In seeking to privatize the jobs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, the Bush administration aims to give the work to Big Business—while putting the nation’s safety at risk.
By Mike Hall
Throughout most of the Boston Control Air Route Traffic Control Center on Sept. 11, 2001, “there was chaos and pandemonium” recalls air traffic controller Tom Roberts.
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| | | Safety at risk: On Sept. 11, 2001, NATCA members brought some 5,000 commercial flights safely to the ground in just two hours, but the Bush administration wants to privatize federal air traffic controllers’ jobs. |
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“But on the control room floor, it was extremely businesslike. We immediately took action to get everybody on the ground. On their own, air traffic controllers started alerting flight crews not to let anybody in the cockpit, to take precautions and to land wherever we told them. With the cooperation of our peers in the cockpits and flight attendants, it worked,” says Roberts.
In two hours, the federal air traffic controllers at Boston center, who each day direct thousands of planes in the nation’s northeastern air space, and air traffic controllers at the nation’s other air route traffic centers, airport control towers and radar approach facilities safely guided some 5,000 airplanes to the ground.
“People performed at such a very high level of competency and professionalism. It was one our darkest hours, but one of the proudest I’ve ever had in my career—to be part of a group of workers who rose to a challenge that was unprecedented,” says Roberts, president of National Air Traffic Controllers Association Local ZBW.
President George W. Bush also has something unprecedented in mind: He wants to privatize the jobs of Roberts and more than 15,000 other federal air traffic controllers and turn them over to the lowest bidder. The move to farm out the nation’s air traffic control system to Big Business is just one part of Bush’s drive to enact a long-term core element of the corporate agenda—privatization of essential government services and jobs. After Republicans won control of Congress with the so-called Gingrich revolution in 1994, the Cato Institute, an ultraconservative think tank with strong ties to the Bush administration, urged Congress to privatize the air traffic control system, all federal energy enterprises, Amtrak, the U.S. Postal Service and more federal services and jobs.
Almost 10 years later, Bush has targeted some 850,000 federal jobs for privatization, including food inspectors, immigration workers, law enforcement personnel, Veterans Administration health care workers, Social Security employees and more, according to AFGE, which represents federal employees.
Following Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts of $1.63 trillion, which mostly benefited the wealthiest taxpayers, AFGE President John Gage says the “Bush administration’s effort to privatize half of our government’s workforce has nothing to do with saving money or improving services. It’s all about political payoffs for well-connected campaign contributors.”
As Sarah Lawrence College government professor Priscilla Murolo points out, federal workers work for America’s taxpayers and should not be turned into some bottom-line asset for corporations.
 | Slowing the Rush Toward Privatization | |
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| |  | | | Corporate payback: AFGE President John Gage says the Bush administration’s privatization plans are all about “political payoffs for well-connected campaign contributors.” |
In a move to speed privatization of the federal workforce, the Bush administration pushed hard for a change in the rules that govern contracting out. The new Bush-backed rules issued in May give contractors “an unfair advantage in the process,” AFGE President Gage says. An AFGE report calls the new rules a “radical privatization scheme that fails to take into account the actual cost of the contractors, exacerbates the ‘human capital crisis,’ hurts taxpayers by giving work to contractors without any public–private competition, uses public–private competition only on work performed by federal employees [and not work performed by contractors] and undercuts workers on wages and benefits.” Charles Teifer, professor of government contracts at the University of Baltimore School of Law, says the rule changes Bush is seeking “could be the instrument to privatize new realms of federal services from the Internal Revenue Service collections to the Federal Protective Service and the federal prison system.” On Sept. 9, after months of intense mobilization that involved rallies and marches by members of government workers’ unions and their community allies and tens of thousands of phone calls and e-mails to lawmakers, the House of Representatives voted to block the new rules. The vote was on an amendment to the Treasury and Transportation departments appropriations bill. As of mid-October, final action had not been taken, but the Bush administration has threatened to veto the bill.
In October, the Economic Policy Institute released a report, Show Me the Money, that counters the Bush administration’s claims that privatizing federal jobs and services would achieve significant savings. The report finds when savings are attained through privatization, they are not returned to taxpayers—they turn into corporate profits. In addition, costs often exceed agreed-upon bids, even taking into account some expansion of the work to be performed. Further, the report finds savings could be achieved at lower cost with workplace restructuring under current law and regulations. Finally, contractors that fail to replace health insurance enjoyed by public employees could be adding to taxpayer costs. (Visit to read the entire report.) |
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“In the United States, government is supposed to belong to the people. The civil service jobs he aims to outsource are not his to give away. They belong to the republic—to the people. To hand them over to corporations is just plain thievery, and the crime injures not just federal employees, but all working people—all of us who count on public services and everyone who cares about democracy,” she said at a town hall meeting organized by community activists in Washington, D.C., May 27.
