Labor Department takes aim at unions

Part of the mission statement of the U.S. Department of Labor is to promote workers’ “welfare” and strengthen “free collective bargaining.” This language was wrested out of the government in earlier periods of labor militancy.

But more and more in recent years, the DOL has turned that topsy-turvy. It has devised a variety of weapons—all paid for by workers’ tax dollars—to defend the bosses, attack workers’ rights, and harass, penalize and impede union organizing.

Since 2001 when Bush took office, the numbers of DOL staff assigned to prosecute employer violations of laws on occupational safety, enforce the right to organize and labor standards on such things as child labor, minimum wage and overtime, have been significantly reduced. That sends the bosses a clear signal: you’re free to exploit and oppress workers, especially the lowest-paid, unorganized immigrants, women, people of color and youth.

Meanwhile, over the same time period, the staff for the Office of Labor-Management Standards, which investigates and audits unions’ financial records, received a 60-percent increase in its budget and added 94 new staff positions.

“We haven’t seen anything like this before,” said Bob Frase, executive assistant to the secretary-treasurer of the Paper Workers (PACE), which represents 275,000 workers. (Reuters, March 8) Last January the PACE local that represents workers at two Houston-area refineries was audited for two weeks.

“They said it was our first audit since 1983,” said David Taylor, secretary-treasurer of PACE Local 4-227. “My secretary’s been here 25 years and she said she had never seen this before.” The DOL told the local to reclassify some line items, but found no irregularities on its fishing expedition.

Though the DOL claims its purpose is to fight corruption in unions, the AFL-CIO disputes that. Noting that the labor federation is at the top of the DOL’s audit list, President John J. Sweeney said, “[It’s] pure political payback for the labor movement’s opposition to the president’s anti-worker policies.” (New York Times, April 17) The Reuters dispatch also called it “payback for opposing President Bush’s reelection.”

But the aggressive auditing policy was well underway before the election. Last year the DOL revised its revenue reporting requirements for unions, imposing extraordinarily detailed demands “that far exceed those placed on corporations,” wrote David Moberg in the March 8 In These Times.

The new forms are so complicated, Edward P. Wendel, general counsel of the United Food and Commercial Workers, told the Times, that “We’ve spent untold hours on it—hundreds, thousands of hours more [than before].” AFL-CIO spokes person Suzanne Folkes told Reuters, “It means diverting time from critical work to a massive amount of paperwork.” And it also drains dues money that could otherwise have been spent providing member services or organizing new workers into the union movement.

But neglecting workers’ rights and aggressive audits are not the only anti-worker weapons in the DOL’s arsenal.

Last year the Bush administration stripped hundreds of thousands of government workers of union representation when it reorganized dozens of offices into the Department of Homeland Security. “Republicans plan to follow up Bush’s success last year in curtailing overtime protection with legislation that would make both overtime payments and the 40-hour week optional for employers,” writes Moberg. He also notes that the Bush admini stration supports “right-to-work laws that prohibit requiring employees in a unionized workplace to pay dues to unions.”

And the National Labor Relations Board, which was established as a supposedly unbiased arbiter of boss/worker disputes, under Bush “has adopted the viewpoint of the ardently anti-union National Right-to-work Committee,” Fred Fein stein, NLRB general counsel under the Clinton administration, told Moberg. The Bush-appointed NLRB chair is none other than Robert Battista, the union-busting attorney who represented the Detroit newspapers in the 1990s.

It must be noted, however, that unions are not the only non-profit groups harassed by the Bush administration. Last year the NAACP and at least 60 other tax-exempt groups devoted to civil rights and social justice were investigated by the Internal Revenue Service. No wrongdoing was found.

But it’s not only the Republicans who are at fault. When did the Democrats ever filibuster to defend the right of workers shifted into Homeland Security to be represented by unions, or to protest regressive overtime regulations?

The leaders of the union movement have relied on the Democratic Party to be a “friend of labor,” spending vast amounts on elections that could have been used to organize and strengthen their base. This reliance on the other party of big business has gotten them nothing but a further shift to the right.

The NLRB, no matter which party has been in office, has functioned to put restraints on the working class. Whenever the NLRB has been forced to recognize workers’ rights, it was as a result of pressure from the struggle in the streets and on the picket lines.

All these attacks on workers and the oppressed are part and parcel of the war on the home front. They’re part of the drive to dismantle Social Security, underfund Medicaid and Medicare, end subsidized housing, starve public education and strengthen racist, sexist, anti-LGBT divisions. What’s needed now is a strong, united insurgency of the workers and oppressed determined to fight for what’s rightfully theirs.