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President Bush: Hardly a bystander in war on workers

Date Posted: August 20 2004

For America’s working families, the stakes in this fall’s presidential elections are the greatest of a lifetime, and the outcome of the election may well determine the shape of basic economic and social protections and benefits for decades.

That is why the American labor movement is launching its largest mobilization ever, with the goal of electing a president who will put the needs and interests of America’s working families first.

The labor movement knows – firsthand – that George W. Bush is not the person for the job. Already, President Bush has presided over the greatest sustained jobs loss since the Great Depression. Our manufacturing sector has been decimated. Under Bush, we have lost more manufacturing jobs than in the entire 22 years before he took office. Real incomes have fallen, the ranks of the uninsured have grown by nearly five million, and three million more Americans have slipped into poverty.

President Bush has not been a mere bystander in the decline in fortunes for America’s workers and their families – he has been an active participant in the deterioration of jobs and working conditions. Among other things, Mr. Bush and his appointees have:

  • Dictated the largest take-away of overtime pay rights in the history of the nation’s wage and hour law and have refused to support an increase in the minimum wage.
  • Led an all-out assault on the collective bargaining rights of America’s workers, intervening preemptively in airline disputes, rolling back civil service and bargaining guarantees for numerous federal employees, reversing legal precedents and siding with employers in efforts to undermine the freedom to form unions.
  • Pursued trade and tax policies that promote and reward the off-shoring of good American jobs.
  • Cut funds and staff for job training and worker protection programs while increasing funds and staff to audit and prosecute unions and eliminated reporting requirements for union-busting consultants while imposing onerous new requirements on unions.
  • Converted the huge budget surplus they inherited from President Clinton into an equally huge budget deficit, a breathtaking $10 trillion turnaround in just three years that chokes our capacity to make needed investments and will saddle our children with mountains of debt.

In addition, the president has proposed an even more drastic rewrite of the nation’s overtime laws, allowing employers to replace guaranteed overtime pay with comp time. He is touting private accounts under Social Security, threatening further depletion of the trust fund and further economic uncertainty for retirees.

His only remedy for the nation’s devastating health care crisis is his implementation of highly questionable tax breaks. He has pledged to make his budget-busting and grossly inequitable millionaire tax cuts permanent. And his long-term budget plans contemplate steep future cuts in domestic programs.

In contrast, John Kerry’s entire political career has been marked by his support and advocacy for America’s workers and their families. That’s why the AFL-CIO has endorsed the Kerry-Edwards ticket, and that’s why America’s unions are more unified than ever before in seeking the election of these two friends of working families.

The American labor movement is mounting a massive grass roots effort to elect the Kerry-Edwards team and to win a worker-friendly Congress. The federation will jumpstart its fall campaign with a member-to-member march in key electoral states, including Michigan, in the hours before the president accepts his party’s nomination on Thursday, Sept. 2.

That evening, thousands of union members will knock on the doors of hundreds of thousands more, making sure union members know what’s at stake in this election, what four more years of George W. Bush will do to working families, and what must be done to elect John Kerry President of the United States.