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Rhethoric vs. Reality
By Jane Birnbaum
Rhetoric vs. Reality
President Bush has promised much. What has he delivered? |  | “When America works, America prospers, so my economic security plan can be summed up in one word: Jobs.”
State of the Union Address, January 2002
“…we’ve got a domestic agenda that is positive and strong and hopeful and optimistic.”
Address to GOP House and Senate members, Feb. 9, 2003, West Virginia retreat | |  |
Reality
Since Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address, more than 668,000 Americans have joined the unemployment rolls—today, 10 million unemployed workers want jobs but cannot find them. That 10 million includes 1.7 million who had been without work for 27 weeks or longer as of January 2003, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Economic Policy Institute economist Lawrence Mishel notes Bush’s “Jobs and Growth” plan enriches the wealthy while resulting in another 750,000 million lost jobs over the coming decade because of insufficient economic growth.
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| | | “Our budget will run a deficit that will be small and short term….”
State of the Union Address, January 2002 | | |
RealityAccording to the House Budget Committee, the 2003 federal budget deficit will reach $400 billion if Bush’s tax cuts go into effect and war with Iraq costs tens of billions of dollars. Says David Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s: “We’ll probably have annual budget deficits for as long as I live—if the budget isn’t back in balance by 2010, when babyboomers start retiring in great numbers, it never will be.”
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| | | “We must work toward a system in which all Americans have a good insurance policy, choose their own doctors and seniors and low-income Americans receive the help they need.”
State of the Union Address, January 2003 | | |
RealityAccording to the House Budget Committee, the 2003 federal budget deficit will reach $400 billion if Bush’s tax cuts go into effect and war with Iraq costs tens of billions of dollars. Says David Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s: “We’ll probably have annual budget deficits for as long as I live—if the budget isn’t back in balance by 2010, when babyboomers start retiring in great numbers, it never will be.”
| | | | | | | | | | | RealityResponding to the American steel industry crisis in 2002, Bush imposed high tariffs on imported steel. But since then, he has exempted about 95 percent of such products from the tariffs. He also supported congressional Republicans when they held up action on a bill that would have paid retired steelworkers’ health benefits. Along with the trade imbalance, retiree health costs are a major factor in the 35 steel industry bankruptcies since 1997. And under the Bush administration, the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. has intervened to make sure some steelworkers can’t receive negotiated benefit protections that kick in when plants shut down.
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“Passing these tax cuts will worsen the long-term budget outlook, adding to the nation's projected chronic deficits.” | | | | | — From a Feb. 11, 2003, statement signed by 450 U.S. economists including 10 Nobel laureates. |
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| | | | |  | | | | Theresa Gerhardt, a Machinists Local 2063 member, grew up in Galesburg, Ill., and started work at the local Maytag refrigerator plant after graduating from high school 19 years ago. Now that Maytag has announced it’s closing the plant in a few years, she and her husband Brian, also a Maytag assembler and Machinist, have sold their home and are looking nationwide for manufacturing jobs to support their family of four teenagers. “I’ve never lived anywhere but Galesburg—all my family is here,” she says. “But we have no choice. We have to go wherever there’s work, somewhere we can make a decent living.” |
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Choice For Working Families | | | | | With the $951 billion President George W. Bush has proposed in tax cuts over the next 10 years mostly for the very wealthy, the nation could: | | Add enough to his Medicare drug benefit proposal to make it meaningful | $400 billion | | Repair and modernize crumbling public schools over three to five years | $200 billion | | Provide all workers a one-time tax rebate equal to 3.5 percent of their first $15,000 of earnings in 2002 | $65 billion | | Provide one year of publicly funded universal preschool for 8.3 million children ages 3 to 5 not yet enrolled in kindergarten | $35 billion |
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| | | And still have $251 billion left over to strength Social Security for future generations. | |
| | | | |  | | | | Mark Gibson,a Navy veteran, was an AFGE member and federal civil servant for 29 years until the facilities management work performed by Gibson and 404 federal workers at Fort McCoy, Wis., was privatized in 2002. The contract went to a British-owned firm. Some workers were offered their jobs, but with fewer benefits and lower wages. “The people who lose their jobs are the folks who were buying houses, boats and snow mobiles, putting money and taxes into the community, supporting the schools. These are people who have devoted the best years of their lives to pubic service. Now they’ve got to get a job at Wal-Mart where they’re treated like second-class citizens.” |
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The Rich Get Richer | | | | President Bush wants to eliminate the federal income tax on stock dividends—profits that corporations sometimes pay to stockholders—and hike the amount of retirement savings the rich can shelter from taxes.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, nearly two-thirds of his proposed tax breaks would go to the wealthiest 5 percent of households—the richest Americans—because they own most stocks. |
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| | | | |  | | | | Oteula Allen,a hotel housekeeper and Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Local 1 member in Chicago, has had to cut her work schedule to four days a week following knee surgery. “Things are rough from paycheck to paycheck,” she says. “With the minimum wages I make, I can hardly afford medical bills plus food and the rent.” |
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| | Reality
In late 2002, Bush pushed for and won legislation that allows the new Department of Homeland Security Department to strip its workers of collective bargaining rights. This destruction of workers’ rights is already under way. This year, the director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, where workers combine map and chart information with material provided by intelligence sources, terminated the bargaining and civil service rights of more than 1,000 AFGE members. And the new Transportation Security Administration has moved to deny a voice at work to airport screeners for whom AFGE is assisting in winning a voice at work.
