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Would Rick Caruso’s proposed blind trust go far enough if he’s elected L.A. mayor?

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Would Rick Caruso’s proposed blind trust go far enough if he’s elected L.A. mayor?

Shortly after Rick Caruso introduced his run for mayor in February, he promised to surrender day-to-day management of his firm and put his holdings right into a blind belief to move off potential conflicts of curiosity, if elected.

The mayoral race remains to be underway, however Caruso moved ahead with the primary a part of that pledge Thursday, stepping apart as chief government of the actual property growth agency recognized merely as Caruso and elevating firm government Corinne Verdery into the CEO’s position.

However Caruso’s promise to place his holdings, which embrace the Grove procuring heart, right into a blind belief, drew fireplace Thursday from his mayoral rival, Rep. Karen Bass, and two authorities ethics specialists who known as it an insufficient step that might invite conflicts of curiosity.

“Actual property builders have lengthy sought to affect choices at Metropolis Corridor. We received’t let that occur in Los Angeles,” Bass mentioned in a Thursday morning tweet.

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Caruso marketing campaign spokesperson Peter Ragone countered that Caruso “is the one candidate who has pledged to nominate an ethics czar who will oversee all features of his ethics pledges and guarantee transparency and daylight in all his operations as mayor.”

The backwards and forwards over Caruso’s deliberate blind belief is the most recent flareup between two markedly totally different candidates — one a billionaire developer and the opposite a profession public servant — within the race to steer the nation’s second-largest metropolis.

The Bass marketing campaign held a information convention Thursday morning the place Norm Eisen and Richard Painter — who served because the chief ethics attorneys to President Obama and President George W. Bush, respectively — castigated Caruso’s deliberate plan of action. The pair printed an op-ed in Slate on Wednesday afternoon, sharply critiquing the conflicts Caruso might face if elected as mayor.

In a metropolis roiled by a collection of corruption scandals which have put elevated scrutiny on the connection between builders and L.A. Metropolis Corridor, Eisen and Painter seem to query whether or not current legal guidelines and requirements go far sufficient to keep away from even the looks of impropriety. Bass, who’s on trip this week, didn’t attend the Zoom information convention. Her marketing campaign declined to say the place she was.

The Caruso marketing campaign mentioned Thursday that if he’s elected, a separate trustee can be appointed to supervise that overarching blind belief, which might additionally embrace his substantial inventory portfolio. Whether or not the event firm retains Caruso’s title if Caruso is elected can be as much as Verdery, Ragone mentioned.

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Ethics specialists have usually mentioned that Caruso’s enterprise holdings don’t stop him from holding workplace, so long as he correctly discloses his monetary pursuits and punctiliously follows protocol round potential conflicts as they come up.

Eisen and Painter have taken a much more stringent view. They counsel that to actually keep away from moral points if elected, Caruso ought to have an unbiased trustee promote his actual property holdings in and across the metropolis and put the proceeds in one thing conflict-free, like a diversified mutual fund.

“It’s critically necessary to insist the mayor be freed from conflicts of curiosity and that this actual property empire be offered if Mr. Caruso have been to be the following mayor of Los Angeles,” Painter mentioned Thursday.

Bob Stern, co-author of the state’s 1974 Political Reform Act and former basic counsel for the California Truthful Political Practices Fee, appeared mystified by the suggestion, saying he didn’t know of a regulation wherever within the nation that might require such a step.

The state’s provisions round blind trusts are clear, Stern mentioned.

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Except a person eliminates the belongings within the blind belief, they aren’t thought-about actually “blind,” and conflict-of-interest guidelines nonetheless apply. However that doesn’t imply a person has to liquidate their belongings to keep away from conflicts of curiosity: She or he would simply should recuse themselves from performing on issues immediately affecting their belongings, Stern mentioned.

In Caruso’s case, that might probably imply avoiding ordinances or contracts that particularly contain considered one of his properties.

Broader choices about growth within the metropolis that aren’t immediately associated to Caruso’s properties wouldn’t be thought-about a battle below the regulation, Stern mentioned.

“In a way, his biases are there whether or not he owns the property or not. He’s very business-oriented,” Stern mentioned. That perspective, nevertheless, would hardly come as a shock to Los Angeles voters — Caruso has made his enterprise success a central a part of his marketing campaign.

When requested how Caruso would strategy hypothetical metropolis choices that may not directly profit him as a developer, Peter Ragone mentioned: “The regulation permits for a lot of established choices for Rick to keep away from conflicts of curiosity, after they actually exist, together with recusal.”

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Others, like Carmen Balber, government director of advocacy group Client Watchdog, took subject with how Caruso would possibly usually profit from a pro-development strategy within the metropolis.

