By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

WASHINGTON (PAI) - Federal worker unions racked up two big wins against 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 Department of Defense workers.

The wins led the government union employees General Counsel Mark Roth to conclude: "We won. They lost. Game over."

The federal worker union wins are important for all workers because American Federation of Government Employees 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.

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.