Recent polls reveal a reversal of fortune for the Republican Party. They also show a change in the number one issue for the electorate. Asked what’s at stake in this year’s election, the average voter says a solution to the Iraq quagmire. Even more revealing is the fact that a majority of Americans now specifically fault President Bush and his party for bungling the post-war plan or, even worse, for not having a plan in the first place.

While this shift among the American public is only weeks old, a strong majority of union members have been turned off for years by this administration and its co-conspirators in Congress. And unlike the average voter and Iraq, union members fault this administration for its ability to actually set a clear goal, put together a plan and implement it.

But the plan that union members despise? Bush & Co.’s systematic program to drastically weaken unions and, consequently, the labor movement’s ability to advocate for working families. Their end goal has been to remove the last line of defense – unions – against a right-wing blitzkrieg on workers’ rights, benefits, safety and retirement security.

And don’t take my word for it. In January 2004, anti-everything conservative Grover Norquist boasted that “unions know that four more years of Bush will mean a huge number of union jobs lost to a new free-trade agreements and the outsourcing of the federal work force… If their team doesn’t win, they don’t eat.�

He was right. We did realize that another four years of radical Republican dominance – four more years of controlling both chambers of Congress and the White House – would mean bad news for union members in the short-term and for all working Americans in the long-term.

The plan to weaken unions involved a series of seemingly unrelated policy initiatives. For starters, as Grover pointed out, the push to pass free trade agreements in Congress had more to do with tamping down unions’ political power than lifting up workers or spreading democratic ideals around the globe. Free trade deals have decimated the manufacturing industry, which, by no coincidence, is one of the most unionized sectors in our economy. Fewer union members mean fewer union voters – score one for Grover.

Not all lines of attack went through Congress. Certain initiatives used the federal regulatory process, such as the Labor Department’s brazen move to gut overtime protections for millions of workers. The GOP-led National Labor Relations Board has inflicted its own damage, allowing employers to reclassify millions of workers as supervisors, depriving them of the right to join unions.

The list goes on, from repealing ergonomics rules to suspending Davis-Bacon after Hurricane Katrina to signing pension legislation that chips away at the retirement security of millions of Americans – most of them union members. Even the anti-union rhetoric of the right wing has gotten more outrageous, with some Republicans even comparing labor leaders to terrorists for trying to protect the rights of workers.

The good news is that Bush & Co. have not yet been able to achieve their end goal of marginalizing unions altogether. Part of the reason is that moderate Republicans have prevented them from going all the way, and part of the reason is that they just haven’t had enough time to complete their plan. Denying them control of just one chamber of Congress for the last two years of the Bush presidency will, in essence, shut them down in the fourth quarter. It will also go a long way in keeping the American Dream alive.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Politics, Labor, Campaign .