With help from Andrew Hanna and Ian Kullgren

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Morning Shift will not publish from Dec. 25-Jan. 1. Our next Morning Shift newsletter will publish on Tues. Jan. 2. Please continue to follow PRO Employment and Immigration issues here.

Story Continued Below

SENATORS EYE DACA DEAL IN JANUARY: “Top senators and White House officials are laying the groundwork for a major immigration deal in January to resolve the fate of young undocumented immigrants whose legal protections were put in limbo by President Donald Trump,” write POLITICO’s Seung Min Kim, Heather Caygle and Elana Schor.

“At a Tuesday afternoon meeting with nearly a dozen senators deeply involved in immigration policy, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly pledged that the administration will soon present a list of border security and other policy changes it wants as part of a broader deal on so-called Dreamers, according to people who attended the meeting,” POLITICO reports. “The plan could come in a matter of days, senators said.”

“About a half-dozen senators have been negotiating a bipartisan package prompted by Trump's decision to kill the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-era executive action that granted work permits to nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants who came here as minors,” the trio report. “Yet the senators could not fully flesh out a deal before they knew what Trump was willing to sign.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday dismissed the idea that the Senate could grapple with DACA-related legislation before the end of the year. Congress needs to pass a spending bill by Friday to avoid a government shutdown. "No, we'll not be doing DACA ... this week," McConnell said. "That's a matter to be discussed next year. The president has given us until March to address that issue. We have plenty of time to do it." DACA enrollment will begin to expire in large numbers by March, according to the timeline crafted by the Trump administration.

The prospect of a January bargain could give lawmakers cover if they opt to ignore DACA for now. But it isn’t certain Democrats will go along. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “put Republicans on notice Tuesday that they shouldn't count on Democratic votes for a short-term funding package that includes just some of Democrats' priorities — such as children's health insurance — while leaving immigration for next year.” More from POLITICO’s Kim, Caygle and Schor here.

GOOD MORNING! It's Wednesday, Dec. 20, and this is Morning Shift, POLITICO's daily tipsheet on employment and immigration policy. Send tips, exclusives and suggestions to thesson@politico.com, ikullgren@politico.com, ahanna@politico.com and tnoah@politico.com. Follow us on Twitter at @tedhesson, @AndrewBHanna, @IanKullgren and @TimothyNoah1.

TODAY:

HOUSE TAX BILL DO-OVER: The House will vote this morning on the Republican tax plan, H.R. 1 (115), likely sending it to the president’s desk later in the day. The legislation cleared the House on Tuesday afternoon and the Senate followed suit just before 1 a.m. But some of the bill’s provisions conflicted with Senate chamber rules, which meant the bill needed to be tweaked and sent back to the House today.

The measure will be the Trump administration’s first significant legislative victory, but that doesn’t mean it’s popular. Forty-four percent of registered voters support the bill, while 35 percent oppose it, according to a Morning Consult poll released Tuesday. Read more about today’s vote here and dig into the crosstabs here.

HEARING IN CALIF DACA LAWSUIT: A federal judge in San Francisco will hear motions today related to five lawsuits that seek to enjoin the Trump administration’s decision to end the DACA program. In October, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ordered the administration to turn over records related to the decision to end the program, but the Supreme Court temporarily halted the order on Dec. 8. The hearing today deals with the plaintiffs’ motion to stop the DACA termination and the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss the suits. Among those suing over the program are University of California President Janet Napolitano, the states of California, Maine, Maryland and Minnesota, and six so-called DREAMers. The hearing begins at 11 a.m. ET (8 a.m. PT).

WORKPLACE DEATHS SPIKE: Workplace deaths hit an eight-year high in 2016, OSHA announced Tuesday. “Government fatality data show workplace deaths rose 7 percent in 2016,” reports POLITICO’s Ian Kullgren. “There was an even bigger jump in the number workplace overdose deaths, which increased by nearly a third over the previous year. The number of overdose deaths at work, including alcohol, has increased by at least 25 percent a year since 2012, according to OSHA.”

“Trump's OSHA has come under fire from worker advocates for issuing fewer press releases on workplace fatalities than Obama,” Kullgren writes. “In August, the department erased a list of workplace deaths from the homepage of its website, and said going forward it would only post deaths where a citation was issued. The Obama administration had posted every death online, regardless of whether the company was cited.” More here.

GRAIN EXPECTATIONS: OSHA reached a settlement with Bartlett Grain company on Tuesday aimed at improving the company's safety standards. The agreement requires Bartlett “to implement safeguards, training, and audit procedures at its 20 grain handling facilities in six states,” DOL said in a statement. The company will have to install fall protections for rail car workers and provide employee hazard training, among other measures. Read the settlement here.

