Why labor wants President Bush ousted

In December 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Florida to stop the recount of ballots, and it became clear Texas Governor George Walker Bush was going to become the 43rd president of the United States.

John Sweeney, head of the 13-million-member AFL-CIO, made a phone call to the president-elect to congratulate him. It was the first and last time the two men spoke.

Bush has shut out organized labor as no president before in memory.

Soon after taking office, Bush — backed by a conservative Republican-controlled Senate and House — issued a series of anti-union executive orders. One barred project labor agreements on federally-funded construction projects. Another required government contractors to post notices telling workers they didn’t have to become union members. He repealed a Clinton-era rule that prevented the government from awarding contracts to businesses that have broken environmental, labor, tax or other federal laws.

Next came a series of anti-labor appointments to federal judge positions and to federal agencies, like the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

DOL is responsible for enforcing and administering numerous federal laws, including overtime, child labor and minimum wage, occupational safety and health, civil rights, laws governing union reporting requirements, laws requiring payment of the prevailing wage on federal construction projects, and laws providing benefits for dislocated workers.

To head the Labor Department, Bush first nominated Linda Chavez, a one-time assistant to the president of the American Federation of Teachers who had turned into an ardently anti-union conservative — with a syndicated column, a talk radio show, and a regular guest spot as a “political analyst” on Fox News. Best known as an opponent of affirmative action, Chavez would have been responsible for enforcing affirmative action requirements in federal contracts. Her nomination was withdrawn after it came to light that she had employed a Guatemalan maid under-the-table.

Bush next nominated Elaine Chao, the wife of anti-union Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell. Chao was a former executive at BankAmerica and Citicorp, and the daughter of the owner of a ship-building company. She had also worked as an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, where she advocated that China be treated as an economic partner, not a competitor.

Since Chao’s appointment, DOL tried to impose extensive new financial reporting requirements on unions, until a federal judge struck them down as overly burdensome. And it changed the rules on overtime by altering the definitions of managers and professionals, making as many as six million workers exempt from the requirement to pay time-and-a-half after 40 hours of work.

Bush also made anti-union appointments to the five-member NLRB, the agency that interprets and enforces the law that governs union rights in the private sector. The Bush appointees reversed two major NLRB rules. They took away the right to unionize for graduate student employees at private universities, which had been an area of fast union growth. And they ruled that non-union workers will no longer have so-called “Weingarten rights” — the right to have a co-worker present when disciplined by management.

Now, Bush’s NLRB is poised to make union “card-check” recognition illegal. Card-check is where an employer can recognize a union if a majority of employees sign authorization cards. Unions are turning to card-check because the laws have made it so difficult to win traditional union elections when employers have every advantage.

At the same time the Bush Administration was putting anti-union corporate leaders in charge of labor-related agencies, he was refusing to appoint representatives from unions to several trade negotiation advisory committees, despite the fact that it was required under a 1974 law. Only after the AFL-CIO filed a lawsuit did he make the appointments.

Where Bush had the power to intervene in labor disputes, he did — on the side of management.

When 10,000 mechanics at Northwest Airlines threatened to strike after more than four years without a union contract, Bush intervened by banning any strike for 60 days.

The Administration threatened to do the same when 23,000 American Airlines flight attendants threatened to strike after they’d been without a contract for two-and-a–half years.

When 16,000 West Coast dockworkers refused to accept management takebacks, Bush assembled a task force to look at ways the federal government could intervene, including using federal troops to keep ports open. After the employer locked out members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Bush ordered workers to return to work without a contract under an 80-day cooling-off period.

Again and again, Bush rolled back union rights for federal employees. He issued an executive order revoking union representation for workers in the Justice Department and numerous other federal police agencies.

Later, more than 1,300 workers at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency were also stripped of their right to join a union.

When Congress debated consolidating 150 federal agencies into the Department of Homeland Security, Bush threatened to veto the bill unless it contained a provision stripping 180,000 workers in the new department of civil service and collective bargaining rights. Congress granted his wish.

He denied newly federalized 60,000 baggage screeners the right to organize.

After winning passage of a $15 billion bailout package for the airlines after Sept. 11, the Administration failed to support a bill to extend unemployment benefits and provide health care assistance for over 100,000 laid-off airline workers.

Four years of direct attacks on unions aren’t the only bone union leaders have to pick. They also fault the Bush Administration for its handling of the economy, and for tax and economic policies that benefit the haves and the have-mores at the expense of the have-nots.

Bush proposed and won three separate tax-cut bills, each of which gave the biggest cuts to the richest 1 percent of Americans, and one of which eliminated taxes on stock dividends.

These cuts in taxes, coupled with massive increases in military expenditures, sent the federal budget deficit soaring. The Clinton years ended with budget surpluses. The Bush years have seen annual budget deficits of nearly half-a-trillion dollars. Total federal debt now stands at $7.4 trillion, or about $25,207 for every man, woman and child in America.

The Bush Administration signed and won approval of new North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)-style trade agreements with Chile, Singapore and Australia.

