The Labor Department’s Anti-Worker Agenda

by Tula Connell, Jun 26, 2006

Now that the ties between the Bush administration’s Department of Labor and the anti-worker Center for Union Facts have been established, let’s take a look at the Labor Department’s original mission and compare it with its current operations.

On Thursday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) posted 108 pages of documents it received through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that showed the Labor Department’s “supportive” ties with Berman.

U.S. employers never liked the nation’s Department of Labor. And they liked it a lot less when it reached cabinet-level status in 1913, which indicated to Big Business that workers for the first time had a voice in government.

And after all, that was the point. Employers had all the money and means to dictate at the workplace. Shouldn’t workers have an advocate as well?

But as Jordan over at Confined Space points out, the Bush administration has distorted the original goal of the department.

In the words of the organic act establishing the Department of Labor, its main purpose is “to foster, promote and develop the welfare of working people, to improve their working conditions, and to advance their opportunities for profitable employment.” (From the Official History of the U.S. Department of Labor.)

Now, Jordan writes, the mission more accurately should be rewritten as follows:

In the words of the organic act establishing the Department of Labor, its main purpose is “to foster, promote and develop the welfare of working people corporate America, to improve their working conditions ability to stay union free, and to advance their opportunities for profitable employment.”

As Ed Sills at the Texas AFL-CIO points out:

The National Labor Relations Act states in its preamble that it is the
national policy of the U.S. to encourage collective bargaining. Now there is
proof that the U.S. Department of Labor does not encourage collective
bargaining and is consorting with those who would destroy it.

Richard Berman, whose projects have included slamming Mothers Against Drunk Driving in a vicious campaign on behalf of the alcohol industry, launched the center in February. For his latest industry front group, Berman has launched a website that purports to show the “facts” on unions but instead provides twisted distortions.

Berman is spending his multimillion budget on full-page anti-union ads published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other newspapers. Berman also has taken out TV ads in local markets where actors dressed as workers attack unions, but those ads ceased airing after CREW contacted stations to point out their falsehoods.

Berman huffs and puffs about union “transparency,” neglecting to mention that only 10 percent of corporations file some financial information with the Federal Election Commission. Meanwhile, all unions are required to file their financial information with the Labor Department, where it is publicly available. But Berman isn’t saying who’s funding his organization, which sources say has an $8 million bankroll. But it’s clear there a political agenda. And it isn’t in favor of working families.

Leo Casey on EdWize notes CREW’s FOIA documents show

…considerable supporting evidence for the thesis that the Bush administration and its corporate bank-rollers have targeted teacher unions for political reasons, on the theory that weakened teacher unions would mean a weakened Democratic coalition.

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