BushWatch: The Final Frontier

by Mike Hall, Jan 12, 2009

Eight years ago, President George W. Bush took office and we started what was to become one of the most popular stops on www.aflcio.org: BushWatch.

Over the years, we’ve chronicled the Bush administration’s executive orders, vetoes, policy decisions, legislative initiatives, regulatory actions and inactions that have had a direct impact on working families—none of it good.

We limited our scope to areas like job safety, health care, workers’ rights to form unions, jobs and the economy, civil rights and other real-world worker issues. It would take a superhuman effort to keep track of the Bush assaults and misdeeds on the environment, foreign policy, privacy rights and more.

With Barack Obama moving into the White House next week, we bid farewell to BushWatch as Bush heads back to Texas to lie about his legacy.

In the meantime, let’s look back at some of his more memorable, outrageous or evil actions—take your pick, depending on your indignation threshold. Today, we’ll revisit eight painful years of attacks on workers’ freedom to join a union.

Bush never got a chance to exercise his promised veto of the Employee Free Choice Act because it never reached his desk. But he left a string of other anti-worker decisions behind.

In one of his first executive orders, issued in January 2001, Bush required federal contractors to post signs telling workers they had a right not to join a union, but didn’t have to bother telling workers they had just as much a right to join a union.

A year later, Bush revoked union representation for hundreds of workers in five Justice Department divisions. His first proposal to create the Department of Homeland Security called for ending the union rights of 170,000 workers.

In January 2003, Bush told tens of thousands of airport screeners, members of the Transportation Security Agency, they had no collective bargaining rights. A few weeks later, he terminated those rights for 1,300 workers at the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

With Bush appointees dominating the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the board’s issued a series of rulings to restrict and deny workers the right to join unions. Those decisions denied unions to graduate student employees and temporary agency workers, among others.

To ensure his anti-worker legacy, Bush last year nominated his point man in the war on workers to another term as head of the NLRB. Robert Battista told a Senate hearing he doesn’t believe the primary purpose of the National Labor Relations Act is to promote collective bargaining.

For more on these and other anti-union actions by Bush, go to BushWatch and click on “Workers’ Freedom to Form Unions” in the top box.

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