The Bush Administration’s attack on workers and the eight hour day

By Stewart Acuff
National AFL-CIO Organizing Director
exclusive to portside*

With the message "Give back our hard-earned money! Take
back your overtime pay cut!," several thousand workers
on Wednesday, October 5, delivered hundreds of thousands
of postcards to the Bush/Cheney office headquarters in
17 battleground cities against the Bush overtime pay
cut, even taking over their offices in several cities.
These workers are enraged about the fact that the Bush
Administration’s overtime pay cut strips up to six
million workers of their right to receive overtime pay
when they work more than 40 hours in a week.

With this new rule, President Bush has given his
corporate friends the green light to stop paying
overtime to hardworking Americans. It’s a corporate
welfare handout at workers’ expense, and it’s just plain
wrong. Many of the workers that participated in
Wednesday’s actions talked about how they will
personally be impacted by these cuts, saying that they
will now be forced to work longer hours for less and
that this is the last thing they need right now when
they’re already struggling in this tough economy.

By denying workers their overtime pay, George Bush has
taken the first set of steps toward dismantling the
eight-hour workday. With his effort in manipulating the
Department of Labor to rename overtime protection for
professional employees and others, Bush has begun and
signaled his intention to move back the eight-hour
workday and its promise of some measure of leisure for
America’s workers. Despite the fact that the United
States Senate has repeatedly voted to stop his efforts,
he continues to pursue his radical agenda.

If Bush can get away with taking away overtime pay from
six million workers, then what is next on his chopping
block? Social Security? The minimum wage? Child labor
laws? We’re angry, and we’re not going to take it.

Rolling back collective bargaining rights for America’s
workers is his next target. When the Bush Administration
created the Transportation Security Administration,
thereby making airport screeners federal employees, he
destroyed their right to organize and bargain
collectively as private sector employees. Despite this,
screeners in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Baltimore-
Washington and other airports are still struggling to
form their unions to win quality health care, a living
wage, and a say in their working conditions.

Now George Bush is trying to cancel collective
bargaining rights for thousands of other federal
employees, including privatizing the Department of
Defense and other agencies, guided by his scornful
vision of destroying the unions and bargaining rights
these employees have built and earned over decades of
effort.

There may be no clearer example of the cynicism of the
Bush Administration than the cancellations of collective
bargaining after 9/11 in the Department of Homeland
Security and Transportation Security Administration for
the sake of "security concerns." Every worker who
answered the call on 9/11 and went into those Twin
Towers - every fire fighter, every police officer, every
EMT - was a union member. Over 300 union members died
that day trying to rescue Americans from a terrorist
attack.

Yet, when the Bush Administration created the Department
of Homeland Security, they cancelled collective
bargaining rights for 160,000 federal workers. In the
Bush Administration, union members are good enough to
die in the war on terrorism but not good enough to
process files and paper in their Washington offices.
With his multiple attacks on overtime, the eight hour
work day and collective bargaining and organizing
rights, George Bush and his administration have begun
their assault on the most fundamental freedoms of
America’s workers. These rights were won at the cost of
extraordinary bloodshed and employer and government
sponsored violence.

>From the early days of the American labor movement in

the 19th century to the New Deal Reforms of 1930’s and
beyond, more strikes, more job actions, and more
employer violence happened in the struggle of America’s
workers to win the freedom to form their own unions and
limit their hours of work than any other issue.

Bush has attacked and appears to be intent on destroying
the foundation of today’s labor movement, and he’s
making sacrifices of the worker martyrs who died for
these rights.

* In 1898, in the Homestead, PA Steel Strike, 50 workers
were killed while on strike for union recognition and
the eight-hour workday.

* In 1916, the state militia intentionally burned 13
children to death in Ludlow, Colorado because their
fathers were on strike for the eight-hour workday and
union recognition.

* In 1937, 12 marching steelworkers were murdered at
Republic Steel in Chicago, Illinois, while on strike for
the freedom to form their own union.

* Cesar Chavez spent decades fasting and struggling to
earn the freedom to organize and bargain collectively
for farm workers.

* In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated while
leading a struggle of city-employed garbage works to
form a union and bargain collectively.

The stakes for America’s workers and progressives in
this year’s election could hardly be higher. We must
beat George Bush. We have to run our politics this year
like the welfare of our kids is at stake. We have to
work politically like our future is at stake. We have to
campaign like our way of life is at stake - because it
is. We must work this year with the weight of history on
our shoulders and the sacrifice of our martyrs in our
hearts and minds.

*portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news,
discussion and debate service of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to
provide varied material of interest to people on the
left.