In fact, some $125 billion a year in federal services already is contracted-out to private corporations. And if Bush’s high-pressure drive to hand over government jobs to corporations prevails, Murolo and other experts say the same culture of greed that fueled the scandals and cost the jobs and retirement security of hundreds of thousand of workers at Enron Corp., WorldCom and other corporations will be running even more of the nation’s government services.
Bush contends his plan to privatize more government services would simply ensure fair competition for the work—but union leaders say true competition is not the administration’s goal.
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“AFGE has never opposed public–private competition as long as federal employees are provided a fair and level playing field,” says Gage. “Unfortunately, the Bush administration has seen fit to redo the rules, giving contractors an unfair advantage in the process.”
Just this spring, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former firm, Halliburton Inc., won a nearly $2 billion contract for reconstruction work in Iraq without any competitive bidding.
While Bush claims increased efficiency and lower costs are his main goals, in March 2002 he signed an executive order—not made public until December—that lifted a ban on cash bonus awards to political appointees in political patronage jobs. The 2,100 high-level patronage appointees eligible for the $25 million in awards are many of the same people who can recommend and even decide what government work is awarded to corporations.
In an interview in the May 12 New Yorker magazine, Karl Rove, Bush’s senior political advisor, laid out another reason why the Bush administration has put federal workers on their hit list.
“Bigger government strengthens the Democratic Party,” he said, adding, “It generates federal employees who will mostly vote Democratic....Conversely, smaller government helps the Republicans.”
Passenger safety at stake
Twice in 2003, Congress voted against Bush’s drive to privatize the nation’s air traffic control system. But the Bush administration pressured negotiators working out the final details to slip in a back-room addition to replace Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) air traffic controllers in 69 control towers with part-time contract workers and open up the entire system to privatization by 2007. The action took place during deliberation on the FAA reauthorization bill.
A privatized air traffic control system has been tried elsewhere—and the results for passengers weren’t good. After Great Britain privatized its air traffic control system, the number of serious in-flight incidents involving passenger planes doubled, flight delays jumped drastically and the government had to step back in to bail out the cash-strapped system, according to NATCA.
“Our air traffic control system is the world’s poster child for safety. We’re not out there trying to make a dollar for the boss. That’s not our bottom line. Safety is,” controller Roberts says.
After the Bush administration swung open the door to privatization, NATCA, the Professional Airways Systems Specialists—whose members install, maintain, inspect and certify air traffic control equipment—and the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department launched a Fly Safe campaign. The campaign includes grassroots mobilization and radio and television ads to mobilize members and the public to lobby lawmakers to defeat privatization and fight Bush’s threat to veto the bill if it does not include his provisions to auction off the nation’s air traffic control system. (To join the fight for safe airways, call 1-866-I-FLY-SAFE [1-866-435-9723] or visit www.unionvoice.org/campaign/ATCsafety to urge your U.S. senators and representative to oppose privatizing the nation’s air traffic control system.)
| Amtrak and Postal Service Workers Fight Bush-Backed Attacks | |
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| |  | | | SOS: Postal Workers rallied in Detroit last summer, seeking to keep the U.S. Postal Service out of the hands of contractors. |
Also targeted for privatization by the Bush administration and its corporate allies are Amtrak and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), two semi-independent corporations with federal supervision and financial support. The jobs of some 20,000 Amtrak workers are up for grabs under a plan the Bush administration unveiled in July that would turn over Amtrak’s most popular routes in the Northeast to the states, wipe out federal support and begin privatization of other Amtrak routes nationwide. The Bush plan “is a death knell for passenger rail in this country and the triumph of ideology over the needs of the American people,” says Sonny Hall, president of the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department. Other countries’ attempts to privatize rail service should serve as a warning to the Bush administration, says a study by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. “In Britain, the privatization has turned out to be so disastrous that government has moved away from the original privatized model back toward a more highly regu-
lated government structure,” the report says. In July, the president’s Commission on the U.S. Postal Service issued a report endorsing large-scale privatization and outsourcing of mail processing, retail services, transportation and motor vehicle maintenance. The commission’s proposal also poses a threat to workers’ rights, says Postal Workers President William Burrus. Its report recommends that a politically appointed board have the unilateral authority to set and impose wages and even reduce current pay, with no collective bargaining input for workers and their unions. It also calls for the elimination of current USPS rules that protect against cutting benefits. “They say they favor collective bargaining, but they adopted a list of recommendations that would destroy it,” he says. “It would have been more honest if they had just said the Postal Service should not have collective bargaining at all.” The Letter Carriers “will fight this appalling proposal with everything we have. Free unions and independent collective bargaining are non-negotiable,” says NALC President William Young. |
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Food safety at risk
Jay Wilson inspects some 200,000 pounds of fish each month. Based at a major inland fish and seafood processing center near Pittsburgh, Pa., Wilson is one of 180 federal seafood inspectors who ensure seafood processed by some 2,500 companies is safe. The inspectors’ jobs were put on the privatization chopping block by the Bush administration this past spring, a move that generated so much controversy the Bush administration was forced to back down.
