Blog Post

Day 1 of Trump Presidency: Know Your Rights & LGBT Content Disappears from the Department of Labor’s Website

Andy Puzder, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Labor, has already proven himself to have a disastrous track record when it comes to paying workers the wages they are due, following the rules that keep workers safe, and respecting women.  That’s why workers across the nation—including his former employees— have raised concerns that Puzder’s DOL won’t have their best interests at heart.
What would an anti-labor Department of Labor look like? Unfortunately, even though Andy Puzder still hasn’t made it through the Senate confirmation process, we are already getting a preview of what’s to come: President Trump’s inauguration had barely begun before pro-worker pages on the Department of Labor’s website began to show error messages.
Over the past few days, LGBT content from the Department of Labor’s website has been disappearing at a worrying rate. While a quick search on DOL’s blog on Thursday for “LGBT” would have shown more than two full pages of results, the same search today shows only one blog – the rest have been deleted.

Other content has also been taken off of the site – as of today, all of the Department of Labor’s videos go to dead links, including Know Your Rights videos for workers on the minimum wage, overtime, migrant work, and child labor.
Some pages disappeared on Friday, only to mysteriously reappear on the site this weekend after backlash – including the page on the History of Labor Day and the report Advancing LGBT Workplace Rights. It gets better though – between yesterday and today, the LGBT report went missing from the website again, once the backlash from its first disappearance had faded.
This disappearing and reappearing act of resources for America’s employees and employers only further highlights that in this new administration, if we want to protect the gains of the of the past eight years, we’ll need to be keeping a close eye on the Department of Labor.