What to recognize about Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s pick for labor secretary

WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump on Friday named Oregon Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer to navigator the Department of Labor in his second administration, elevating a Republican congresswoman who has powerful back from unions in her district but lost reelection in November.

Chavez-DeRemer will have to be confirmed by the Senate, which will be under Republican control when Trump takes office on Jan. 20, 2025, and can formally send nominations to Capitol Hill.

Here are things to recognize about the labor secretary-designate, the agency she would navigator if she wins Senate approval and how she could matter to Trump’s encore presidency.

Chavez-DeRemer is a one-term congresswoman, having lost reelection in her competitive Oregon district earlier this month. But in her short stint on Capitol Hill she has established a obvious record on workers’ rights and organized labor issues that belie the Republican event’s usual alliances with business interests.

She was an enthusiastic back of the PRO Act, legislation that would make it easier to unionize on a federal level. The statement, one of Democratic President Joe Biden’s top legislative priorities, passed the House during Biden’s first two years in office, when Democrats controlled the chamber. But it never had a chance of attracting enough Republican senators to reach the 60 votes required to avoid a filibuster in the Senate.

Chavez-DeRemer also co-sponsored another piece of legislation that would protect community-sector workers from having their Social safety benefits docked because of government superannuation benefits. That proposal also has lingered for a lack of GOP back.

Chavez-DeRemer may provide labor plenty to like, but union leaders are not necessarily cheering yet. Many of them still do not depend Trump.

The president-elect certainly has styled himself as a partner of the working class. His predictable returns with blue-collar, non-college educated Americans is a core part of his political identity and helped him chip away at Democrats’ historical electoral advantage in households with unionized workers.

But he was also the president who chose business-amiable appointees to the National Labor Relations Board during his 2017-21 term and generally has backed policies that would make it harder for workers to unionize. He criticized union bosses on the campaign trail, and at one point suggested members of the United Auto Workers should not pay their dues. His administration did expand overtime eligibility rules, but not nearly as much as Democrats wanted, and a Trump-appointed judge has since struck down the Biden administration’s more charitable overtime rules.

And though Trump distanced himself from the Heritage Foundation’s assignment 2025 during the campaign, he has since his win warmed to some of the people involved in that conservative blueprint that, broadly speaking, would tilt power in the workplace even more toward employers and corporations. Among other ideas, the schedule also would curb enforcement of workplace safety regulations.

After Trump’s announcement Friday, National Education Association President Becky Pringle lauded Chavez-DeRemer’s House record but sounded a note of caution.

“Educators and working families across the country will be watching … as she moves through the confirmation procedure,” Pringle said in a statement, “and aspiration to listen a pledge from her to continue to stand up for workers and students as her record suggests, not blind loyalty to the assignment 2025 agenda.”

Labor is another executive department that often operates away from the spotlight. But Trump’s emphasis on the working class could intensify attention on the department, especially in an administration replete with tremendously wealthy leaders, including the president-elect.

Trump took implicit aim at the department’s historically uncontroversial role of maintaining labor statistics, arguing that Biden’s administration manipulated calculations of unemployment and the workforce.

If she is confirmed, Chavez-DeRemer could discover herself standing between the nonpartisan bureaucrats at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a president with powerful opinions about government stats and what they declare about the state of the economy — and the White House’s stewardship. Her handling of overtime rules also would be scrutinized, and she could discover herself pulled into whatever becomes of Trump’s commitment to launch the largest deportation force in U.S. history, potentially pitting Trump’s administration against economic sectors and companies that depend heavily on immigrant labor.

Chavez-DeRemer was the first Republican woman elected to Congress from Oregon. She joins Secretary of State-designate Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, as the second Latino pick for Trump’s second Cabinet. Trump’s first labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, also was Latino.