Another week, another threatened takedown of the Speaker of the House by a handful of the new populists. Those populist hardliners might have finally pushed far enough to accidentally create a functioning governing middle, with the House passing three foreign aid bills and the Tik Tok ban by bipartisan majorities. While the intraparty fight among House Republicans continues to take center stage in the media it steals the spotlight from the heavy-handed regulations pouring out of President Biden’s federal agencies. Just today, the administration finalized two major rules that could have detrimental impacts on your workplace and the relationship between employer and employee. Those rules, the DOL Overtime Rule and the FTC Non-Compete Rule, are each hundreds of pages long and rely on questionable legal authority as their foundation for policymaking (details below).   

Speaking of both labor and populism, I want to raise an issue NAW is tracking on an emerging body of regulatory policy merging concerns about Ai in the workplace and old-school pro-union initiatives. Stemming from efforts to unionize Amazon and Walmart, the Teamsters and their allies are drafting rules and legislation specifically targeting warehouse workers, raising issues about Ai, surveillance, and quotas as the justification. A worthy read on this is an Oxfam paper titled “At work and Under Watch.” I encourage you to read it, it highlights the direction advocates are going and is a topic policymakers are becoming active, blending the “threat” of Ai with old school labor policy.