“He can’t neglect that he’s a developer and he does higher when guidelines favourite builders,” Balber mentioned. “Regardless of how strict the creation of a belief is for Caruso, the small print of his actions in workplace — and whether or not or not he’s nonetheless partaking in choice making that may profit him personally — will want powerful scrutiny.”

L.A.’s mayor has appreciable sway over land-use choices within the metropolis. She or he has the facility to rent and fireplace the highest supervisor on the Division of Metropolis Planning. She or he would even have the authority to interchange the 9 members of town’s planning fee, a panel of volunteers that vets large-scale growth initiatives.

Caruso’s enterprise has been enmeshed in a battle over plans to modernize and broaden L.A.’s storied CBS Tv Metropolis studios, situated throughout the road from the Grove, elevating questions on how he would possibly deal with such initiatives as mayor.

However an elected official with substantial private wealth — and belongings within the area they govern — would hardly be unprecedented in Los Angeles or California.

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“Many native officers and statewide officers who’ve belongings will oftentimes create a blind belief,” retired legal professional Colleen McAndrews mentioned, noting that the apply grew to become extra commonplace after the state’s Political Reform Act was adopted.

McAndrews, a former member of the state Truthful Political Practices Fee, suggested Arnold Schwarzenegger on establishing a blind belief when he grew to become governor. Gov. Gavin Newsom additionally put his hospitality enterprise, the PlumpJack Group, right into a blind belief when he took workplace and didn’t liquidate the person companies.

The closest parallel to Caruso’s state of affairs would probably be that of Richard Riordan, an prosperous businessman who served as L.A.’s mayor for 2 phrases starting in 1993.

Riordan paid a $3,000 wonderful for violating the state’s conflict-of-interest regulation in 1996 over a problem that his workplace known as an inadvertent mistake, however Stern and others mentioned conflicts weren’t a serious subject throughout his administration.

McAndrews, who additionally served as Riordan’s legal professional whereas he was mayor, mentioned she would maintain trainings with metropolis employees so they might know what the then-mayor’s belongings have been and be capable to spot potential conflicts as they arose.

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However Eisen, the previous Obama lawyer who co-authored the Slate op-ed, argued that merely complying with current conflict-of-interest regulation wouldn’t go far sufficient to satisfy moral finest practices.

Eisen mentioned that he and Painter had provided to offer Bass casual, professional bono steerage on the potential moral points in play. When requested why they didn’t equally strategy Caruso earlier than laying out their considerations in a public op-ed, Eisen mentioned he knew Bass from her service in Congress.

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Former CBS and Disney TV executive James Stark Bennett dies at 78

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Former CBS and Disney TV executive James Stark Bennett dies at 78

Television executive James Stark Bennett II, known for developing talk show “Live with Regis and Kathie Lee,” has died at 78.

Bennett, who went by Jamie, died July 6 after a fight with cancer, according to his family.

He spent more than a decade at CBS, where he was an executive at television and radio stations in San Francisco and Chicago before coming to Los Angeles, where he served as vice president and general manager at KCBS-TV.

Bennett then moved over to the Walt Disney Co., where he served as senior vice president of Buena Vista Television Productions. In that role, he developed such shows as “Live with Regis and Kathie Lee,” “Siskel & Ebert” and the game show “Win, Lose or Draw.”

He later became president and chief executive at ACI, a Los Angeles-based TV and film distributor. When ACI was bought by Britain-based Pearson Television in 1995, Bennett and his family moved to London, where he ran the company’s worldwide production.

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He eventually moved back to L.A., where he got involved in volunteer work and expanded his career beyond the entertainment industry by becoming chief operating officer at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. There, he was instrumental in helping the school establish its permanent base in L.A.’s Arts District, his family said. He also served on the board of the Ojai Music Festival, later becoming its president and CEO for five years until 2020.

Bennett was born in New York City on June 1, 1947. He later graduated from UC Berkeley, where he chaired a student-run summer program in Washington, D.C., and started his media career as the program director for the university’s radio station. After getting his MBA from Harvard Business School, he moved back to New York to take a job at CBS, which launched his media career.

He and his wife, Carolyn, eventually purchased an 11-acre farm in Ojai, which became their permanent residence. Bennett is survived by his wife, Carolyn, their three children and other family members.

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Uvalde school shooter was fueled by Instagram and 'Call of Duty,' L.A. lawsuit alleges

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Uvalde school shooter was fueled by Instagram and 'Call of Duty,' L.A. lawsuit alleges

Tess Mata’s parents were once enthusiastic about social media. The 10-year-old from Uvalde, Texas, wanted to be TikTok famous. She used to dance, sing and imitate popular trends on her videos, with mom Veronica and dad Jerry keeping a watchful eye on her online habits.

