Reprinted with permission from Shareblue.
Trump is well-known for screwing over working people — both the people who work for him directly, and the people who voted for him because they believed his lies about bringing back jobs.
So it’s not surprising that Trump would pick a Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, who virulently opposes workers’ rights.
What is surprising? It turns out that Kavanaugh directly helped Trump to screw over his own casino workers, Bloomberg reports.
Kavanaugh, Bloomberg explains, was one of three Republican-appointed judges who ruled in 2012 to crush a perfectly legitimate unionization effort by employees of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
In 2007, Trump Plaza employees voted 324 to 149 to join the United Auto Workers (UAW) — an arrangement that would have helped the employees collectively bargain for fairer wages and benefits.
These workers really needed the support of a good union to help protect them against Trump’s notorious abuses.
After all, Trump has been accused of failing to pay hundreds of contractors and employees what they were owed, and now faces a new lawsuit for denying overtime pay and health benefits to his personal driver of 25 years.
Trump Plaza tried to get the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency in charge of enforcing labor law, to throw out the union election as invalid. The casino tried to argue that the vote had been “tainted” by a UAW media event that featured politicians who supported the union drive.
The NLRB found that this was nonsense; it’s not illegal for lawmakers to support a union campaign. Trump Plaza, the NLRB ruled, was violating federal law by refusing to let UAW negotiate on behalf of Trump Plaza workers.
But then Trump Plaza appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court — where Kavanaugh served as an appeals judge.
Kavanaugh ruled against Trump’s workers, and in favor of the casino.
He threw out the NLRB’s ruling and ordered the agency to reconsider the case. But the casino closed in 2014, and the case never got revisited.
The union drive was crushed. Trump won, and his workers lost.
Workers’ rights is just one of many issues on which Kavanaugh is likely to do Trump’s bidding.
Kavanaugh has indicated, for instance, that he doesn’t believe a president can be criminally indicted while in office — which could have big implications for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Kavanaugh is also likely to fulfill Trump’s promise of gutting Roe v. Wade.
Bloomberg’s latest report on Kavanaugh is yet more evidence that Trump’s Supreme Court nominee will rule in favor of Trump, and against the interests of most Americans.
Published with permission of The American Independent.
