Without much fanfare or public notice, Senator Barack Obama has embraced a central element of the Republican agenda: the treatment of corporate dividends.

The Justice Department will roll back a set of rules that penalized companies if they insisted on paying employees’ legal fees or protecting their confidential communications with corporate lawyers.

Corporate interests have won several victories, but trial lawyers continue to try to undo legislation restricting litigation and are pursuing new strategies of their own.

The outlook for the American worker: increasingly hostile.