But then Tess was gunned down at Robb Elementary School in 2022, one of 19 children and two teachers killed by a former student.

Since then, as details of the shooter’s personal life have become public, the Matas and a handful of other Uvalde families have come to believe that his exposure to gun content online and in video games led to the tragedy.

Jerry and Veronica Mata stand in front of the Spring Street Courthouse on July 17 in Los Angeles. After their daughter Tess was killed in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, the couple are suing Meta, Activision and Daniel Defense in an attempt to challenge social media and video game marketing that they say urged the shooter to commit violence.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

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They are now suing three companies they allege profited off the violent fantasies that led to their children’s deaths. The defendants include the maker of “Call of Duty,” a first-person military shooter game where they say 18-year-old Salvador Ramos encountered a virtual version of a Daniel Defense-branded AR-15 he used in the attack. They are also suing Meta, alleging Ramos encountered ads for the gun that promoted violence on Instagram.

The Matas and three other families from Uvalde will travel more than 1,200 miles this week to confront the companies in L.A. County Superior Court, where they have filed claims for negligence, aiding and abetting and wrongful death.

“They glorify these weapons. They made it enticing for young kids to want to purchase these guns, and kids that young are so receptive to these types of things,” Veronica Mata told The Times.

Activision, the Santa Monica-based video game developer, has filed for dismissal, arguing that the 1st Amendment protects “Call of Duty” as a work of art. Meta has also fought to have the case tossed, pointing to well-established case law that shields social media platforms from liability for third-party content posted by users and advertisers.

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Whether the case proceeds could be decided at a hearing Friday in downtown L.A.

Jerry Mata holds dog tag necklaces of his daughter Tess in front of the Spring Street Courthouse in Los Angeles.

Jerry Mata holds dog tag necklaces of his daughter Tess, one of 19 students killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

The families allege “Call of Duty,” one of the top-grossing video game franchises in the world, encouraged violence by catching Ramos in a repeated gameplay loop with real-world weapons. And they claim Instagram equipped him with the knowledge of how, when and where to buy the gun he used.

“To put a finer point on it: Defendants are chewing up alienated teenage boys and spitting out mass shooters,” the complaint claims, noting that the three most deadly K-12 school shootings in American history — Uvalde, Parkland and Sandy Hook — were all committed by young men who played “Call of Duty” and used an AR-15.

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“Call of Duty is a simulation, not a game. It teaches players how to aim, reload, and fire accurately, while habituating the teenage nervous system to inflict repeated, graphic violence. And though the killing is virtual, the weapons are authentic,” the complaint alleges.

Ramos’ choice of the Daniel Defense AR-15 was intentional, the lawsuit said. The small weapons manufacturer has a market share of less than 1%, but a specific rail displayed on a popular “Call of Duty” gun made it easily identifiable to players online despite a lack of branding inside the game.

“It is the Defendants who gave Daniel Defense a direct line into children’s homes and heads, who wrote a playbook for how to peddle firearms while circumventing parents and the law, and who created a simulation with real-life weapons and applauded children for their proficiency at killing,” the complaint said.

Meta did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment, nor did Daniel Defense, another defendant in the lawsuit.

A photo of a weapon next to the truck that the shooter crashed near the elementary school before the shooting.

A photo of a weapon next to the truck that the Robb Elementary School shooter crashed before the shooting on May 24, 2022.

(Pete Luna / Uvlade Leader-News)

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Courts have long rejected the idea that violent video games like “Call of Duty” are responsible for the actions of those who play them despite the moral panic surrounding the issue, and have also overturned efforts to restrict minors’ access to them.

Most modern “Call of Duty” games are rated for mature audiences over 17 by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, but are available to minors through online marketplaces that don’t meaningfully verify someone’s age before purchase.

“Any adolescent that wants to download Call of Duty can do that,” Josh Koskoff, a lawyer for the Uvalde families, told The Times.

A 2011 Supreme Court case, Brown vs. Entertainment Merchants Assn., struck down a 2005 California law that banned the sale of violent video games to minors. There was “no tradition in this country of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence. … Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed,” the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the 7-2 majority opinion.

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Activision has long defended its games as protected artistic expression despite criticism of its extreme violence, which sometimes involves players killing other combatants — almost never allowing civilian casualties — in combat simulations, sometimes in public arenas like airports and urban sprawls.

