By John J. Sweeney
In one bold and unjust stroke, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) appointed by President Bush has invited employers to rob workers of their freedom to have a union by simply reclassifying them as “supervisors.”
The board’s decision in the lead of three cases referred to collectively as "Kentucky River" is the natural progression of an escalating attack on workers and their unions by the Bush administration and its allies in Congress. The Bush NLRB’s ruling has the potential to strip union rights from up to 8 million workers.
It is clearer now than ever that if America’s workers want to restore their hard-fought freedom to form unions and bargain collectively with their employers, we must replace our anti-worker national leadership. Now.
The recent NLRB decision was not a surprise. Bush has spent years loading the board with Republican members who share his ideology and agenda. Under Bush, the NLRB—which was designed to protect workers’ rights—has effectively eliminated the right of temporary agency workers to form unions, ruled teaching and research assistants are students rather than employees and not entitled to federal labor law protections, questioned the legality of well-established majority sign-up and neutrality procedures to form unions and supported employer efforts to use taxpayer money for anti-union campaigns. Perhaps most outrageous of all, regardless how deeply its decisions affect workers, the Bush NLRB has refused to hear oral arguments in any case since 2001.
That’s just the NLRB. Other corners of Bush’s administration intervened multiple times to disrupt bargaining by transportation workers, terminated or attempted to deny hundreds of thousands of federal employees’ their bargaining rights, worked to gut civil service protections, imposed onerous and unnecessary new reporting requirements on unions and dropped strict reporting rules for union-busting consultants and attorneys.
Our rights are in shreds thanks to six years of rule by Bush and his party’s leadership in Congress. And we will not restore those rights until we restore a pro-worker national government. When a democracy works properly, Congress exercises checks and balances and corrects errors and injustices by the executive branch. But ruled by Bush’s party, Congress has rubber-stamped the president’s anti-worker, anti-union agenda.
Even before the NLRB ruled, congressional Democrats signaled interest in correcting the damage the board has done. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), for one, said she expects congressional Democrats to give “thought to what legislative remedies are available,” including limiting funds to the NLRB to enforce the ruling.
America’s workers are going to need a strong partnership to reverse the damage the Bush administration and its allies in Congress have done in the past six years. We need to forge that partnership now through Nov. 7 by working for candidates who will work for us in Congress.
Please join the fight for working families in your community.