With manufacturing and other economic activities heading offshore at an accelerated pace, the trade deficit also shot up during the Bush years, to nearly half-a-trillion dollars a year.

Privatization has been a major Administration goal and numerous attempts have been made to turn government programs into opportunities for private profit making.

Early on, Bush set a quota for privatizing 850,000 jobs in the Defense Department. It won a partial privatization of Medicare with a phased-in drug benefit that pushes seniors into private plans. And the Administration has pushed but so far failed to win proposals to privatize Social Security, the U.S. Post Office and Amtrak.

At the behest of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, Bush supported and signed a Republican-sponsored bill to repeal new “ergonomics” rules that had been developed over a decade by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The rules were intended to prevent hundreds of thousands of injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome that are caused by repetitive motion, heavy-lifting and poorly-designed work. In workplaces where such injuries were a regular occurrence, employers would have been required to make changes in how jobs are structured.

Bush has not only presided over an era of corporate corruption, but many of the shadier corporate figures were close Administration associates.

Despite a wave of exposures of corporate corruption in 2001, few of those responsible were prosecuted by the Justice Department.

One of the exceptions was Enron chief executive officer Kenneth Lay, who in the early days of the Administration was one of its closest advisers on energy policy. When a handful of energy traders were manipulating prices and creating havoc in California’s deregulated electricity market, the Bush Administration delayed action by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to stop price-gouging until after the worst damage had been done.

As soon as Baghdad fell, the Bush Administration was handing out billions in no-bid reconstruction contracts to a subsidiary of anti-union Halliburton, where Vice President Dick Cheney had been CEO before joining Bush’s presidential ticket.

The Bush Administration has had the worst jobs record since President Herbert Hoover stood by during the beginning of the Great Depression. Economists say the recession began March 2001, two months into Bush’s term, and ended that fall. But no period since World War II has experienced such an extended lag between the end of a recession and the resumption of job growth.

Private sector jobs are down 1.8 million since Bush took office. Meanwhile the Administration has backed those in Congress who voted against extending unemployment benefits. The number of Americans living in poverty increased by 4.2 million over the past three years. And 3.8 million fewer Americans received health insurance from their jobs in 2003 than in 2000. 

“I think we’ve got a stark lesson in what we lose when we lose,” says Oregon AFL-CIO President Tim Nesbitt.

If Bush is re-elected, workers can expect more of the same, as Bush would likely continue to have a Republican majority in the U.S. House and Senate, a supportive Supreme Court, and no need to worry about re-election since presidents are constitutionally limited to two terms.

In the race for the Democratic nomination, John F. Kerry wasn’t labor’s top choice. Most unions backed Missouri Congressman Dick Gephardt at first; a few backed Vermont Governor Howard Dean. Only the International Association of Fire Fighters backed Kerry initially. But when it became clear Kerry would be the nominee, labor got behind him.

Aside from the fact that he’s not George W. Bush, labor has two bases for supporting Kerry: his past record, and what he says he’ll do if elected.

For his 20 years in the Senate, Kerry has a 91 percent pro-worker voting record, as tallied by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE). That makes him a reliable if not perfect ally: 14 other senators have a higher COPE rating, including Kerry’s running mate John Edwards, who has a 96 percent rating; 83 senators have a lower rating than Kerry.

Trade issues made up much of the 9 percent of the time Kerry disagreed with the AFL-CIO. Kerry voted for NAFTA, for “fast track” and for permanent normal trade relations with China.

There are some indications Kerry may have had a change of heart on trade. He didn’t cast votes on the Chile, Singapore and Australia trade treaties. And he says he would not sign the Central American Free Trade Agreement as now written and negotiated by the Bush Administration. He also says he would review all current trade treaties within the first 120 days of his administration, and that he would negotiate for labor protections in any new trade treaties.

He says he would investigate Chinese workers’ rights violations and put pressure on China to halt its currency manipulation.

The Kerry campaign is spelling out its plans for the next four years in much more detail than the Bush campaign. He pledges to:

• Raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 to $7 over two years;

• Roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, but cut taxes on 98 percent of families (those making less than $200,000) and 99 percent of tax-paying businesses;

• Pay the employer share of the payroll taxes for any net new jobs created by manufacturers or other businesses affected by outsourcing, and small businesses;

• End a tax policy that encourages outsourcing — a set of rules that allow companies to “defer” paying taxes on foreign income until they bring profits back to the United States. This would ensure that American companies be taxed on their foreign subsidiaries’ profits just like they’re taxed on domestic profits.

Kerry also pledges to “end corporate welfare as we know it.”

And his campaign has a detailed series of health care proposals that he says would insure all American children, lower employer-paid insurance premiums by having the federal government pay catastrophic health care costs, and make sure that 95 percent of Americans had as good a health care plan as the U.S. Congress. A Kerry Administration would also use bulk purchasing to lower drug prices, and would allow Americans to reimport prescription drugs from countries like Canada.

© Oregon Labor Press Publishing Co. Inc.