“Call of Duty tells complex stories that explore the real-world combat scenarios that soldiers face in modern warfare. There can be no doubt Call of Duty is expressive and fully protected by the First Amendment,” the company said in a court filing.

The families still mourning their children say challenging the institutions that failed to protect them has been an ongoing fight. The new case is another chapter which feels like taking on giants, Veronica Mata said.

A blurred-out person walking in front of a billboard for "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II" with someone in a skeleton mask.

A woman walks near “Call of Duty” publicity on Dec. 7, 2022, in New York City.

(VIEW press / Corbis via Getty Images)

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The city of Uvalde approved in May a $2-million settlement for a flawed police response to the shooting, and a Texas appeals court Wednesday ordered the release of documents from the school board and county about the shooting, local news reported.

“We can step forward, and we can make that change and make them understand that what they’ve done and what they continue to do is not benefiting them or anybody else,” Mata said.

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Commentary: She looked like a pro-worker Trump cabinet appointee. But now she's gutting the Labor Department

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Commentary: She looked like a pro-worker Trump cabinet appointee. But now she's gutting the Labor Department

You may have detected a cautious note of relief among worker advocates when Donald Trump named Lori Chavez-DeRemer as his secretary of Labor.

During her sole term as a Republican member of Congress from Oregon (2023-25), Chavez-DeRemer was one of only three House Republicans to vote in favor of the so-called PRO Act, which would significantly strengthen collective bargaining rights. The measure passed the House in 2019 and 2021 but has been stifled ever since.

Her nomination and subsequent Senate confirmation elicited optimistic noises from the pro-union camp, as I reported in December.

This is an onslaught on people’s basic protections at work.

— Rebecca Reindel, AFL-CIO

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“Her record suggests real support of workers & their right to unionize,” tweeted Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, when Trump nominated Chavez-DeRemer in November.

AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said she was “encouraged” by Chavez-DeRemer’s confirmation in March, “given her history of supporting the freedom of workers to organize, join unions and other fundamental values of the labor movement.”

The union leaders tempered their optimism with concerns about the anti-labor policies emanating from the Trump White House: Weingarten said she hoped the appointment signaled that “the Trump administration will actually respect collective bargaining and workers’ voices,” and Shuler said the AFL-CIO was “clear-eyed” that Chavez-DeRemer would be “joining an administration that’s been openly hostile to working people on many fronts in its first two months.”

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Can you guess which way the ball has bounced?

On May 1, the Labor Department ordered its staff to cease enforcing a Biden administration rule that had raised the bar preventing businesses from designating their workers as independent contractors instead of employees, depriving those workers of the legal protections and wage and hour benefits typically due employees.

A few days later, Chavez-DeRemer submitted a proposed budget to Congress that would slash her agency’s discretionary funding by more than 35%, to $8.6 billion from $13.2 billion, and cut its workforce by nearly 4,000 full-time workers, a reduction of more than 26%. Among the services to be eliminated would be the Job Corps, which assists low-income youth to complete their high school education and provides job training and placement. (A federal judge in New York has blocked the suspension of Job Corps services and set a hearing for Monday.)

On July 1 came what could be the biggest blow. Chavez-DeRemer announced a plan to rescind 63 regulations that had been designed to help workers. With language that sounds cribbed from the MAGA playbook, she said her goal is to “eliminate unnecessary regulations that stifle growth and limit opportunity.”

She boasted of launching “aggressive deregulatory efforts in push to put the American worker first,” and added that “these historic actions will free Main Street, fuel economic growth and job creation, and give American workers the flexibility they need to build a better future.”

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I’ve asked the Labor Department to provide specific rationales for the deregulatory actions but haven’t received a reply.

The effects, however, are clear. “Two-thirds of these have to do with worker health and safety protections,” says Rebecca Reindel of the AFL-CIO. “They’re being proposed to be either eliminated or severely weakened.”

Chavez-DeRemer’s actions as Labor secretary resemble less the image she fostered as a member of Congress than the policymaking of Trump’s first term. Then, as I wrote at the time, the Department of Labor was “a black hole for worker rights.” His second Labor secretary, Eugene Scalia (son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia), had made his name professionally as a corporate lawyer fighting pro-worker government initiatives.

The standards on the chopping block include those issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a unit of the Labor Department, that were developed after years of effort. OSHA standards, Reindel told me, take an average of seven years — and as long as 20 years — to draft. “This is an onslaught on people’s basic protections at work.”

One category of threatened regulations applies to standards for respirators and filters to screen out workplace pollutants including asbestos, arsenic and lead. The department proposes to eliminate requirements that workers exposed to occupational pollutants be medically evaluated to ensure that their respirators fit properly and don’t cause health problems on their own.

