Spin Cycle
As DOGE heads for the U.S. Department of Labor, the freelance-busting brigade creates a fake agency to try and influence media coverage.
Before we get into what happened with the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Department of Labor this week, let’s first make clear what the AFL-CIO has been up to in recent years. Without question, this organization has been one of the loudest pushers of freelance busting in the nation:
The AFL-CIO supported California’s disastrous Assembly Bill 5.
The AFL-CIO strongly supported an AB5 copycat bill that those of us who earn a living as independent contractors in New Jersey had to fight to stop.
The AFL-CIO championed taking that same wretched freelance-busting policy nationwide in the Protecting the Right to Organize Act.
The AFL-CIO joined the Democratic Socialists of America in what appeared to be a coordinated media campaign against freelancers who fought back to protect our livelihoods.
The AFL-CIO urged bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Labor to target independent contractors.
Now, with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team reportedly headed for the federal Department of Labor to perform an X-ray on the place’s bowels, the AFL-CIO has created a fake agency to try and influence media coverage about whatever DOGE finds inside.
According to yesterday’s AFL-CIO press release, the newly created Department of People Who Work for a Living will “report on proposed DOGE cuts and their impact on working people. And DPWL will provide its own recommendations for how the government can work more efficiently, proposed by the people who are the backbone of America’s economy: America’s workers.”
There are just a few problems with this statement.
The AFL-CIO’s press release states: “If Elon Musk can make up his own government department, so can workers.” The thing is, the Department of People Who Work for a Living is indeed a figment of the AFL-CIO’s imagination, while DOGE is quite real and reporting to the sitting President of the United States.
Most people who work for a living have nothing to do with the AFL-CIO. Less than 10% of America’s wage and salary workers are union members, according to newly released government data.
The AFL-CIO’s previous recommendations have led to horrific freelance-busting outcomes for all kinds of working people, as economists and independent contractors continue to point out with regard to California’s AB5.
When the federal government has followed the AFL-CIO’s requests to focus on whether employees were being misclassified as independent contractors, only 0.126696833% of targeted workers benefited from the program, according to the government’s own figures. That is not exactly an efficient use of taxpayer money.
Nonetheless, it appears that a good number of the AFL-CIO’s members and supporters have plenty of time on their hands to focus on this fake agency-news media effort. Yesterday, instead of actually working at any jobs, these alleged People Who Work for a Living stood by the hundreds outside the federal Labor Department to holler about DOGE taking a look at the books.
The White House correspondent for Reuters—whose X bio claims she is about “facts not opinions”—seemed to personally cheer them on:
Over at The New York Times, their labor reporter also sounded enthusiastic:
In addition to creating its fake agency, the AFL-CIO also joined with other freelance-busting organizations such as the Service Employees International Union and the Economic Policy Institute to file a real lawsuit attempting to stop DOGE from accessing Labor Department data.
All of this was happening at the same time that the Biden-Harris administration’s Acting U.S. Labor Secretary, AFL-CIO darling Julie Su, announced her new job at a progressive think tank where she will work to defend unions. Su had “Acting” in front of her job title for her entire tenure atop the Labor Department during the Biden-Harris administration because the U.S. Senate refused to confirm her for the job, with members of Congress claiming she had allowed “fraudsters to steal $32 billion in unemployment insurance from California taxpayers” during her time in state government on the West Coast.
We’re all going to find out together what happens next, but it sure is interesting to see many of the same media outlets that pushed the freelance-busting narrative all these years now being the first to cover the AFL-CIO’s lawsuit and its creation of a media effort to counter information dumps about stuff that DOGE hasn’t even found yet.
Honest to goodness, what on earth has actually been happening inside the federal Labor Department?
Senators Should Ask
Members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions will have a chance to ask about all of this next week, when President Trump’s nominee for the U.S. Labor Secretary job, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, is going to be questioned as part of the confirmation process. Her hearing has been set for 10 a.m. on February 12.
Chavez-DeRemer is a controversial nominee, backed by the Teamsters, whose leader Sean O’Brien was busy this week praising a new piece of legislation that would cap credit-card interest rates at 10%.
That was an interesting stance for the Teamsters leader to take, as Dominic Pino reported in National Review:
“Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) is teaming up with Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) to introduce legislation capping credit card interest rates at 10 percent. A political ally of both senators is Teamsters union president Sean O’Brien. While praising Hawley for going after credit card companies, O’Brien said on his podcast Better Bad Ideas, ‘You’ve got a lot of our members, our constituents, who are paying 28, 29 percent on credit cards that they’ll never be able to pay off.’
“If O’Brien thinks that’s unfair, then he should look in the mirror. The Teamsters-branded credit card offered only to members or their families has interest rates as high as 27.49 percent, and the union makes millions from it.”
It’s these kinds of media-and-money rope-a-dopes that make actual People Who Work for a Living like me want to know exactly where all our tax dollars have been going when the unionists cry foul.
I, for one, absolutely want to see a detailed report from DOGE about whatever the federal Labor Department has been doing with our tax dollars. I’d sure like to know why they’ve needed such a big budget while independent contractors had to file lawsuits against them to try and protect everyone’s basic freedom to earn a living.
It was also notable yesterday when Elon Musk reposted this quote that somebody else shared of him speaking in earlier times:
"One lesson I remember from the PayPal days: Do you know who complained the loudest? The fraudsters. There would be immediate over-the-top indignation from the fraudsters. Normal people will say, ‘I think there's something wrong.’ Fraudsters will come hot out the gate with fake outrage. They'll claim that they're a single mom with kids trying to make ends meet, but it'll be some dude in another country scamming others. We're going to see some pretty outrageous stuff from the fraudsters as we continue cracking down, they're going to be the loudest."
Put another way, if this were all a poker game, the unbelievably loud protestations we’re seeing from the freelance-busting brigade about DOGE and the federal Labor Department would be one heck of a tell.
I’m betting that this part of the story has only just begun.