There’s a new Administration in DC, and things are changing rapidly. Executive Orders articulate new policies, there’s new leadership with new priorities; resources are being redirected and some programs have been shut down altogether. In this seminar, Larry Stine and Jim Hughes will share their scorecards, explain what’s been happening at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and US Department of Labor, and make some predictions about what to expect as the new team takes the field.

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James L. Hughes (00:00):
Okay, we'll begin. Larry Stine to my right, and I are presenting this webinar titled Changes in the Air at the EEOC and DOI have the responsibility for discussing the changes at the EEOC, and I can proudly announce that there is the return of sanity science and sense. And by that mean, I, by that I mean common sense to the EEOC. All of this begins with some executive orders that President Trump signed in January. He issued a series of executive orders restoring even handed civil rights enforcement and directing the federal government, including the EEOC, to combat serious patterns of discrimination and harassment that have gone unchecked for too long. One way he did that was repealing some of the executive orders issued by the Biden administration. He also sought to eliminate a lot of DEI programs. He wanted to restore sanity to the gender ideology doctrines, and he wanted to combat antisemitism.

James L. Hughes (01:27):
There is still one problem. The EEOC, the commission itself has no quorum at the present time, because on January 28th president Trump removed two of the Democratic commissioners that leaves us with two commissioners, the acting chair, who is Republican by the name of Andrea Lewis Lucas, and then the Democratic Commissioner, who is Calpana Kako. We initially certain documents the commission has to act by majority vote. So based on her existing authority, the acting chair of Ms. Lucas cannot unilaterally remove or modify certain gender identity related documents that are the subject of the President's executive orders. Those documents include the guidance that was issued in 2024 on harassment in the workplace the EOC strategic plan for 2022 through 2026, and the strategic enforcement plan for the years 2024 through 2028, all of which were approved by the Democrat majority on the commission, and were objected to by Ms. Lucas and the other Republican member.

James L. Hughes (02:59):
Even though the commission has no quorum, they remain open for business and they're fully committed to protecting the civil rights of all Americans and advancing equal opportunity for all and combating private sector and public sector discrimination. Now, Ms. Lucas has taken some recent actions that I'll summarize here, and then we'll go into more detail. The EEOC is abandoning litigation and guidance on LGBTQ plus protections and other areas that were enforcement priorities just weeks ago. The EEOC has signaled that, that it will not defend its own rules under the Pregnant Workers' Fairness Act. The EEOC withdrew its guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in hiring decisions and other human resource software tools.

James L. Hughes (04:06):
And the EEOC intend to focus on discrimination against US citizen workers. Now people will say that Ms. Lucas actions are in doing years of agency work, even before the eus OC has a quorum of major actions, but her actions are within her authority at the present time. Let's talk first about LGBTQ plus issues. In 2024, the EC issued guidance that said, employers cannot misgender employees or guard them from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity. And by misgender, I mean you have to use the employees preferred pronouns. Ms. Lucas has returned to science and noted that biology is not bigotry. Biological sex is real, and it matters. Sex is binary, male and female and immutable. It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities even repeatedly.

James L. Hughes (05:27):
She continued because of biological realities. Each sex has its own unique privacy interests, and women have additional safety interests that warrant certain single sex facilities at work and other spaces outside the home. It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single sex bathrooms or other similar facilities, which implicate the significant privacy and safety interest. And the Supreme Court's decision in Bostock versus Clayton County does not demand otherwise. The court explicitly stated that it did not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind. It might be worthwhile to stop and mention what Bostock did. Basically bostock considered whether it was discrimination to take adverse action against someone who identified as transgender or someone who identified as homosexual. And the court ruled in that case that it was sex discrimination under Title vii, but they explicitly did not address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else at the time.

James L. Hughes (06:56):
So the EEOC through Ms. Lucas has decided that they are going to take actions to implement the Trump's executive orders to the extent that she can, while there is no forum on the commission. And that means that there is a review of all pending transgender bias charges. They have removed non-binary gender markers from charge intake forms. They have dismissed six transgender discrimination cases citing Trump's executive order, recognizing only two sexes. And of course, these actions could potentially discourage transgender workers from bringing discrimination claims, but probably not <laugh>, I wouldn't anticipate. And and our explanation for that is that under the bostock decision you're basically locked in to treating workers based on their work performance as opposed to their sexual preferences or gender identity in terms of the normal terms and conditions of employment. Now the EEOC would say you can make males go to male bathrooms, and you can make females go to female bathrooms, and that may change with the next administration. But for the present time, you don't really have to worry about directing males to go to male bathrooms and females to go to female bathrooms.

