our rules and laws. So, we’re trying to make that transparent to drive down costs, which has never been done before. Then, offering the fertility benefits as a side benefits, we think it’s going to really continue to help the American worker.
Washington Reporter:
Dating back to your time in the first Trump administration, one of the things you were most known for was your work on independent contractors. Bill Cassidy on the HELP Committee, and other Senate Republicans, recently put out a bill to empower independent workers to receive workplace benefits. From the Department of Labor’s standpoint, what do you want to do to further empower these independent contractors to keep flexibility while also being able to provide for their families in that less traditional workplace structure?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
The most important thing from the Department of Labor’s perspective is to offer clarity to both employers and employees or to independent contractors on how that model works and what their roles are, and this is something that was a big initiative of ours during the first Trump administration. It relates to the entire gig economy. What you saw was a new way of working, where employees and workers wanted that flexibility. If they want to work one hour a day, they can. If they don’t want to have a boss, they can do that. Being in the gig economy allows that, but Democratic administrations, specifically California, didn’t like this business model. They always attacked it, and they believe that everyone, whether you’re a vendor or an independent contractor, you are an employee of your employer, and that’s not what workers wanted. During the first Trump administration, through our historic opinion letter and rules, we were able to really go back to what the law originally said in the 1970s and make a very clear standard, and then California came out with their AB5 legislation, and then the Biden administration made it very difficult to implement our previous work, so that’s something a big initiative of ours that is coming back, and we have a proposed rule out there that really goes back to the basics. It’s just a two-factor determination with some other factors for additional clarity, as opposed to where the Biden administration was, where they basically had six factors, and if somehow you were still not an employee, there was an imaginary seventh factor that came in, and that’s really what’s going on. We believe employees and job creators should be able to enter in the business model they want and not be subjected to the Department of Labor saying ‘this works and this doesn’t.’ It’s the same with the franchise industry and our joint employer role. It was an industry that had worked for decades without any problems, just like independent contractors, and a Democratic administration comes in and says, ‘we don’t like this model, we believe that if you’re a franchisee and you own one store in one part of the country, whoever the franchisor is, they’re liable for you too.’ That’s another way we’re bringing back to the basics, back to what the law says, not to dictate, but just to say, ‘here are the rules of the road.’ Employers can understand it, workers can understand it, and you’re entering that arrangement based upon your situation, not that the Department of Labor is telling you this is how you’re going to operate your business.
Washington Reporter:
We also Cassidy and HELP Committee Republicans write to your immediate predecessor about a Biden-era OSHA rule called the Heat Injury and Illness Prevention and Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings Rule. Is this on your radar?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
Everything is on my radar.
Washington Reporter:
Several of them are pushing for revisions, if not an outright withdrawal from the Department of Labor of this rule. On the other side you have liberal activist groups like Public Citizen pushing for it amidst a ‘climate genocide’ ideological framework. Where are you sitting at right now with this rule?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
Out of everything we do at the Department of Labor, the most important mission is to make sure that every worker goes to work and comes home safe every single night. In everything we do in the OSHA and in the safety space is to ensure that workers have safe, healthy work conditions, and we know specifically related to the Heat rule, that is an issue that has been going on, we’re certainly looking at it and certainly have a lot of guidance to make sure that employers in the summer and other hot climates are providing the adequate water, shelter, and are otherwise protecting their workers during that time, but having a federal rule of imposing a nationwide standard, certainly it is well documented, that there are a lot of issues, and the lens we’re looking for is how do we balance the need to protect workers versus also not putting companies out of business because they can’t actually operate due to weather conditions. So, it’s something we continue to look at very closely, and stand by.
