GOOD-BYE, GOOD RIDDANCE--THE EIGHT YEARS OF GEORGE W. BUSH

Friday, January 9, 2009

(PAI)

GOOD-BYE, GOOD RIDDANCE--THE EIGHT YEARS OF GEORGE W. BUSH
By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

WASHINGTON (PAI)--At last year’s United Auto Workers legislative conference, union President Ron Gettelfinger was asked what the election of then-presumed GOP presidential nominee John McCain would be like for workers and unions.

His reply: McCain would be the worst possible person in the White House for workers, “except for George W. Bush.”

Gettelfinger wasn’t wrong. A review of the departing Republican ruler’s 8-year reign shows his consistent depth and breadth of hatred of workers and unions.

“The legacy of Bush, when it comes to workers, will be one of inaction and neglect,” says AFL-CIO Safety and Health Director Peg Seminario, who has been in the federation’s department, including running it, starting during the Carter administration 32 years ago. She’s being polite.

Bush’s anti-worker war started almost the day he entered the White House. He ordered cuts in construction workers’ wages by banning a project labor agreement for the multi-billion-dollar Woodrow Wilson Bridge, and all other federally funded projects.

His crusade continued through actions such as ruling millions of workers ineligi-ble for overtime pay and appointing National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) members who voted in Sept. 2006 that between 8 million and 34 million workers could be class-ified as supervisors. They would not be protected by labor law, weak as it is, at all.

And Bush’s hostility to workers and unions extended through his last days in the Oval Office, when he conditioned aid to ailing General Motors and Chrysler on a prompt 50%-plus cut in UAW members’ pay at the two automakers. UAW is resisting.

Through it all, Bush has been consistent in trying to destroy unions and wreck workers’ living standards. Federal data show he’s succeeded, at least in the latter goal: Median income in the U.S. in his reign was flat or declining for all but the top 5% of the country. Though the first Bush recession officially ended in Nov. 2001, it never really stopped for workers. The second, and worse, Bush crash started just over a year ago.

But his aim to destroy unions failed. We’re still here. Nevertheless, Bush’s anti-worker and anti-union actions are so many and varied it is often easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Yet his “forest,” making the U.S. union-free, was always there.

Evidence: Bush, then Texas governor and already pondering a run for the White House, ordered the writing of the 1998 Texas Republican platform – a document with a statement virtually calling for outlawing unions. He has never changed that stand.

Once in the presidency thanks to a Supreme Court ruling, Bush didn’t hesitate in carrying that goal out, waging constant war on workers. There are so many anti-worker Bush actions that listing them all here is impossible, but lowlights include:

* The biggest Bush anti-union push was in the federal government, where he outlawed unions at Justice Department agencies, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Transportation Security Administration’s airport screeners and, most notably at the Defense and Homeland Security departments. Almost 1 million workers, mostly at DOD and DHS, were stripped of rights.

Bush justified his federal union bans on the fake grounds that unionization threatens “national security.” He made clear he wanted to ban unions in the rest of the government, too. AFGE President John Gage warned Bush would not stop, but would move on to killing unions at the state and local levels, and then in the private sector.

To stop Bush, AFGE and other government worker unions took him to court, and lobbied the Democratic-run 110th Congress. Federal judges tossed the DHS union ban, which covered 135,000 workers, and severely circumscribed his anti-union scheme at DOD, which covered 700,000 civilian workers. Last year, Congress cut off the money for DHS’ plan. Bush’s DOD personnel system comes up for renewal in 2009.

* Bush strongly opposed collective bargaining rights for first responders – police, Fire Fighters and EMTs – even after 343 unionized New York Fire Fighters and their priest, trying to rescue others, were among the 3,000 killed by the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Bush’s GOP killed the collective bargaining rights bill on Capitol Hill. The measure is expected to pass the more pro-labor Democratic-run 111th Congress.

* Bush’s Office of Management and Budget yanked a contract signed between the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the closing days of the Clinton administration. After six years of bargaining, and some progress according to NATCA, the Bush FAA declared an “impasse” and imposed its final offer: Cuts for the most-senior controllers, a wage freeze for the rest and worsened working conditions. Controllers are retiring in droves, and the 14,000-person FAA controller workforce is now 2,000+ short, NATCA reports.

* At the behest of another Right Winger, then-Gov. James Gilmore, R-Va., Bush banned the project labor agreements, which let unions reach construction peace – and decent wages for workers – on all federal projects, starting in late Jan. 2001.