James L. Hughes (08:51):
Well, also, isn't the, a lot of the plants have these used sex

J. Larry Stine (08:55):
Bathrooms. I know prior to right, the Obama administration, our solution for people who were transsexual and believe not we had it before then is we sent them to the unisex

James L. Hughes (09:07):
Right

J. Larry Stine (09:08):
Bathroom.

James L. Hughes (09:09):
And you could continue to do that. Now, let's talk about the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. The EEOC adopted some rules by Quorum Vote Last administration, which requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for employees who are pregnant or have related medical conditions. Those rules included protection for abortion. And it is probable that the Trump administration will not take action to enforce the rules so far as they relate to abortions. And any pending litigation may end with an agreement that the, the rules will not be enforced with respect to abortions, artificial intelligence the EEOC, under the Democratic Leadership published guidelines that have been removed from the EOCs website regarding the bias that's possible through the use of AI and other software tools.

James L. Hughes (10:27):
The reason that you should be concerned about the use of AI and other software tools is that it may have a disparate impact on your selection of workers. Now, the concept is that even where something has a neutral application in the workforce in the workplace, it could have an adverse effect on certain protected classes. So you need to consider when using an AI tool whether you are excluding from consideration one of the protected classes. Now presently, the Attorney General has directed the Department of Justice to limit use of disparate impact theories, but that doesn't change the discrimination laws or an employer's obligations. So a private plaintiff could still bring a disparate impact case if the evidence supported that sort of case.

J. Larry Stine (11:32):
But if on the ai, we don't feed the ai, the race or the sex in having to make assessments without that information hasn't

James L. Hughes (11:45):
An well, that's not the only way that disparate impact could be evidence that it may also result in the language used. You know, some people have different language skill sets,

J. Larry Stine (11:58):
Right,

James L. Hughes (11:58):
Than others that may be identified through the use of ai.

J. Larry Stine (12:03):
Okay? So, so a little bit of what we can do to manage it is to manage what type of information we put into the system to help us with selection.

James L. Hughes (12:15):
That's right. But we have to be careful.

J. Larry Stine (12:19):
Yeah, I I I, I, I'm just thinking this through because I'm just spitball a little bit, but to have dispar impact in the system that doesn't fit those factors in kind of is an interesting challenge for the plaintiff's attorneys.

James L. Hughes (12:36):
Yes, it is. And, and of course, disparate impact cases are pretty rare anyway.

J. Larry Stine (12:41):
They're rare. And the problem is the case law is developed that you can't use a bottom line number, right? You gotta use the selection criteria, which would be, you'd have, you can't use a bottom line number. You gotta use the number that the AI select, and then they're gonna have a problem with not feeding the data. I just think it's gonna, I, I, I hear it. I just think it's one of those things that's more theoretical than practically.

James L. Hughes (13:04):
Yeah. So the EEOC will focus on discrimination against US citizens. Now, employers have offered a lot of reasons for why they prefer non-American workers, but most of those reasons are not legally permissible lower labor costs. You have a workforce that is perceived as more easily exploited in terms of the group's lack of knowledge, access or use of wage and hour protections, discrimination, law protections, and other protections. You may have a customer or client preference, or you may have the bias that foreign workers are more productive than American workers, but the law is clear. There is a prohibition on national origin discrimination, and that prohibition applies to any National origin group, including discrimination against American workers in favor of foreign workers. And the EEOC will rigorously enforce the law to protect American workers from national origin discrimination.