Washington Reporter:
You recently acted decisively to protect 14(c) sheltered workshops from being closed. This is something that Senator Tom Cotton has led the fight for in the Senate. Can you talk about why these workshops are important for disabled Americans?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
The 14(c) program is a program under the Fair Labor Standards Act that Congress enacted, and what it does is it allows workers with a disability to be paid a sub minimum wage; it is an exception to the minimum wage based on that individual worker’s need and ability, and the 14(c) program allows those who otherwise would be unemployable because of their disability a chance to get into the workforce, and it allows employers to pay them at a rate acceptable to the amount of work that they’re doing. Otherwise, if these employees had to be paid minimum wage, they would never be able to work in the workplace, and they would never be given that opportunity, because from a productivity standpoint, those employers wouldn’t be able to afford it at their work. A lot of nonprofits and others come to the Department of Labor and say ‘we want to help these individuals, we want these people to have a sense of purpose, we want these people to be in the workplace, so we’re going to apply for a certificate at the Department of Labor to allow us lawfully to pay that individual worker less than the minimum wage at about what their individual productivity is,’ and it is a sense of community for these workers. We hear from parents all the time that their child would be home, that they wouldn’t be able to integrate into society. We should go to one some time. It’s very inspirational, because you see these people, and they are sometimes very small manual tasks, but they have a sense of community, they earn a paycheck, and it means a lot. This program has been attacked for many years, because there are some who say this has been a way to get forced labor or to pay people unfairly, and that everyone should just be paid the minimum wage, but the issue is, Congress has allowed this exception to the minimum wage. During the Biden administration, towards the end, they created a rule to essentially eliminate the program, even though it’s a law written by Congress. But, they did a rule saying the Department of Labor is no longer going to issue these certificates, even thoughts it’s literally in section 14(c) of the the Fair Labor Standards Act that we have to do it; that was something that we immediately pulled back, and if Congress wants to make those changes, they can, but it’s not something the Department of Labor should interject itself in. The only thing that we should be concerned about is making sure that everyone has the opportunity to enter the workforce, and individuals with disability are historically on the sidelines for a whole host of reasons, and those with severe disability who need to use the 14(c) program should be able to until Congress repeals the law, but on a broader side we believe that workers with disabilities can be very valuable members of the workforce, so through our Office of Disability Employment Policy, we have reinvigorated a program called the Job Accommodation Network, and what that does is it allows employers to go in and type in the type of disability that applicant or that employee has, and it gives them the exact types of accommodations to allow that employee to work with their disability in the workplace. A lot of employers just think that hiring a worker with a disability is going to cost too much, and they’re not going to be productive, and that’s not true. So, through this website, askjan.org, we allow employers to see the accommodation, and most accommodations cost nothing, and allow that employee to get in the workforce and work productivity. So, in addition to the 14(c) program, we’re also making sure that employers know that they can hire disabled workers and have the programs to allow them to work.
Washington Reporter:
I’ll go to the swamps of Florida with you in the summer. I’ll for sure go to one of these with you. Another piece of legislation we saw from Congress was authored by two chairmen from Michigan, Tim Walberg on Ed and Workforce, and John Moolenaar on the Committee on CCP. They have legislation that, in their view, advances DOL policies on countering human trafficking, especially with regards to China. This is not necessarily something that people think about with your agency. How do you fit into this?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
There are two points about human trafficking in the United States. We do enforce laws related to ensuring that there are no victims of human trafficking in the United States, because our investigators go into work sites, and if they see human trafficking, the most important thing for us is to refer it to the proper authorities, but when you have workers who are human trafficked and who are not getting paid at all, and they have their passports taken from them, that undercuts other American businesses, because if that one American business is having victims of human trafficking, and not paying them anything, or paying them $1 an hour, that is a competitive advantage that they have over good faith employers who follow the law, who are paying the employees their normal rate too. Stopping human trafficking helps American businesses by raising the standards, and as far as overseas, the Department of Labor does have a Bureau of International Labor Affairs, and that has a significant role working with the Department of Homeland Security to make sure that the supply chains that are coming into the U.S. are free of child labor and are also free of human trafficking, so that’s a very big role we play, and we work with USTR and DHS to make sure that companies have the tools they need to understand that their entire supply chain, whether it’s vendors in China or in other countries, is transparent, because ultimately, if you’re a big brand in the U.S., and one of your supply chains is made with forced labor in the United States or overseas, not only does that harm workers, but it’s also illegal and it hurts American competitiveness, but also it is a really stain on that company. We do everything we can to make the American companies who have the purchasing power to ensure that they don’t have any slave or human trafficking within their supply chains.