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The agency, asserting that such rules are “unnecessarily prescriptive,” proposes to give employers “greater flexibility in the respirators they select for exposed workers.” Removing some of these regulations, Reindel says, “basically would allow employers to make the determination if a respirator is needed for specific chemicals. They’d give employers more flexibility at the expense of workers’ health.”

One of the more potentially far-reaching proposals would narrow the application of OSHA’s “general duty clause,” which requires employers to maintain safe workplaces even when no specific OSHA regulation applies. In the most notable case, OSHA cited the clause in fining SeaWorld of Florida $12,000 in connection with the 2010 killing of trainer Dawn Brancheau by an orca during a performance. SeaWorld sued to overturn the penalty but lost in a 2-1 decision by the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.

The three-judge panel found that even though the dangers of cavorting with wild animals for a public show were understood, SeaWorld should have done more to protect its human performers. (Who represented SeaWorld in that case? Eugene Scalia.)

The department is proposing to exempt from the rule “professional, athletic, or entertainment occupations” that are intrinsically dangerous. In justifying its proposal, the department cites a dissenting opinion in the appellate case by then-Appeals Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who is now on the Supreme Court.

In his dissent, Kavanaugh maintained that the agency exceeded its Congressional mandate: “The bureaucracy at the U.S. Department of Labor has not traditionally been thought of as the proper body to decide whether to ban fighting in hockey, to prohibit the punt return in football, to regulate the distance between the mound and home plate in baseball, to separate the lions from the tamers at the circus, or the like,” he wrote. The Department of Labor now maintains that Kavanaugh’s analysis, even though it was a minority finding, was right.

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More than 115,000 athletes, actors and other entertainers could be affected by the change, the agency acknowledges.

The department also proposes to rescind a 2024 regulation that guaranteed the right of migrant agricultural workers to host union organizers in company-owned housing.

The Biden administration asserted that the regulation was needed to “protect workers’ fundamental rights of association” and observed that the isolation of workers in company-furnished quarters and their “unique vulnerabilities renders them particularly at risk of … workplace abuses, labor exploitation, and trafficking.”

The department, however, cites several court rulings in red states that have held that the regulation was “an infringement on the property rights of employers.” Indeed, that was the reasoning of the Supreme Court in overturning a California law providing for similar access on farm property in 2021.

“The access regulation grants labor organizations a right to invade the growers’ property,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for a 6-3 majority, with the court’s three liberal justices dissenting. “It therefore constitutes a per se physical taking” without compensation.

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Worker advocates fear that the July 1 announcement is a precursor of more rollbacks to come. “I think the announcement is just the beginning of their deregulation effort,” says Margaret Poydock, a senior policy analyst at the labor-affiliated Economic Policy Institute. “These 63 rules they referenced were just two days’ worth of posting.”

One rulemaking effort that worker advocates are watching closely involves heat-related injuries. A proposed rule was posted in August and is still under consideration, with bipartisan support; public hearings on the rule were completed earlier this month, and final action is expected by the end of September. The Trump administration hasn’t taken any steps to quash it, thus far. But it has been fiercely opposed by business interests.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, submitted a 20-page comment arguing that the proposal “would result in OSHA micromanaging workplaces, imposing unreasonable burdens, and creating confusion as to what employers would be required to do.”

The proposal, which would apply to almost all employers, would be triggered whenever employees were exposed to a heat index — a measure taking into account heat and humidity — of 80 degrees or higher for more than 15 minutes in an hour-long period.

In those conditions, employers would be required to supply cool drinking water, break areas with cooling and paid rest breaks, among other measures. A heat index of 90 degrees would require mandatory rest breaks of 15 minutes every two hours and other heightened measures.

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In the absence of a specific federal heat regulation, workplaces are subject to the general duty clause. But that’s inadequate, worker advocates say. “The general duty clause is reactive — it addresses what happens once a worker is already exposed,” Poydock told me. “It does not prevent workers from becoming sick from heat or having heat stroke or dying from heat.”

The Chamber’s objection is that the current proposal is a “one-size-fits-all approach” that fails to account for regional conditions.

“Businesses operating in consistently high-heat regions, such as Arizona, Florida, and Texas, where these temperatures are the norm,” would be disproportionately affected. “People in hotter climates tend to be more acclimatized to heat, including working in temperatures above 80° F, and thus have a lower risk of heat injury or illness.”

The labor leaders who once saw a glimmer of light in Chavez-DeRemer’s appointment have seen their hopes dashed. Until recently, one might have said that the jury was out on whether she would be a good Labor secretary or another MAGA cabinet member. Now, sadly, the jury’s verdict is in.

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