James L. Hughes (14:18):
And to give you an illustration in February of this year, the EEOC announced that a Guam company, a a hotel in Guam is going to pay 1.4 million and provide equitable relief to settle a national origin discrimination lawsuit filed by the EEOC. In that situation, employees of American nationals in Guam received less favorable wages benefits in terms and conditions of employment compared to employees from Japan who held equal or lesser positions. And there will be changes to your EEOC poster Trump's executive order. Repeat 1 1 2 4 6. Well, one of his executive orders repealed executive order, 1 1 2 4 6, which created O-F-C-C-P and required federal contractors to consider workforce diversity <laugh> in their hiring practices. So be looking for a new poster because the repeal of executive order 1 1 2, 4 6 and its amendments will have to be removed from the current EEOC poster. And now I'll turn the program over to Larry Stein

J. Larry Stine (15:52):
All. Thank you, Jim. So I'm gonna talk about the Department of Labor, and I'm gonna focus on three agencies there. There's the other agencies that are there, and there may be some impact, but they're so specialized and so technical that I didn't think it would be helpful to spend that. The changes I have to OCP wage hour take up the rest of the time anyway, so, alright, I'm having trouble. Which one

James L. Hughes (16:32):
Right there.

J. Larry Stine (16:33):
Okay. Sound good? Sound good. Little trouble

James L. Hughes (16:44):
Upper error here, <laugh>. Okay, there

J. Larry Stine (16:47):
We go. Use, apparently. So we've talked about the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. There's also calling it this O-F-C-C-P. Now, a lot of you don't know who OF CCP is, but they've been around and basically they're the ones that govern discrimination and affirmative action for federal contractors. And they will do enforcement actions. But unlike EEOC, almost all of their enforcement actions are a disparate impact or statistical cases where they do analysis of statistical aspects of the of the case. Now, what's happened is that there's an executive order 1 4 1 7 3. By the way, I, they didn't issue that number to the executive order till this week. They were putting out executive orders so fast that it took a while to get the numbers. 'cause I, I was tracking it down and literally didn't show up until Tuesday. It was issued on January 21st, 2025.

J. Larry Stine (17:56):
It is entitled Indian Illegal Discrimination Restoring Merit Based Opportunity. Now, this is the executive order that we hear so much about on the news where it eliminated DEI and told everybody, you can't do DEI. We're gonna focus on one part of this executive order and how it impacts O-F-C-C-P. So what it did, among other things is it re appealed the executive order 1 1 2 4 6. It was issued in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson, and it repealed the various amendment to that executive order. Now, the executive order 1, 2, 4 6 was the primary purpose of O-F-C-C-P. I was regional counsel for OCCP in the eighties, and virtually every case we got was executive order. I would say over 95% of all cases O-F-C-C-P did at the time I was working with them, were executive order 1 1 2, 4 6 cases. This was the affirmative action and the ones where they were looking at the disparate impact when they were analyzing the workforce shown by the Affirmative Action Program.

J. Larry Stine (19:12):
And basically the affirmative Action program data was designed and required so that when O-A-F-C-C-P investigators came in, they could do statistical analysis on the data and see what the standard deviation and what is the impact of that particular one. Well one other thing. I was left of OAC, of the Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Systems Act and section 5 0 3 of the Rehabilitation Act, section 5 0 3, the Rehabilitation Act for most purposes has the same aspects of the American With Disabilities Act. And so there's very little left, there's a few minor differences, but not enough to, to support a program. So what's happened here? Well, first thing is I've told you that the enforcement was used by standard deviation. Now, if you talk to anybody who reads the program, they'll tell you O-F-C-C-P never had a quote. There are always goals. And if you look at the language and the affirmative actions and the way you write it, you'll write goals.

J. Larry Stine (20:20):
The reality, which is different from what they say is they had a backdoor quote of three standard deviations. And the way they did it is they based it on footnote two from the Supreme Court decision and teamster, which the footnote basically said, Hey, if you got two or three standard deviations, that's evidence of discrimination. Was that the Bowman case? No, it was the teacher's case. Bowman versus teacher. Yes. Yeah. Alright. I have it in my head so much as teamsters. I forgive me as Bowman versus Teamsters. And it's in footnote too. Well, what OSCC P'S done is an enforcement policy, and they've been doing it since the seventies, is that they ran a binomial distribution analysis and it showed three standard deviations. They took the enforcement position that that was conclusive evidence discrimination, and then they would assess back wages to the federal contractor. And the problem is that they also hold one other little piece of power they could devalue if you don't comply. So there would be this thread always of them hanging this over. So why I say it's a back door quota three is for my clients for all these years, we run standard deviations for recovery. People poorly make certain we don't get to the three standard deviation, and we make appropriate adjustments when it's going the three standard deviation.