 Learn More:
Another Threat to National Security
Unable to join unions, airport screeners endure long workweeks and unsafe working conditions—with dangerous implications for passenger safety
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| | | RealityIn his first days in office, Bush issued four anti-worker, anti-union executive orders sought by corporate contributors. The orders ended job retention protections covering “working poor” employees—largely immigrants and women—employed by service contractors in federal buildings; abolished labor–management partnerships that serve the federal government and hundreds of thousands of federal workers; effectively barred project labor agreements on federally funded construction projects; and required government contractors to post notices telling employees they cannot be required to become union members and may object to paying the portion of agency fees not related to collective bargaining.
And in early February 2003, the Bush administration endorsed legislation changing the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act—which established the 40-hour workweek—so employers could give hourly workers compensatory time rather than time-and-a-half pay, as the law currently requires. The overtime pay requirement is the only protection workers have against excessive hours, and many depend on overtime pay to make ends meet. | | |
| | RealityThe Bush White House supported a bill passed by the House of Representatives in April 2002 that protected executives more than workers. The bill scaled back rules requiring pension plans to meet specific tests that imposed balance between benefits for lower-paid and higher-paid workers to qualify for favorable tax status; eliminated a key worker protection barring mutual funds, insurance companies and banks from giving workers investment advice on products the company sells and earns fees from; and did not limit the amount of employer stock in 401(k)s. The Senate did not pass a bill in 2002, and workers still are waiting for genuine retirement security protection.
| | | | RealityIn January 2002, the adminis- tration promised $3.5 billion in homeland security funds to first responders—fire fighters, police and emergency medical personnel at the local level—for training and equipment to help prepare for terrorist attacks. In February 2003, the Republican-controlled Congress, working closely with the White House, finally approved a 2003 fiscal year appropriation that included $3.5 billion for homeland security.
But only $1.3 billion was dedicated to local governments to fight terrorism, and nothing was earmarked for new hiring—even though two-thirds of the nation’s fire departments are understaffed, according to the Fire Fighters and the U.S. Fire Administration. With deficit-stricken states unable to assist municipalities with homeland defense, many large police and fire departments say they have been forced to postpone the purchase of protective suits, biochemical detectors and communications equipment that would be used to respond to a terrorist attack. And a recent National League of Cities survey of 322 cities finds that 25 percent are cutting the ranks of their police forces or plan to shortly for economic reasons.
Within weeks of Congress approving the 2003 fiscal year budget, relations between the White House and the nation’s governors were so strained that by late February, President Bush resorted to pretending that the White House had not been intimately involved in the appropriations process. He actually told the National Governors Association, meeting in Washington, D.C., that the GOP-controlled Congress was to blame for shortchanging local homeland security. The president hasn’t yet similarly explained his 2004 budget plan proposed earlier this year, which cuts direct federal grants to fire departments by $250 million, a full one-third, and is so vague on other details that first responders fear more shortfalls.
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| | | RealityThe Congressional Budget Office reported as early as August 2001 that Bush was set to tap the Social Security Trust Fund. In August 2002, the Democratic staff of the House Budget Committee found that over the next decade, “the Bush administration will be diverting at least $2 trillion from the Social Security Trust Fund to pay for general operations of the government.”
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| | |  | | | | Tom McEachin, president of Fire Fighters Local 1619 in Bowie, Md., says firefighters and paramedics across the country are committed to doing whatever is necessary to protect U.S. citizens against terrorist attacks—even if it means risking their lives. But first responders “need the proper training, equipment and staffing to do our job. The administration has promised $3.5 billion in federal homeland security money for first responders, but we haven't seen anything yet.” |
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From America@work, April 2003. |
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| | | | |  | | | | Garland Akers,Springfield, Ill.-based Laborers Local 477 member, and his wife are holding off buying a home and having a child because of concern about the rising cost of health coverage and the uncertainty of future work. “Everyone says you have to spend money to keep the economy moving,” he says, “but we’re afraid to create a problem and lose everything we have.” |
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America's Future Left Behind | | | | President George W. Bush’s fiscal year 2004 budget proposal cuts the early childhood federal education program Even Start by 12 percent and takes a whopping 40 percent from after-school 21st Century Learning Centers. And in the 2003 budget, Congress slashed more than $300 million in funding for youth employment and job training programs.
These cuts can only worsen the findings of Left Behind in the Labor Market, a new report from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, Mass., that finds nearly 5.5 million Americans age 16 to 24 were neither in school nor holding down jobs in 2002—a 12 percent increase over 2000.
These jobless, out-of-school youths are in danger of being “permanently left behind,” says Andrew Sum, the center’s director. “Our ability to generate family stability and safe communities is strongly influenced by this.”
The result will be increased social ills, especially for the nation’s 10 largest cities, where unemployed and less-educated youths tend to live. Young Americans of color appear hardest hit by the jobless economy: One in four African Americans and one in five Latinos between 16 and 24 are out of school and without jobs, the study found. |
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| | | | |  | | | | Ken Weaver, a member of AFSCME Local 758 in Madison, Wis., is a state highway projects inspector with 23 years of experience. He’s concerned not only about losing his job to privatization, but also the quality of work done by contract inspectors: “It’s only a matter of time until they mess up a bridge or do something that creates a public safety concern,” he says. |
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