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FEDERAL WORKERS UNIONS VS. BUSH: 'WE WON. THEY LOST. GAME OVER.'

(PAI)FEDERAL WORKERS UNIONS VS. BUSH:  ‘WE WON.  THEY LOST.  GAME OVER.’
By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

WASHINGTON (PAI)--Federal worker unions racked up two
big wins against anti-worker GOP President George W.
Bush after his regime, on Feb. 18, gave up its
long-running attempt to impose new anti-worker
personnel rules on the 135,000 employees at the
Department of Homeland Security--and when Congress
earlier dumped his similar scheme for 700,000 Defense
Department workers.

The wins put paid to what AFGE General Counsel Mark
Roth called “the Heritage Foundation agenda” to
denigrate federal workers and to destroy worker
protections.   Of Bush’s plan, adopted from the Right
Wing think tank’s treatises, Roth said: “We won.  They
lost.  Game over.”

The federal worker union wins are important for all
workers because AFGE President John Gage previously
said that if Bush won at the two big federal agencies,
he would try to extend the anti-worker personnel rules
to other federal agencies, then state and local
government workers and then to the private sector.

In both DOD and the Homeland Security Department, the
Bush rules stripped workers of union rights,
whistleblower protections, pay based on objective
standards, and appeal rights, among other things.  Pay
and promotions would have been decided by presidential
political appointees, and appeals of discipline
rulings against DOD workers would have gone to a
stacked board appointed by the Defense Secretary.

But all that was overturned in the defense bill Bush
signed earlier this year, so the unions dropped their
Supreme Court appeal against Bush’s DOD plan.

The Bush surrender on the DHS suit was unexpected,
Roth told Press Associates Union News Service.  The
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for D.C., which had
ruled against Bush on the DHS rules, had scheduled a
“status conference” to see if Bush would take the case
one step further, to the High Court.

But in their Feb. 18 letter to the D.C. court, the
Bush officials said the conference was unneeded.  “We
think it (the case) can be closed because we have no
intention of going forward on implementing the labor
regulations,” Roth read from the letter.  He said the
unions believe the Bush regime “saw which way the wind
was blowing” on Capitol Hill when lawmakers passed the
defense bill, halting the personnel scheme in its
tracks. 

Not only that, but in each of the last three years,
Bush asked Congress--under GOP control in the first
two--for $100 million yearly to implement his
personnel plans.

He didn’t get it: The two GOP-run sessions cut the
funds to $50 million, then $30 million.  For this
year, the Democratic-run Congress gave Bush $10
million.

“That led them (the Bush officials) to believe that
if they fought this in court, the same thing would
happen” to their DHS plans in Congress, Roth added.

There are two vestiges of Bush’s anti-worker
personnel schemes, both at DOD.  One is that he was
able to put it into effect for 11,000 managers and
69,000 other workers not covered by union
jurisdiction.  The other is a “heavily modified
pay-for-performance” scheme, Roth said.

“It’s there, but there are a lot of safeguards and we
can bargain a lot of things around the edges,” he
added.  Pay-for-performance never began at DHS, Roth
said.

And Roth said the Bush regime’s anti-union
anti-worker personnel schemes also again showed “the
law of unintended consequences.”  Alarmed federal
workers, seeing their jobs threatened, have joined
AFGE in droves, increasing its membership in each of
Bush’s seven years in office, including 6,000 more
last year alone.   “That’s probably the opposite
effect of what they (Bush officials) intended,” Roth
concluded.
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