James L. Hughes (21:52):
Now, Larry, as I recall, Bowman case wasn't a federal contractor case. So employers still should be concerned about the three standard deviation standard, right? Yeah.

J. Larry Stine (22:04):
But the, the courts in, in that particular aspect have become far more sophisticated over the years. You know, as mark Twain's most famous quote is, there's liars liars and statisticians. And so you can, I, I, when I handle those cases, cases, it is so easy for both sides to manipulate statistics to show different impacts on it. And the other thing that has really impacted the the teamster case is they have since basically says you can't do this analysis on the bottom line. And that has made a major impact because what OFC CCP is doing is they're doing a bottom line analysis of the three standard deviations, and they're not gonna, what the risk of the cases say, where you have to take a practice and show it has an adverse impact, this, and has specifically rule that we're not allowing a bottom line analysis.

J. Larry Stine (23:02):
However, O-F-C-C-P has been doing that for years. I, I'll tell you what my prediction for O-F-C-C-P is, I, my prediction, and I think we'll see this as O-F-C-C-P will end as an agency because over 95% of what they were doing was executive order 1, 2 6. And they've already been told to stop it. They've stopped litigating all the o the affirmative action cases and the two statutes. They can go to another agency with several problems if one these funding wage hour or EC might get one or the other. So we will see that. And what we do have is we have an end of mandated affirmative actions for federal contractors. They no longer have to go through and do all this highly technical analysis, do standard deviations, set up these logs, which provide the data for the plaintiff's attorneys to use approved discrimination.

J. Larry Stine (24:12):
And that no longer is mandated. So that, that's my analysis of OCCP is I think O-F-C-C-P is an agency within a year will not be an agency and there'll be another layoff, those people ccp. So it will go before the Department of Education. Yeah, the FCP will go before the Department of Education. I mean, the problem is they don't have anything left to enforce, and their existence was based upon an executive order. Then the problem with having an agency based exclusively on an executive order is when one president can write in the executive order, another president can re bill. And that's exactly what's happened in this particular case. Now, the next one I wanna talk about it a little bit more complicated, is the wage hour division. So the wage hour division is basically has statutory provisions, so there's no executive order, but what's going on in wage and hour is that there's a number of rules that have been issued and they're still being challenged.

J. Larry Stine (25:21):
And what we're anticipating is because what we anticipated is this has already happened during previous Trump administration, and the Biden administration is the opposite. These regulations that were issued by the previous administration are no longer being defended in court. So one of the rules that we have for wage hours, the independent contractor. Now this has got an interesting history because the independent contractor who had no changes for years and years and years, decades until the Obama administration decided to try to change the independent contractor, that one never got quite in. And Trump issued a new on the independent contractor that fundamentally went back to the first one before the change based upon what the courts have said. Well, the Biden administration did go through the process, administrative Procedures Act, and it's beings, but it's still being challenged. There's actually five different courts that have had challenges to it, and we're pretty comfortable that Trump administration will not defend, because what will happen is if they vacate that regulation, that particular regulation vert back to the Trump administration rule, which is what was really the rule prior to the Obama unit, really reflects what the courts had said about the independent contractor and goes back to the older way of considering.

J. Larry Stine (26:54):
And, and what could an employer consider to be an independent contractor on the Trump rule? The Trump rule. The Trump rule kind of goes back to the fundamental kind of principles that we were talking about before the Obama administration changed it. So you're looking at certain aspects, you're looking at the, the permanency of the relationship. You're looking at the capital invested in it. So if somebody's got a lot of capital in it, then they're likely to be in the contractor. If the purported employer is paying for everything and the independent contractor puts in no money, then that factor goes in. If it's a five factor test varies from circuit to circuit, but it's one of those five factors where the courts always say no one factor looks at it the most, but the most important one's control. How much control did you exercise over these people?

