What Next - Why This Trump Nominee Has Union Support
What Next | Daily News and Analysis
Slate Podcasts
4.3 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 February 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Trump's pick for labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, is an outlier: She has experience in federal government, where she was one of three House Republicans to support the “Protecting the Right to Organize Act” to expand employees’ rights to organize and collectively bargain and she was accompanied by the head of the Teamsters when she went to visit Mar A Lago after the election.
What did her hearing tell us about how she would approach being labor secretary—while working in an administration that’s firing huge chunks of its workforce?Â
Guest: Tammy Kim, contributing writer at the New Yorker.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, Ethan Oberman, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | For the New Yorker's Tammy Kim, out of all of Donald Trump's cabinet picks, there was one she was tracking from the beginning. |
| 0:13.6 | Lori Chavez-Darimer, Trump's nominee for the Department of Labor. |
| 0:22.5 | She definitely stood out among the pack. |
| 0:25.2 | Why? |
| 0:25.9 | Because she had been sort of bipartisan. |
| 0:29.1 | I mean, she has a very slim record to go on because she only had one term in Congress. |
| 0:34.2 | But, you know, she had this sort of record of being pro-union and had good relationships with labor. |
| 0:39.0 | And so especially on the spectrum of Trump's other nominees, she looked incredibly reasonable. |
| 0:47.6 | Chavez-Durreemar showed up for her confirmation hearing yesterday. |
| 0:51.3 | And no one was quite sure what to expect. |
| 0:54.0 | Would the GOP fall in line to defend |
| 0:56.1 | Trump's pick the way they had for every other nominee? Would Democrats, newly fired up by the |
| 1:01.9 | president's departmental purges, grill someone who could be an administrative ally? The answer to that |
| 1:09.6 | was mixed. Like here's Bernie Sanders, asking Chavez |
| 1:13.8 | DeRimer if she still supports the Pro Act, legislation that would bolster organized labor. |
| 1:19.9 | Do you support the Pro Act? Thank you, Ranking Member Sanders, and I appreciate the conversation. |
| 1:27.4 | I support the American |
| 1:29.1 | worker. President Trump. |
| 1:31.2 | Okay. I don't need to be rude. No, you're not rude. I'm a lot of time. I'm gathering, |
| 1:35.9 | I am gathering that you no longer support the project, is what I hear. You know, I noticed |
| 1:40.8 | this interesting language choice from both the nominee and the senators grilling her. |
| 1:47.2 | Democratic senators wanted to find out how pro-union Chavez-Durremer was going to be. |
... |
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