President-elect Donald Trump is reportedly considering Victoria Lipnic, a commissioner at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for labor secretary in his administration.
Lipnic has worked for Republican and Democratic administrations and is described by those who know her as a pragmatic conservative with a deep knowledge of labor and employment law.
“She would bring to the job a real depth of understanding of the law and a real sensitivity to how it would have an impact on people’s daily lives at the workplace,” said Mark Wilson, chief economist for HR Policy Association, a trade group of human resources officers. Wilson served as Lipnic’s deputy when she was assistant secretary for the department’s Employment Standards Administration during the George W. Bush administration.
Wilson described her as a person with a great respect for the rules and the Constitution. She was interested in administrating the law fairly but would not hesitate to put the full force of the law against bad actors, he said.
Lipnic’s consideration was first reported by Politico, but the Trump transition team has made no public comment regarding who may be considered for the post. It is likely to be an important role in the coming administration given the Trump’s campaign emphasis on job creation.
Observers say Lipnic would be an obvious choice for the position – and a relatively uncontroversial one— given she has strong qualifications for it. She served in the Labor Department under Bush; she was formerly an adviser to Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldrige during President Reagan’s administration; she worked as a counsel for the House Education and the Workforce Committee and worked as a labor law attorney for both the management-side firm Seyfarth Shaw and the U.S. Postal Service.
Lipnic was nominated by President Obama in 2010 to serve on the EEOC and re-nominated for a second term in 2015, receiving Senate confirmation each time. By tradition, the president picks three of the five commission members and the party out of power gets the other two. Obama’s nomination, therefore, wasn’t necessarily a strong endorsement of her but rather part of a deal to get a Democratic majority on the board. The administration, nevertheless, found Lipnic unobjectionable enough to put her name forward.
Steve Bernstein, a labor-law attorney with the management-side firm Fisher and Phillips, said Lipnic was well-known and respected in the labor-law field. “The word ‘moderation’ comes to mind,” he said. “She has been reasonable in her approach and that’s probably why Obama tapped her.”
Bernstein said that after the EEOC in 2012 stepped up enforcement of “systemic discrimination” — discrimination based on a pattern of activity rather than specific incidents — employers were initially worried about how broad the rule would be, but found the ultimate result more moderate than they expected. Lipnic backed the plan and was influential in its drafting.
“I suspect she was the person who kept them from going too far,” Bernstein said.
Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute and a former Labor Department official, worked with her during her days on the committee. He recalled the two of them collaborating on a rule to protect healthcare workers from being stuck with hypodermic needles. “She was fair and reasonable. We managed to negotiate a good result,” he said. Eisenbrey added that he believed she is unquestionably qualified for the Cabinet position.
“She’s certainly far more qualified that Elaine Chao was,” Eisenbrey said, referring to President Bush’s labor secretary.
He also noted that while at the Labor Department, Lipnic’s section oversaw an expansion of overtime eligibility, the first such overhaul in 50 years. The rule expanded overtime coverage overall by raising the income requirement that a worker would have to make before they could be exempted from $8,000 a year to more than $23,000. At the same time, it expanded the types of jobs that were considerable “managerial” and therefore exempt from overtime. It also didn’t specify how much time a worker had to spend at managerial tasks before they could be exempted. Unions denounced the changes as weakening the intent of the rule.
“It was a disgraceful attack on the overtime rule,” Eisenbrey said, adding that Lipnic was “technically responsible for it.” He said it soured the positive memories he had from working with her.
