President Bush's budget for 2004 will reflect a shortfall of $480 billion. Over nearly three years, the Bush Administration has been giving American workers the short end of the stick, too.

The slights to U.S. workers have come fast and furious during the Bush Administration. At every opportunity, the president has fought to take away nearly everything that could be helpful to the nation's workers, while going the extra step to help his friends and supporters in the business community.

Bush pledged to be a "compassionate conservative," but there hasn't been a lot of compassion in his agenda.

"Is the president living up to his promise of acting on behalf of all Americans?" asked Democratic Congressman George Miller of California, who chairs the Democratic Policy Committee. "Or is this administration, and its Republican majorities in Congress, waging unprecedented, unrelenting, unconscionable attacks aimed at stripping hard-working Americans of basic workplace rights and economic security?"

In a report released on Labor Day, called The Republican Economic Collapse and the Assault on America's Working Families, Miller suggests the president and Congress are in the attack mode on U.S. workers.

"President Bush and his Republican congressional allies are pursuing a relentless assault on the men and women still fortunate enough to have jobs," Miller wrote.

The evidence:

• Republicans are pushing a plan to eliminate overtime pay for at least eight million Americans - nurses, police, fire fighters, and more - who rely on overtime to
  make ends meet, and allow employers to implement a system of providing compensatory time off instead of paying time-and-a-half for overtime. When that comp time could be taken would be up to the employer. The measure has passed the House, but not the Senate.
• Republicans have refused to approve an increase in the minimum wage, the value of which is 24 percent lower today than it was in 1979.
• Republicans have refused to grant extended federal unemployment benefits to millions of laid-off workers.
• More than two years after the Enron and WorldCom scandals, Republicans still refuse to take responsible steps to protect the pensions and retirement accounts of millions of Americans. On the contrary, the Bush Administration wants to change the rules and let companies unilaterally slash as much as 50 percent of the pension benefits of millions of workers by switching to "cash balance" pension plans.

House Republicans repeatedly rejected Democratic efforts to give employees the choice of retirement plans based on their personal needs.

In addition, Republican leadership won't let Congress vote on whether employees should have more control over their own retirement savings, or whether to give employees greater protection against corporate fraud and abuse. Republicans have repeatedly blocked a Democratic plan to stop giving corporate executives special financial protection for their investments when their company fails.

• With the exception of a federal lawsuit against Enron, the federal government has taken no action to recover hundreds of millions in lost employees' 401k investment money, squandered in accounting scandals by the likes of WorldCom, Lucent Technologies, Qwest, Tyco, and Global Crossing.
• Members of the House Republican leadership recently introduced legislation (H.R. 2672) to repeal the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires firms that receive federal funds for construction projects to pay the prevailing wage level in the community. This provision protects millions of workers from having their wages undercut by low-balling contractors who hire underpaid workers.
• One of the first acts of the new Bush Administration was to overturn safeguards designed to prevent the country's leading workplace hazard: ergonomic injuries. But that was just a start. The Bush Administration has stopped action on 30 safety initiatives, and canceled workplace safety and health grants.

Throw in Bush's ardent support of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the push to implement new book-keeping rules on unions that could cost $1 billion a year to comply with, and the repeal of Clinton Administration rules that required companies who want to do business with the federal government to have a solid track record of employee health and safety - and there's an evident pattern of abuse against the nation's workers.

"The AFL-CIO is a block from the White House. It might as well be in Omaha, Neb., in terms of its access," said Harley Shaiken, a professor of labor and politics at the University of California at Berkeley. "Labor feels frozen out. Their agenda is not the agenda of this administration."