Dirt Diggers Digest -The Trump Administration has left little doubt that one of its main missions is to roll back the regulatory initiatives of the Obama years, especially the Clean Power Plan and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Although Trump has been less overt about it, his corporate-friendly approach also includes weakening rules that have been around for decades.
An important case in point concerns the Fair Labor Standards Act, the key federal wage and hour law that was signed into law 80 years ago by President Franklin Roosevelt. The culmination of decades of struggle over excessive workweeks, inadequate pay levels and child labor, the FLSA put the federal government in the business of combatting wage theft and other forms of workplace exploitation.
It accomplished that through a system of workplace investigations and the imposition of financial penalties on employers large and small. In a move that has received limited attention, the Trump Labor Department is seeking to replace rigorous enforcement with a system called Payroll Audit Independent Determination (or PAID) that puts employers on the honor system. Beginning with the dubious premise that wage and hour violations mainly derive from inadvertent mistakes made by managers, PAID will encourage employers to report irregularities on their own. When they do they will still have to pay back wages but will not be assessed damages or penalties.
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