Washington Reporter:
You have also supported expanding investment options inside 401(k)s to give Americans increased flexibility in saving for retirement. Are there additional reforms or investment opportunities that the Department of Labor is looking at to help current workers build for their retirement?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
Absolutely. This is one of the most exciting roles we’ve had because of the president’s executive order. 401(k)s are where most people’s retirements are, and the way that it has been lately due to litigation fears is that for most companies, 401(k)s are just completely in index funds in the stock market, and we’re very reliant on the stock market, but there are so many other types of investments out there that could really help Americans build wealth, and they are not allowed to have access to that because companies have fears of the Department of Labor’s rules and litigation, but we’re democratizing that. We have a proposed rule out there related to allow certain types of alternative investments responsibly and prudently in 401(k)s, but not dictating, and not doing what the Biden administration did in DOL, saying ‘we like this product, we don’t like this product.’ They had put out a guideline, basically saying ‘you’re violating the Department of Labor’s laws if you’re looking at crypto in a 401(k).’ We removed that, because we don’t think that we should be pro or against any type of investments in the 401(k). We just want to lay the framework out there on how to make the best investment for your workers, and offer the best products for your workers, and then let the market decide which products should go in. So that’s really what this rule is all about. It’s not dictating, it’s not saying what’s good or bad, it’s just allowing everything in under strict rules, and the investments that will meet that scrutiny will hopefully become products within 401(k)s and help American workers build wealth, because they just have not had access to those private markets where other individuals do, whether they’re very wealthy or even within pensions, a lot of the big union pensions or state pensions are very diversified into private equity, private credit, whereas your 401(k) is not, so you can literally be in the same household where the husband works as a teacher and is invested in the state pension fund, and it’s completely diversified in private equity, in private credit, in real estate, in the stock market, and then the wife can work at a Fortune 500 company, and the 401(k) is only limited to certain stocks. So that’s what we’re really trying to do, just give that flexibility and give the option, and get the government out of dictating what certain investments can be invested in.
Washington Reporter:
What is the DOL’s working relationship with the NLRB? It has a 2-1 Republican majority that is about to term out; how do you work together, if at all?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
The National Labor Relations Board is an agency within the executive branch. The president made it very clear in his executive orders that independent and so-called independent agencies are still in the executive branch, and still are under the president’s purview. The Department of Labor is a separate agency, but we’re very excited from an administration perspective that we have a Senate confirmed general counsel there, Crystal Carey, and we have two Trump-appointed members, and Scott Mayer and Jim Murphy, and James Macy is the third Republican who will be coming there, and under the NLRB’s precedent, they don’t overturn major cases until they have three members, so when the third member comes through the HELP Committee hopefully this summer, you’re gonna see a lot of action, a lot of Biden-era policies that will start to be taken a look at, a lot of ones that are being challenged in court and have potentially fundamentally changed labor law, will be taken a look at. I can’t predict about how I think that’s going to occur, but that agency is really reliant on a full slate of members to be able to move policy. At the Department of Labor, we can move policy, but with those voting agencies, they’re quasi-judicial. So we look forward to seeing what a full board is going to do with a lot of the backlogs.
Washington Reporter:
You’ve talked with a lot of workers on this visit and throughout your time already heading this agency. The White House just shared one of the articles. You know a thing or two about good workers. How do you think the White House digital team is doing?
Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling:
I think they’re doing a fantastic job, and from an administration perspective, from an agency perspective, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. We look to see what they’re doing, and we’re just basically copying it, and every time we get a retweet from them, we know that we are doing a good job copying what they’re doing. They do a fantastic job getting the president’s message out. Especially at agencies like the Department of Labor, we deal with federal labor law that is so complex, and we need to get it out to the American workers and job creators to see how these very complex labor policies are not only putting more money in the workers’ pockets, but are also allowing companies to invest in their workforce and invest in America, and the White House digital team does a great job taking all of our legal jargon and making it very simple, and getting Americans excited about it.