* The PLA ban wasn’t the only time Bush tried to cut construction workers’ wages. He also ordered a waiver of the Davis-Bacon Act and its prevailing wage requirements, for the massive multi-billion-dollar reconstruction needed for New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.

Pressure from the AFL-CIO Building Trades Department and moderate Republicans forced him to rescind that ban, but union construction workers lost jobs, including dozens of IBEW members who were fired in favor of non-union imports.

* Bush also suspended wage documentation rules for Katrina contractors, many of whom were politically connected and got work without competitive bidding. He dropped enforcement of job safety and health rules, despite widespread worker exposure to toxic hazards in the hurricane-smashed area. And Interfaith Worker Justice reported that 47% of the Katrina recovery workers had missed paychecks.

* After eight years of inaction – and one labor lawsuit – Bush’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) finally had to issue a job safety rule ordering firms to buy and provide personal protective equipment, such as steel-tipped shoes, safety aprons, goggles and helmets, to workers who need protection against hazards.

* The biggest category of occupational injuries is in ergonomics. The very first law Bush signed in 2001 – which he, big business and the GOP pushed – killed an OSHA rule designed to cut down on the hundreds of thousands of yearly ergonomic, or repetitive motion, injuries. Then, to add to the insult, the Bush OSHA told business they didn’t even have to count the number of ergonomic injuries any more.

The Bush-named 3-person GOP majority on the NLRB spent much of its tenure throwing workers out from under labor law protection. In a series of rulings, everyone from newspaper part-time correspondents to nurses to teaching assistants to you name them was ruled ineligible for labor law’s safeguards, as weak as they are.

The rulings also prevent those workers from unionizing.

The biggest decisions: The Sept. 2006 “nurses as supervisors” Oakwood ruling, reclassifying nurses and a wide range of other low-level workers as supervisors and deprived of labor rights, strictly for managing others as little as 15% of the time, or for having a few tenets of being a supervisor. Oakwood alone could throw between 8 million (says the Economic Policy Institute) and 34 million (according to the NLRB’s dissenters) workers out from under labor law protection.

The GOP-named majority of the Supreme Court made things worse, by saying undocumented workers were not entitled to labor law remedies such as back pay, even

where their employers broke the law in mistreating them. That same High Court bloc
also ruled that workers suffering pay discrimination by sex or race could not sue employers after their first 180 days on the job. Congress plans to overturn that ruling.

* Bush’s NLRB majority took no official position on the Employee Free Choice Act. It would help level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining. NLRB dissenter Wilma Liebman, however, made clear at congressional hearings that employers abuse the agency’s processes to thwart organizing drives.

But while the NLRB didn’t take a stand on card-check and EFCA, it did – over Liebman’s objections – make it easier for dissenting workers, who are often covertly aided by management, to get union decertification votes. The majority ruled that even simple cards, with few safeguards, were good enough for a decert. And Bush’s NLRB sided with the Chamber of Commerce against California’s neutrality law, which barred use of state funds for or against organizing drives. The High Court tossed that, too.

* Bush loves the anti-worker GOP-passed Taft-Hartley Act. He invoked it several times on the side of the nation’s airlines to prevent unionists from helping themselves during disputes over wages, benefits and working conditions. He got a Taft-Hartley injunction against the International Longshore and Warehouse Union when West Coast port managers locked it out in a contract dispute. The managers wanted troops, too.

* Bush imposed tariffs on dumped imported steel in the run-up to the 2004 election and phased them out afterwards, despite Steel Worker protests and documentation of dumping from 15 countries. Subsidized foreign imports “contributed to plant closings, bankruptcies, and lost jobs and benefits for thousands of Steel Workers,” union Vice President Tim Conway said.

* The Bush Labor Department office that administers the Landrum-Griffin Act, which mandates disclosure of union finances, imposed onerous new rules on both unions and individual unionists. The rules greatly expanded forms unions must fill out and details they must disclose, including exact figures on spending on everything from staffers‘ paychecks to boxes of paper clips, plus how unionists spend their time.

Besides the disclosures, which are far more specific than those required of corporations and their executives, the new rules cost unions untold hours of time and approximately $1 billion yearly, the AFL-CIO estimated. Their real harm? They detract time and money from what unions are supposed to do: Organize and represent workers.

But after Bush’s long anti-worker anti-union war, unions are alive. “Can we survive four more years of this?” asked then-AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson before the 2004 election, when Bush won a new term, over labor-backed Democrat John F. Kerry. The answer, even after eight years of war, is “yes.”