This New York Times piece, titled “Trump Shifts Labor Policy Focus From Worker to Entrepreneur,” puts a soft spin on an unsurprising but appalling development — moves by the Trump administration to screw over American workers. It’s also a reminder that despite the president’s protestations, there’s tons of mainstream, prestige journalism that pulls its punches from clear-cut, outright takes on the starkest betrayals of Trump’s campaign rhetoric.
After detailing an executive branch reversal of the Obama administration’s position in a Supreme Court case on whether “employers can force workers to forfeit their rights to bring class-action lawsuits,” the article goes on to note Trump’s proposed 40% cut for an agency that researches workplace hazards and gutting of a program to educate workers on avoiding injury. The obvious angle is betrayal of the president's supposed working class base; but the article instead highlights how this approach actually demonstrates Donald Trump’s long-time support of “entrepreneurship,” a term never defined in the article but which seems to refer to people who create jobs and hire people.
Suggesting that Donald Trump is actually acting in a pro-entrepreneur fashion seems a highly charitable reading of his government’s anti-worker actions, which after all are equally reflective of long-term right-wing efforts to smash labor protections wherever possible. The article seems to stake its case on the pro-entrepreneurship policies of this administration by citing its changed positions on various technical but important labor rules about joint employers, who gets termed a independent contractor versus an employee, and who qualifies for time and a half pay.
But whether the administration, its supporters, or the author choose to call these policies supportive of entrepreneurship, you could also easily counter that “entrepreneurship” is just a fig leaf for the timeless effort of business owners to pay and compensate their workers as little as possible. When the article quotes labor-hating, failed nominee for labor secretary Andrew “What a Puzd!” Puzder about the tendency of overtime pay to staunch the job-creating ambitions of hourly workers (apparently by seducing them into settling for being mere workers fairly compensated for their work), the stench of bullshit becomes overpowering.
The article amusingly quotes David Weil, who was involved with the issue of classifying workers as independent contractors versus employees during the Obama administration, and who notes how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs expressed an attitude of “Why are you bothering me with this employee stuff when I’m actually giving people a chance to be entrepreneurs?” The idea of valorized entrepreneurs arguing that people working for them are actually entrepreneurs, too, and should be happy about it, is an absurd but also quite radical shift in what an employer’s responsibilities to its workers should be. It conjures a vision of a world in which, through the magic of semantics, there are no longer owners and workers, but just entrepreneurs floating in a sea of equality, as if all the tendencies toward exploitation in the absence of regulation have been whisked away by good will. But it doesn’t take a cynic to see that anyone — you can call them entrepreneurs, but you can more clarifyingly also call them bosses or owners — who needs other people to help them with their work will always have serious incentives to compensate those people as little as possible — isn’t that the basis of capitalism? — and that such incentives include simultaneous efforts to deny the basic fact that these people are indeed working for them.
In the glorification of the entrepreneur, we see a devaluation of being a “mere worker”; but this sleight of hand rests on the false idea of a heroic, creative few who supply the real drive to the economy, with automaton-like laborers supplying rote and unthinking grunt work to make it all move. It’s a self-serving notion at odds with the real world, and an insult to the near-infinite contributions made by people who, for a thousand different reasons, don’t have the means or inclination to found a company.
