By Jeff Burman

Every four years American unionists are urged to throw themselves into the election efforts of Democrats, admonished with the reminder that ignorance and indifference will lead to grave consequences. The 2004 election cycle turns past admonitions into a cruel parody. President George W. Bush can be accused of many things, but in harsh counterpoint to the claims of his 2000 presidential campaign, he cannot be considered a “compassionate conservative,” nor is he “a uniter, not a divider.” Here are a few points to consider while readying for Election Day:

The Bush administration has pursued a sweeping agenda in which labor rights and protections have been rolled back.

Ergonomic protections have been reversed. Guidelines preventing bidding on government contracts by firms with labor law violations have been dropped. Strikes by dockworkers and airline workers were interfered with aggressively – with the president calling the dockworkers’ routine negotiations potential threats to national security.

Overtime protections, long taken as a bedrock of American labor law, have now been redefined, potentially stripping premium pay from millions of workers. The Bush administration has enthusiastically endorsed the benefits of global “outsourcing” and under the guise of having to respond to terrorism, formed a Homeland Security Department that has included the privatization of a large part of a previously unionized
federal work force.

The Bush administration has the worst record on employment since Herbert Hoover.

Job growth has been thrown into reverse, failing to keep pace with the minimum amount of job creation needed to compensate for population growth. Despite recent small upturns, the nation has endured month after month of stagnant or decreasing employment levels. The number of manufacturing jobs reached its lowest point in January 2004, after 42 consecutive months of losses – a feat not seen since the Great Depression. To make matters worse, the Bush administration’s tax cuts for the rich and increases in military spending have had devastating effects, choking off key social benefits that have protected and sustained generations, reaching back to President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The Bush administration has a fundamental disdain for organized labor.

President Bush refused to meet with top international union leaders when the world’s major industrial nations, known as the G8, met at a Georgia resort last June. Bush is the first U.S. president and first head of state of any nation to refuse such a meeting since the summits began in 1977. Previous G8 hosts known for their antipathy to labor, such as Italian Prime Minister Silvio Burlusconi and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, dutifully met with the international labor delegations (New York Times, July 6, 2004).

Bush is dismantling the legacy of the New Deal.

PBS journalist Bill Moyers laments that radical forces are reshaping the premises of American governance. Moyers, a former press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, was a participant in LBJ’s “War on Poverty.” He believed that the legacy of Roosevelt’s New Deal embodied the ideals of the American Dream. Moyers’ conclusions, from a speech given on June 4, 2003, are somber and dire. He saw the “progressive impulse” transform into “a crusade to resurrect social Darwinism as a moral philosophy, multinational corporations as a governing class, and the theology of markets as a transcendental belief system. …Their stated and open aim is to change how America is governed – to strip from government all its functions except those that reward their rich and privileged benefactors.” (www.truthout.org, June 12, 2003)

New York Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman agrees with Moyers, concluding that the Bush administration is attempting to undermine and eventually destroy two of the most popular American institutions created in the 20th century, Social Security and Medicare. In the forward to Krugman’s book, “The Great Unraveling,” the author characterizes President Bush’s efforts as nothing less than “revolutionary.”

Moyers and Krugman are not alone in their beliefs. George Akerlof, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, called the Bush administration “ extraordinarily irresponsible.” Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobel laureate, said that Bush’s plans were “fiscal madness, fiscal irresponsibility.” In 2002, 400 economists, led by 10 more Nobel Prize winners, took out a full-page ad in The New York Times criticizing the administration's economic policies.

Organized Labor Endorses John Kerry

“We’ve had three years of national priorities that placed the special interests of corporations and the wealthy over those of regular workers and their families,” states AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. “John Kerry will lead us in our fight to make creating good jobs America’s number one priority…to make affordable healthcare a right and not a privilege…He will fight so that we have trade that’s fair to workers here at home and fair to workers around the world.”

Tom Short, President of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, added: “The bottom line is defeating George W. Bush in November.” He also believes that a Kerry victory “will lead to the protection and maintenance of jobs, fair trade and healthcare for every working family across this nation.”

After receiving the AFL-CIO endorsement in Washington, D.C., Senator Kerry stated, “It makes no sense at all for the American taxpayer to subsidize sending our jobs overseas. We’re going to repeal every tax loophole and benefit that rewards any Benedict Arnold CEO or company for exploiting the tax code to export American jobs. We should be exporting American products, not American jobs.

“Everywhere I’ve been in this campaign, I’ve seen the wreckage of the Bush economy,” Kerry continued. “I’ve met working Americans who are getting the short end of the stick. Jobs on the run. Wages and salaries dead in the water. Healthcare unavailable and unaffordable. A sense of powerlessness – people waking up everyday worried that their job is about to disappear and a lifetime of dreams will be destroyed. I’ve met those workers over and over again. They have touched my conscience and my heart. I will never forget them. And I will be a president who fights for them.”

Kerry on the Issues

Candidate Kerry is keenly aware of President Bush’s grinding assault on organized labor as an institution and his assault on the rights and federal funding of groups that implement those rights. On Kerry’s internet site, his staff has catalogued the safety regulations, the safety enforcement programs, the job training programs, the executive orders, the budget cuts, the “voluntary guidelines,” the business lobbying, the partisan appointments, the privatizing, and the procedural reforms that have each turned government programs away from benefitting the common good.

John Kerry’s positions on a broad range of issues are available on the internet, at both the candidate’s site and the AFL-CIO site. The AFL-CIO’s tracking of Kerry’s voting record on issues considered critical to organized labor shows a lifetime record of 188 out of 207, or 91 percent since being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984. Kerry’s positions on a wide range of issues of interest to union members are described on the two websites.

Register to Vote

The 2004 presidential election will be held on November 2nd. Deadlines to register vary from state to state. If you live in California, the registration deadline is October 18th. In New York, it is October 8th.To register on the internet, the IATSE has provided a site at http://register.votenet.com/iatse/.

The Motion Picture Editors Guild, the IATSE and all of organized labor urge you to vote your interests as a union member. While you may have other political interests, your union views this election as a critical civic exercise. A collective bargaining agreement may protect you from many of the ravages of a hostile economic environment, but these advantages are always affected by the prevailing winds of the larger political environment. The current administration does not have the interests of employees close to its heart.

Set aside worthy third party campaigns. Vote your conscience and vote to protect the future of your livelihood. Exercise your most sacred civic right.

Vote.