10 Things Obama Did For Workers

“He’s going to go down as one of the worst, perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States,”

-Donald Trump on President Obama

In the last hours of the Obama administration his legacy is being debated across the aisle. Let’s open up the books and let the record speak for itself. Trump’s words aside, we’ll take a look at the Obama administration’s legacy for US working women and men.

10 Obama victories for workers:

1. Established minimum wage and overtime protections for home care workers. Since the 1990’s Democrats have been to fighting the decades-old exemption of a minimum wage for the home care industry. In 2015 the Obama administration drew up regulations to override the exemption and provide greater protections for the nearly two million people who provide home care for the elderly and disabled.
2. Funneled support directly to working people. The Obama administration rolled out the $67 billion in workforce programs provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, including the extension of unemployment benefits to 34 million Americans, education and job training for nearly 40 million Americans, and the direct placement of nearly 700,000 workers into new jobs during the depth of the recession.
3. Enabled contractors and franchises to bargain collectively. President Obama’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board pushed through an important ruling that makes it easier for employees of contractors and franchises to bargain collectively with the corporations that have sway over their operations.
4. Sped up union formation. Taken together with other key regulatory actions and executive orders — an N.L.R.B. rule that effectively sped up the process for holding elections on whether to form a union and Alongside a spate of regulatory actions and executive orders, an administration-dominated National Labor Relations Board passed a rule that in effect sped up the process of holding elections on whether or form a union.
5. Supported federal contract workers. President Obama’s issued a series of executive orders to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10, crack-down on wage theft and other labor law violations, and extend paid-leave benefits.
6. Fought for workplace gender equality. The first major piece of legislation President Obama signed into law in 2009 was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which gave employees experiencing unlawful discriminatory wages the right to file federal anti-discrimination claims. The law placed pressure on employers by placing power in the hands of workers.
7. Catalyzed investment in sustainability. As part of his economic stimulus plan, Obama paved the way for investment into the “green economy” as a pathway for job growth and innovation that rippled across the economy, including manufacturing and transportation.
8. Supported the call to raise the minimum wage. After the President’s 2013 call to action to increase the minimum across all industries, 18 states and 50 cities have passed minimum wage increase laws.
9. Tackled wage theft. Former Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis put wage theft high on the list of Labor Department priorities, hiring 300 new wage and hour investigators and securing nearly $313 million in back wages for 517,000 employees by July 2011. In 2012 alone, her labor department recovered $280 million in unlawfully withheld wages — an historic record.
10. Kept it real. In 2013, in the wake of the Great Recession, the President declared that the growing income gap between the rich and working poor was the “defining issue of our time.”