J. Larry Stine (27:52):
If you're telling these people where to go, what time to show up, what to do during the day when they can quit and how you're paying then and they look like an employee and they're working side by side by the employee, going back to the <inaudible> of being an employer. If you're hiring people to do tasks and jobs and you're not measuring and handling how they do it, and you're looking for result as opposed to a process, and they're more likely to be independent contract. So that's, that's one of the things that we're looking for. But I think for the most part, we can still kinda look at the case law. And really the problem with administrations keep changing these things is the reliance becomes less and less. And of course, with the little bright case, the impact of these had a smaller impact than they would've prior to the bright case, which eliminated Chevron <inaudible>.

J. Larry Stine (28:50):
So the increase in the white collar salary last year, the wage and I decided to increase the white, the pay for the salary and the white collar exemptions, it was $684 and then they changed it starting last July in the $800 range. And on January it was gonna be over a thousand dollars prior to the implementation of a thousand dollars limitation. But after the 800 the district court in Texas, Texas versus United States Department of Labor, and you see the site there vacated the rule. Basically they decided not to enjoin the rule, which is what some of them do vacated, which means it as though the rule did not exist, and we send it back to the Department of Labor for consideration. Well, the Department of Labor obviously filed an appeal even though it was after election day. The Trump administration has indicated they're not gonna defend it.

J. Larry Stine (29:57):
The fifth Circuit where, where this is in has already given them an opportunity and has stayed the appeals. And so what is the net result of that is it looks like those salary increases a hundred dollars salary increase and the thousand dollars increase will not be I and will be back to the $684 a week as the required salary for employees or managers, professionals and administrative qualified white collar people. And that's the way, way was kind of handling some of these particular issues. Let's see what else we've got here. Federal contractor, federal minimum wage is 1720. So here's the story on this. In the Obama administration, the they've decided to issue the executive order to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 for all federal contractors and implemented it and told the Department of Labor issue regulations based upon the executive order increasing the federal minimum wage.

J. Larry Stine (31:19):
There was challenges on it. As you can see, there's a challenge by Nebraska versus Sue. It was the acting Secretary of Labor that was rendered by the Ninth Circuit, which is one of the more liberal circuits. But there are conservative judges on, on election day, November 5th, 2004. And in the language that I was happy to see this, what they're doing is they're trying to do it through the Procurement Act. The problem is for federal contractors, the two main statutes that cover them are, or Davis Bacon for contractors and service contractors for people who provide services. And both of them were passed in the 1930s. And the purpose of them was to make certain that people from lower other localities couldn't come in and underbid the locality. And they set local rates back in the thirties and the forties, that basically was the union where there was a, where there was a union in that locality that was the local rates.

J. Larry Stine (32:26):
But the rates varied from place to place to place. And they still do if you read the wage determinations, but there is issuing, they have all these different for these different or qualifications for those. But when they set the minimum wage, 1720, a lot of those jobs that they set with local rates were exceeded by the 1720. And the next circuit of decision basically said that, you know, you can't by executive order nullified to statutes issued by Congress. And that's what they, they were doing. So they found it to be improperly issued. The Trump administration, I'm pretty certainly goes back down to the district court will concur and that rule will be vacated and that federal contract for federal minimum wage will be no more. And that, that's quite an interesting change because the other courts had not done that. But that's where believe and when he had that rule, didn't, even though it was in the executive board, he made some adjustments and some modifications with Biden changed within the first week of his administration.

J. Larry Stine (33:43):
So we got a few more. So H two A regulations. Now, H two A regulations may not impact a lot of you directly, but what they do is they impact us and our farm products H two A regulations or the regulations in which the farmers get most of the guest workers who do the handheld harvesting. Whether you know it or not, we are fundamentally relying on guest workers to do the hand harvesting. And there was a study I read in which they did in North Carolina on the number of domestic workers who did guests who did the hand harvesting in the entire state of North Carolina with all the farmers who have an association. The number was 4%. So 4% of all the workers were domestic. 96 of the workers were workers from abroad. But what happened during the Biden administration is they've manipulated or tried to amend the H two A regulations and design it to increase the A word, what is the a word?