PENN GRAD UNION EFFORT: The NLRB's reversal last week of Specialty Healthcare is already having an impact. Regional NLRB director Dennis Walsh ruled Tuesday that when University of Pennsylvania graduate students vote next year in an NLRB-directed election, they must include students from the business and engineering schools, who previously were excluded from the bargaining unit. "A unit limited to graduate student employees in the seven petitioned-for schools is not appropriate," wrote Walsh. Read the decision here.

SEXUAL HARASSMENT UPDATE:

Women employed at a pair of Ford plants in Chicago say sexual harassment has been common there for decades, Susan Chira and Catrin Einhorn report in the New York Times. “Bosses and fellow laborers treated them as property or prey,” write Chira and Einhorn. “Men crudely commented on their breasts and buttocks; graffiti of penises was carved into tables, spray-painted onto floors and scribbled onto walls. They groped women, pressed against them, simulated sex acts or masturbated in front of them. Supervisors traded better assignments for sex and punished those who refused.”

“That was a quarter-century ago,” Chira and Einhorn explain. “Today, women at those plants say they have been subjected to many of the same abuses. And like those who complained before them, they say they were mocked, dismissed, threatened and ostracized.”

“Their story reveals the stubborn persistence of harassment in an industry once the exclusive preserve of men, where abuses can be especially brazen,” the Times reports. “For the Ford women, the harassment has endured even though they work for a multinational corporation with a professional human resources operation, even though they are members of one of the country’s most powerful unions, even though a federal agency and then a federal judge sided with them, and even after independent monitors policed the factory floors for several years.” More here.

“Microsoft, one of the world’s biggest software makers, said on Tuesday that it had eliminated forced arbitration agreements with employees who make sexual harassment claims and was also supporting a proposed federal law that would widely ban such agreements,” Nick Wingfield and Jessica Silver-Greenberg report in the New York Times.

“The moves make Microsoft an early company — and certainly the most prominent — to take such steps to end legal agreements that have been criticized for helping to perpetuate sexual abuse in the workplace,” the Times reports. “The move is largely symbolic because only a minority of Microsoft workers — numbering in the hundreds in its senior ranks, according to Mr. Smith — have been subject to the requirement. Microsoft will still require those employees to take claims unrelated to harassment and gender discrimination to arbitration.” More here.

“The House of Representatives secretly paid $115,000 to settle three sexual harassment claims between 2008 and 2012,” the New York Times reports, citing an announcement Tuesday by House Administration Committee Chairman Gregg Harper (R-Miss.). “The figure includes $85,000 paid in 2010 to settle claims brought by young men who said that Representative Eric J. Massa, Democrat of New York, had groped them, according to a person familiar with that settlement.

“The figure brings to $199,000 the amount paid out of a fund controlled by Congress’s secretive Office of Compliance since 2008 to settle a total of four sexual harassment claims, under a confidential procedure that most lawmakers say they did not know existed until recently,” the Times reports. More here.

ICE PREPS FOR HIRING SURGE: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking to contract with a private sector consultant to help bring on nearly 26,000 new employees over the next several years, creating optimistic annual objectives to meet and exceed President Trump’s agenda,” Eric Katz reports in Government Executive. "The ICE request for information asks for support in bringing on 2,500 employees in the base year of the contract, beginning in March 2018. The contract would then have four option years.” President Trump signed an executive order in January that called for the hiring of 10,000 additional ICE officers “subject to the availability of appropriations” (that’s the tricky part). The agency currently employs roughly 20,000 people. Read more from Government Executive here and the RFI here.

UNEMPLOYED FACE BARRIERS TO AID: The unemployment insurance program “is in far worse shape” than when the Great Recession hit a decade ago, according to a report released Tuesday by the pro-labor National Employment Law Project. One major issue: fewer unemployed workers have received unemployment insurance, according to NELP. Just 27 percent of unemployed workers claimed the benefit in 2016, compared with 36 percent in 2007. The report identifies four factors that contribute to the decline in recipients: “deep and unprecedented benefit cuts, falling application rates, spikes in disqualifications after initial eligibility, and increases in process disqualifications.” Read the full report here.

COFFEE BREAK:

—“15 years after deportation, Marine wins right to come back to U.S.,” from the New York Times

—“White House reaches out to black Republicans for administration jobs,” from the Wall Street Journal

— “How too much focus on ‘superstar’ workers enables harassment,” from the Washington Post

—“As Trump tightens legal immigration, Canada woos tech firms,” from the New York Times

—“Corporate America’s gender gap: few women in the C-Suite,” from the New York Times

—“Why are women losing retail jobs while men are gaining them?” from the Washington Post

—“Burger King franchisee hit with child labor fine in Mass.,” from Law360

—“Somalis were shackled for nearly 48 hours on failed US deportation flight,” from the Guardian

THAT’S ALL FOR MORNING SHIFT.