MORGANTOWN – Some readers have asked about a full-page ad that appeared in Sunday’s edition, which is headed by the line: “David Weil is wrong for West Virginia.” It says below his picture, “David Weil is a radical Biden nominee who will destroy Main Street businesses and put West Virginia’s economic recovery at risk.”
As the text suggests, Weil is not a political candidate and readers have wondered who he is and what the ad is about. So we looked into it.
Weil is a nominee to run the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, a post he held from 2014 into 2017 under the Obama administration. Wage and Hour enforces labor laws to protect workers.
The ad – paid for by Taxpayers Protection Alliance, a D.C.-based nonprofit that term itself a nonpartisan that educates the public on the government’s effects on the economy – refers readers to a website that give reasons why West Virginia’s senators should oppose his appointment.
Those at Taxpayers Protection Alliance did not respond to requests for comment – via phone and email – on why the ad was run, how many such ads the nonprofit has run across the country or how much the organization spent on this campaign. TPA’s most recent federal 990 form shows that for the 2020-2021 tax year it received $4.15 million in contributions and grants and spent $3.98 million to “increase awareness of wasteful government spending by conducting original studies, public education campaigns and issue advocacy efforts.”
In August, the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee deadlocked on a vote to favorably report Weil’s nomination to the floor, stalling his move until the Democrat-led full Senate can vote to discharge the nomination from committee and vote on it.
Critics have said that Weil opposes the gig economy, the model used by Uber and Lyft to hire drivers as independent contractors, an arrangement that lets the drivers choose the hours and jobs they want.
They also say Weil opposes franchises – many owned by minorities and women – because he has stated they lead to low wages, reduced benefits, workplace violations and corporate exploitation of franchisees, among other things.
His views, critics say, mean hundreds of thousands of lost jobs and harm for consumers.
At HELP’s July hearing on Weil’s nomination, chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., said Weil has a long history of fighting for workers and is a capable leader. During his prior term, he increased efforts to enforce wage and hour laws, expanded access to overtime pay for 12 million white collar workers who were misclassified as exempt (a rule overturned in federal court).
If appointed again, she said, he will have the chance to reverse many Trump-era labor rules that have harmed workers.
On the other side, Ranking Member Richard Burr, R-N.C., said labor “rules need to be based on reality and not on what academics think,” and that Weil – dean of Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management – is an “extreme ideologue … who will support [Biden’s] partisan agenda to bring more companies under the thumb of bureaucrats.”
At the hearing, Weil countered comments that he’s a lifelong left-wing academic with limited management experience and no private sector experience by saying he’s been a successful labor-management dispute mediator, successfully ran the Obama-era division with its $235 million budget and 2,000 employees and successfully runs the Heller School.
The Dominion Post contacted both of West Virginia’s senators to get their views on Weil’s nomination.
Sen. Joe Manchin’s office had no comment at this time.
Sen. Shelly Moore Capito said, “In August, David Weil’s nomination failed to advance out of the Senate HELP Committee due to an 11-11 tie. Every Republican voted against his nomination due to the justifiable fear that he would reinstate the failed policies of the Obama administration. I share that concern with my colleagues, which is why I would not support discharging his nomination from the committee.”
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