Zach VanHouten, People For the American Way

Dear Friends,

Eric Dreiband, Trump’s extreme nominee to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, is set to receive a Senate confirmation vote as early as THIS WEEK!

Senate Republicans just rammed through the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh … now Mitch McConnell is hoping to ram through another anti-civil rights Trump nominee and place him in a position where he could do tremendous damage.

Sign immediately – tell senators to OPPOSE Dreiband for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights!>>

Drieband is another example of a Trump nominee who has spent his career opposing the very mission of the office he is nominated to hold.

Here are just a few examples of why he is totally unfit and should be REJECTED by the Senate:

• Dreiband spent years defending corporations accused of employment discrimination, he defended a corporation that discriminated against a Muslim woman, and he defended North Carolina’s notorious anti-trans bathroom law.
• In his personal capacity, Dreiband has opposed and testified against legislation designed to protect civil rights. In one instance, he opposed legislation that would secure equal pay for women. He testified against legislation that would prevent age discrimination in workplaces. He even submitted a friend of the court amicus brief supporting an employer accused by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of discriminating against Black and Latinx applicants.
• Dreiband lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee in his confirmation hearing. One particularly egregious example was when he insisted that he never opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, even though he served as an expert witness testifying in opposition to the bill. He also refused to repudiate Trump’s wild allegations of mass “illegal voting” in the 2016 election.

Please add your name without delay to demand that the Senate vote NO on the confirmation of Eric Drieband>>

Thanks for staying in the fight. We might not win them all, but if we don’t fight, we don’t even have a chance.

— Zach VanHouten, Digital Communications Coordinator

voters — We’ve seen a lot of strange things from Republicans here in Washington State — but this might take the cake: Yep, Dino Rossi is headlining a GOP men’s retreat. Have a clever caption for this graphic? Submit it here. Dino Rossi and the Republican Party have a pretty abysmal record on women’s rights. Rossi is staunchly anti-choice Rossi doesn’t think insurance plans should cover contraception In the state Senate, Rossi voted to exclude low-income womenfrom access to family planning services Just last year in the state Senate, Rossi was instrumental in keeping the Equal Pay Opportunity Act from coming to a vote (luckily, the Act passed once Manka Dhingra replaced Rossi) And even with all that, we were still stunned that every Republican whose picture appears above thought that holding a “men-only” event was a good idea. It’s an awful idea. So we’re throwing a caption contest for the above graphic! We’ll choose some of the wittiest submissions and post them on social media. Submit your caption, and you might see it online soon! — WA Democrats

 Lowe’s, CVS, and Home Depot could have given each of their employees an $18,000 raise with the money they spent buying back their own stock instead. Starbucks could have given each employee $7,000, and McDonald’s $4,000. 

 A new legal settlement requires that the Hanford nuclear site test for toxic vapors in tanks where people work. Thousands of Hanford workers have been exposed to vapors from 177 tanks holding 53 million gallons of waste, which have never before been tested for toxicity.

 Those savings are just going to trickle down into workers’ paychecks, right? L&I announced that the cost of workers’ comp insurance is dropping 5% in Washington next year. Employers will have to pay a total of $136 million less next year than they’ll pay this year.

 Truck drivers working out of Spokane Valley were putting in as many as 90 – 120 hours a week, but were only getting paid for 40 hours… at $11 an hour. So they got together and filed a class action lawsuit over the unpaid overtime — something which, as The Inlander reports in a remarkably comprehensive and clarifying piece, is about to get much harder due to a recent ruling by the US Supreme Court. In a 5-4 decision written by Justice Gorsuch, the Court ruled that employers can require employees to sign forced arbitration agreements that eliminate workers’ right to join class action suits. However, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson still has the right to file large-scale claims, and there are further legislative remedies our state could pursue to address the get-of-jail-free card handed to wage thieving corporations by the current court.

Read this far?

Consider yourself briefed, boss. 

workingwa.org