Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based journalist, has covered labor and political issues for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.
Labor to Bush: Good Riddance!
By Dick Meister
With the departure of George Bush from the White House, working people and their unions have finally ended one of their toughest fights ever an eight-year struggle with the most virulently anti-labor president in American history.
Of all those bidding Bush good riddance, none have more reason than organized labor and the workers it champions. The record of Bush’s antipathy to them is truly staggering.
Consider, for starters, Bush’s appointment of a notoriously anti-union secretary of labor , Elaine Chao, and an anti-union majority to control the National Labor Relations Board.
The Bush appointees have played a major role in stripping union and civil service rights from more than a million federal employees, cutting back raises that had been due them and most others on the government payroll, and shifting thousands of unionized federal jobs to private non-union contractors.
They’ve increased the staff and budgets for investigating and auditing unions, while decreasing those for enforcing employer violations of labor standards, including those covering child labor and pay discrimination and violence against women.