“I’ve got 14 years in food safety, a degree in biology—just like most federal seafood inspectors. The public expects that. I don’t think they’d be real happy with Joe’s Seafood Inspection Service from down the road,” says Wilson, president of AFGE Local 2594.
The nation’s seafood inspection system is voluntary for seafood processors, who pay a fee to the government for the inspection. “We cost the taxpayers zero dollars,” Wilson explains.
But the Bush administration’s Department of Commerce, which oversees the Seafood Inspection Program (SIP), determined ensuring seafood safety is not a governmental function and should be turned over to private, for-profit companies.
“With the government’s own acknowledgment of the threat of bioterrorism to the nation’s food chain, the position that our function is not inherently governmental is ludicrous,” Wilson says.
So ludicrous in fact, that at AFGE’s urging, a bipartisan group of 39 senators and representatives wrote U.S. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, calling on him to halt the privatization of SIP. The lawmakers noted groups as diverse as students in school lunch programs and U.S. military personnel benefit from federal seafood inspections.
“Without a reasonable system assuring the safety of our seafood supply, the risk of serious illness and even death because of the consumption of tainted seafood, as well as the presence of adulterated or mislabeled seafood, would be substantially increased. It is difficult to understand how this key public function can be considered nongovernmental,” they wrote.
On July 17, the Commerce Department reversed its decision to privatize the program.
| Collective Bargaining Under Attack | |
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Along with its efforts to privatize jobs across the board, the Bush administration is rushing headlong to strip civil service rights and collective bargaining rights from many federal workers. Under a plan pushed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, some 700,000 Department of Defense workers could lose their workplace rights. The changes in the department’s personnel system would allow the Secretary of Defense to decide whether department workers have collective bargaining rights, the right to join a union, due process and appeal rights. It would even allow Rumsfeld and his successors to implement a new pay system giving supervisors the power to determine if workers get raises. In September, Defense Department workers across the country joined a grassroots campaign to build public opposition to the plan, concluding with a national call-in day to Congress urging lawmakers to scrap the Rumsfeld plan, which is now part of the fiscal year 2004 Defense Authorization bill. “This a chance to turn back the war this administration is waging against the federal civilian workforce,” AFGE President John Gage says of the drive to stop the plan. Bush is waging that war on several fronts. Last year Bush took away civil service protections and collective bargaining rights of 170,000 workers in the newly created Department of Homeland Security and allowed the head of the new federal Transportation Security Administration to ban its 60,000 workers from exercising their freedom to join a union. In September, AFGE appealed a federal judge’s ruling upholding the security administration’s action, and that case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In February, the Bush administration took union representation from 1,000 workers at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. In January 2002, Bush issued an executive order revoking the union representation for workers in the Justice Department’s U.S. attorney’s offices, the Criminal Division, the U.S. National Central Bureau of Inerpol, the National Drug Intelligence Center and the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. “Collective bargaining rights are in jeopardy for all federal workers whose jobs are subject to outsourcing,” says Sarah Lawrence College government professor Priscilla Murolo. “Given the outrageous union-busting at the Department of Homeland Security, no one can doubt that Bush appointees are likely to favor outsourcing bids from nonunion firms or firms in engaged in union-busting.” Even jobs not yet created are under the gun: The House this summer passed a Medicare prescription drug bill that would take away the civil service and pay scale protections of workers hired to administer the prescription drug program. |
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Contracting out national security
Preventing terrorists from slipping into the United States and acquiring important identification and other documents is one of the most vital duties of the 1,100 Immigration Information Officers (IIOs), says Charles Showalter, vice president of AFGE Council 117.
The council represents IIOs and other workers in what was formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Service but now is part of the Department of Homeland Security’s Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. The IIO workers have been targeted for privatization.
“These people can spot a fraud at 100 paces,” Showalter says about the workers who interview immigrants, review their documents for possible fraud and indications of illegal activity, conduct criminal background checks and process residency, work, school and other applications for immigrants and their families.
“If you are contracting out these jobs, you’re contracting out national security,” he says. In fact, contracting out such critical jobs to low-wage and even minimum-wage workers can lead to disastrous consequences—as it did when the government contracted out student visa processing.
A private company, ACS Inc., processed the student visas for Sept. 11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, who piloted planes into the World Trade Center, CNN reported on March 13. @
