Our Anti-Labor President

By: Dick Meister

It's hard to imagine any civil right more important to Americans than having an effective voice in setting their pay and working conditions. Yet President Bush has denied union rights to some federal employees and curtailed their use by many others.

Bush claims to be acting in the interest of national security. But it's actually part of what's been a major attack by Bush and his Republican colleagues on unions, which are among the Democrats' chief supporters. The GOP is especially eager to weaken public employee unions, the strongest segment of today's labor movement.

Admiral James Loy, head of the Transportation Security Agency, launched the latest anti-labor attack with an order that denied union rights to the 56,000 federalized screeners at the country's airports.

Screeners at San Francisco International Airport are temporarily exempted because they work for a private firm as a pilot project. But screeners virtually everywhere else are affected, including those at the Oakland and San Jose airports.

Loy asserted that: "Collective bargaining conflicts with national security."

That, of course, is pretty much what Republicans were saying back in the 1930's in opposing passage of the Wagner Act that guaranteed union rights to most U.S. workers as essential to national security.

What's being done to screeners is only a very small part of the administration's assault on union and civil service rights. Bush, for example, got the authority he sought from Congress to operate the new Homeland Security Department with almost no regard for the labor laws and the protections they provide workers.

Among his other anti-labor acts, Bush revoked the union rights and union contracts of several thousand employees of the Justice Department's Criminal Division and of all U.S. Attorneys' offices nationwide.

He's even replaced all seven members of the mediation panel that is the last resort for federal employees who've reached an impasse in bargaining with their agency bosses.

This is not to mention the President's cutback of raises due rank-and-file federal employees, while granting bonuses of up to $25,000 each to several thousand of his other political appointees.

Certainly no one could now possibly believe that Bush and his Republican cohorts are sincere in the praise for firefighters, police, construction workers, and other unionized workers and public employees they've been spouting repeatedly since Sept. 11, 2001.