As we witness the parade of uber-rich benefactors lining up to throw their support — and their wallets — behind Donald Trump’s blatantly authoritarian presidential agenda, it’s important to remember what many of these people stand to gain.
Trump’s galling proposition to oil CEOs at a private event that they give him a $1 billion campaign investment was a reminder that shrewd capitalists who run companies might see Trump’s deregulatory agenda as a prime reason to back him.
And voters can't afford to underestimate what that could mean for everyday working people.
As the Washington Post reported earlier this month:
Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation they would avoid thanks to him, according to the people. Trump’s remarkably blunt and transactional pitch reveals how the former president is targeting the oil industry to finance his reelection bid. At the same time, he has turned to the industry to help shape his environmental agenda for a second term, including rollbacks of some of Biden’s signature achievements on clean energy and electric vehicles.
I suspect the propaganda of Reaganomics has convinced some people (even those who may not consider themselves to be conservative) that the word “regulation” means “unnecessary red tape that diminishes profits." I want to combat that by highlighting the human cost of deregulation, which isn’t felt only by communities that suffer most directly from weakened environmental protections, for example, but is also felt by the actual workers who labor in what tend to be poorly regulated industries.
The AFL-CIO published its “Death on the Job” report in April, which chronicles the rate of on-the-job deaths per year up to 2022. And a disproportionate number of those who’ve died on the job are Black and Latino.
As NBC News reported, “Black workers’ job fatality rates are the highest they’ve been in nearly 15 years, and Latino workers die on the job more than any other group.” The report largely focuses on hazardous working conditions but also includes workplace homicides and suicides, both of which increased in 2022.
That year, the industries with the highest worker fatality rates were "agriculture, forestry, and fishing and hunting." The second-highest fatality rates were found in the group including "mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction" (to relate things back to Trump's private meeting).
The report also contrasts President Joe Biden's efforts to improve worker safety standards with Trump’s weakening of worker protections as president. The data just underscores a distinction I’ve highlighted recently, which is that Biden has fashioned himself as a pro-labor candidate while Trump continues to position himself pretty openly as the candidate of rich executives.
As the AFL-CIO’s workplace death report shows, this distinction might mean the difference between life and death for not a few workers.