J. Larry Stine (34:56):
The A word is the adverse effect wage rate. It's a prevailing wage rate. And so for example, in the case that involved sugar cane, the rate was already up to $15. And when they went through the new regulations, that thing popped up to 20 bucks, which nobody was getting where they were working. So it was an artificial inflation, well, they were enjoying in this case and Louisiana. And once again, we expect that the Trump administration will come in and no longer defend that to regulation and let it revert back to the old way of preparing the wages. Another one was the expansion of the coverage under Davis Bacon Act. What the Department of Labor tried to do is the Davis Bacon Act basically says, joins labor and workman's at the locality. And what they did in this, in regulation is they tried to include it, include a lot more people who barely had type would come in and deliver something like vendors would all of a sudden be covered by data vacant rates because they came in and delivered something left.

J. Larry Stine (36:15):
And the department of Legal was trying to expand the coverage by regulation, and in, in my opinion, far exceeded the language. At least I've got one other court that concurs with me in the associated General Contractors of America versus us DOL the court rule that it, it violated the rules violated the statute, tried to engage in expansions that weren't allowable. And once again, they've been joined enforcement the way department Trump administration will handle this. Once again, what they'll do is they'll come in and say, we concur with that. We're not gonna appeal and we're gonna let the decision stand and that will end up vacating that particular expansion of coverage federal contract. The other one I'm gonna talk about is this one impacts restaurants and that impacts a lot of our clients is they had a tip rule. And I rather than try to put it all down there, so 80 20, 30 rule now since 1967, wage and hours had in 80 20 rule.

J. Larry Stine (37:30):
Now what this 80 20 rule was related to was tipped employees who's how much time they could spend in tipped activities and how much time they could spend in non tipped activities and still be considered working for the tipped credit. And so for years, they basically said, you know, you gotta spend 80% of your time involved in tip generating activities and you could spend 28% of your time and non tip generating activities and still retain the tip credit for those hours and not be kicked into the dual job rate. The dual job rate is basically, hey, part of your time you're working is one type of job non tipped and you got paid number wage and the other time you're working is tipped and you can take the tip credit of $5 and 12 cents an hour and only pay $2 and 13 cents.

J. Larry Stine (38:25):
But what they did is they amended it during the Biden administration to add a 30 minute requirement. In other words, you could not exceed 30 minutes in non tipped activities. Well, that's generated a lot of lawsuits, a lot of plaintiff lawyers have been bringing suits and which are trying to say, Hey, during the day you can't exceed these non ti generating activities back 30 minutes. And now they're trying to have restaurants maintain such detailed records of what they're doing minute from minute, it's an impossibility. And what happened is the case went up to the Fifth Circuit from the Texas case, and the Fifth Circuit vacated the rule vacated the rule. What we're talking about is that the rule is just gone. It's not enjoined, it is just gone. And it goes back to the Department of Labor reconsideration. They wanna reissue another regulation, but we revert back to the 1967 regulation, which uses the 80% and 20% rule.

J. Larry Stine (39:36):
And looking at that decision, if you're dealing with a restaurant cases, it's an interesting case about how the Department of Labor is exceeding their authority by mandating such detailed records that was almost impossibility to keep up with. So the Department of Labor not in the Department of Labor wage an hour primary effect we're seeing right now is on these challenges and them agreeing to the injunctions that have been issued or, or withdrawing from the defenses of other cases. That's how they're handling that. Now, the last one I wanna talk about is OSHA and OSHA's a little bit different. And I'll tell you one of the things that we can have, there is a regulatory freeze issue by Trump and his executive order. And I just froze all the regulations that were being issued. Now that did not impact all of the regulations. I was just considering it only impacted some. The first one is the one that they called the heat injury proposed regulation. This was the one that was a big emphasis in the Biden administration on heat stress, heat injury. The problem we've always had is OSHA for years has been using the general duty clause and they've been trying to enforce the ni understanding. The problem with the NIOSH standard is, is after you got to a certain degree of heat, it literally mandated 45 minute breaks every hour.

