National Review Smears Labor Secretary Tom Perez As A “Radical” And “Ideologue” For Supporting Workers

Attacks On The Labor Secretary Come Amid Speculation That Perez Could Be Hillary Clinton’s Pick For Vice President

The National Review recycled debunked myths and smeared Labor Secretary Thomas Perez for standing up to big business and expanding overtime protections for workers as speculation mounts that he may be Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s pick for vice president.

National Review described Perez as “[t]he Obama administration’s most radical and relentless ideologue” in a June 2 column by correspondent Jim Geraghty, replete with right-wing media myths about the potential contender for vice president. Although the column admitted that Perez’s “liberal credentials are as impeccable as they come” it still lambasted the Labor Secretary for advocating for labor and expanding overtime protections for salaried workers. National Review quoted Iain Murray of the right-wing Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) who claimed this expansion of worker protections for people making up to $47,476 is “probably the most fundamental attack on the free-enterprise system going on at present” (emphasis added):

Perez’s liberal credentials are as impeccable as they come. Mother Jones called him “one of the administration’s most stalwart progressives.” Conservative policy experts who have followed his work in the Justice and Labor Departments consider him perhaps the Obama administration’s most radical and relentless ideologue.

Iain Murray, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s vice president of strategy, calls Perez “possibly the most dangerous person in the administration right now.”

“His rewriting of U.S. labor law is probably the most fundamental attack on the free-enterprise system going on at present,” Murray says. “If he has his way, we won’t just revert to the 1930s. We’ll do things that even Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t do, like eliminate vast numbers of independent-contractor jobs and unionize those that remain.”

Murray sees Perez’s ideological vision as driven by an arrogant insistence that most workers are oblivious to their own exploitation by employers, and need the state to intervene to help them understand proper “work-life balance” or to make basic choices about work.

Right-wing media repeatedly assailed the new overtime rules released by the Department of Labor (DOL) on May 17, which will expand overtime pay protections to 4.2 million additional American workers previously exempt from compensation under outdated provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

But experts have found that these new protections are long overdue. The National Employment Law Project (NELP) found the new overtime rule “will rectify” the problem of wage protections guaranteed by the FLSA that have been “steadily erod[ing] since the late 1970s.” The overtime update is particularly important for women -- especially women of color and working mothers -- as the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) found “women are now the sole or co-breadwinner in half of American families with young children.”

Right-wing media smears against Tom Perez have been ongoing since his confirmation hearings for Labor Secretary began in 2013 and are frequently laced with racially charged language in addition to debunked misinformation. Then-Fox contributor Michelle Malkin has baselessly called Perez an “extremist race-baiter,” and frequent Fox guest J. Christian Adams has falsely claimed that Perez's leadership of the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division saw it “infested with racial animus.” Republican lawmakers later regurgitated these falsehoods and claimed that the division under Perez's leadership was itself racist. Right-wing talk radio host Mark Levin also called Perez an “Ethno-Thug[],” and the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal stooped to claiming the only reason to confirm Perez for Secretary of Labor was his “Spanish surname” -- a reductionist line of attack also used by The National Review, which remarked Perez’s “Dominican heritage means he checks the box as a Latino.”