J. Larry Stine (41:13):
Yeah. And to be a general duty the industry had, well, nobody calls it because you, basically, what would happen is the Southern United States, and I mean the southwest United States and the southeastern United States would basically have to cease working outside starting in May because you get to work 15 minutes and rest 45, all the crops, everything else, the farmers, there be no way to get them done. And so year after year, the OSHA would bring one of these things and they would lose because they hadn't, the industry hadn't adopted it. They did stick that provision in that injury proposed regulation which to me made it just a totally un unenforceable absolutely bonkers provision. But it's been stayed. It's the phrase and the emergency response, how you respond to certain type of emergencies. That proposed regulation is also been stayed under the regulatory freeze.

J. Larry Stine (42:15):
And we can pretty much anticipate that once it's frozen, it ain't going anywhere at least for four years. Now, the ones that weren't impacted, but we anticipate modification is the walk around rule that was caused a lot of issues when they passed it because it theoretically allows the OSHA compliance officer to bring in a third party into the walk around of an OSHA inspection. And it, they deposition the authority to the compliance officer. Interesting thing about that is, although they passed it and all the inspections I've been in since then, I haven't seen them use the rule one time. I think part of the problem is the fourth Amendment gives the employees the opportunity to give limited consent. And so they can still limit consent to the ocean deposit officer and say, Hey, this is union guy from the National Union and we're not a union plan Union, come in here and leave.

J. Larry Stine (43:21):
But I, I think there's a strong likelihood that the current administration re appeal that go back to the old walk around rule. But at a minimum, I can pretty much guarantee you they're not gonna implement that walk around rule for at least the next four years on the electronic record keep requirements in the OSHA record keeping. I'm inspecting modifications. The, what they started doing is they were doing the OSHA three hundreds, which turned out not to be much of a problem for anybody. And now they've implemented for some electronic requirements for the OSHA 300 ones, which is a bigger problem. I don't know what they can do with that much data. I don't think they can do anything with it. I'm expecting that Trump, like he did in the first term, he made some modifications on the electronic requirement. He didn't eliminate it, but he made it something.

J. Larry Stine (44:13):
And that's what I'm expecting, that he duplicates what he did in the first term. It goes back to having electronic requirements, <inaudible> three hundreds and nothing else. We'll see what's going on. Deregulation, if you recall during the first Trump administration, he had a, you had to pick out 10 regulations for each one that you passed. That rule is back in place. So in order to issue a rule, you gotta, you gotta repeal 10. And this will be an opportunity for them to go through and find some of the old ones that really make no sense anymore. And some of 'em are old and really don't make any sense and they will be repealed. And that's what we're looking at. The other issue that will be, I'm pretty comfortable is the consultation programs will be revived. And, and what basically it seems to happen between the democratic administrations, at least the Obama Biden ones, is they seem to really dislike consultation program.

J. Larry Stine (45:15):
And what they have done every time that they've come in is they basically just put the hold on consultation program. To me, it was, it showed a fun fundamental misunderstanding of what their duty is. Their duty is to ensure that Americans comply, their statutes and the Obama and Biden administration, they focused on en enforcement. You just can't, you're just not enough resources to just get there through enforcement. And they drop the consult consultation programs. The idea is to get compliance. Consultation program's an important thing where you get people to work with you cooperatively. I do know that, for example, at the end of the Trump administration, we were working with thery industry and having a very good working relation with some people at osha. And it really was helping both us and OSHA people understand the industry and do a better job on safety. They shut it down.

J. Larry Stine (46:13):
We've had conversations with those officials and they're still believers in it. I'm pretty comfortable that we'll get the the consultation broker to provide back up and for the next four years we will see consultation programs. That's kind of where the if you got any questions or anything, let see the Indian chat room. Yep. Let's see if I gotta eliminate this first. Right. We're going to address next seminar. The Trump's impact in the NLRB is what we're gonna do on the first Friday in April. And Jim Wiley will be doing that with somebody and unnamed at this time. And Mr. Wiley will be to see that particular aspect. So we also have this video saved on the webpage. If anybody is interested in having this slideshow, send me the Jim Hughes or me an email. We did it last, last seminar and send some, send it to js@wimlaw.com or JL h@wimlaw.com and slideshow, anybody who wants to have that slideshow. Well, I, we have run this about to 1250. We'll give you a few minutes. There are no more questions and it doesn't appear to be the seminar. And we appreciate everybody showing and coming in. Thank you very much.