Sept. 18, 2002

Unions to protest at Secretary of Labor

appearance in Los Angeles

            Members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, other unionists and labor supporters will turn out to protest George W. Bush’s anti-labor policies when his administration’s Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao visits Los Angeles this week.

            “The Labor Department is supposed to represent the interests of workers in the administration,” said ILWU International President James Spinosa. “But under Bush the department has been stacked with anti-worker officials and its policies reflect the concerns of business much more than those of the working men and women of this country.”

            The ILWU is particularly incensed about the way Bush administration officials, including some from the Dept. of Labor, have interfered in the West Coast longshore negotiations. Tom Ridge, the head of Homeland Security, has called Spinosa to say that he considers the longshore contract a national security issue and that he is keeping tabs on the situation. A high-ranking attorney from the Dept. of Labor has made repeated threats to Spinosa, by phone and in person, to pass special legislation to eliminate the ILWU’s rights to bargaining collectively and to strike, and has threatened to send military personnel to seize the ports and operate them as scabs.

            “The administration’s threats are not only an inappropriate intervention into the legal collective bargaining process, they have been the main obstacle to our coming to a negotiated settlement,” Spinosa said. “The employers have no incentive to bargain seriously when they know they have government troops standing behind them.”

            But Bush’s interference in ILWU contract is only one of the administration’s anti-labor practices. In less than two years in the White House, Bush’s other actions include:

• Appointing Eugene Scalia, son of right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who handed Bush the presidency in the disputed election, to Solicitor of Labor, the top attorney in the Labor Dept. Scalia, who has made a career out of opposing worker protections, especially ergonomic standards, which he called based on “voodoo science,” is now in charge of enforcing worker protections.

• Among the first moves of the Bush administration were overturning the ergonomic standards established after 10 years of government studies and issuing an executive order banning project labor agreements that encourage union contracts on all federally funded construction projects.

• In January 2002 Bush took away the union rights of some 500 government workers in the Department of Justice, claiming they were in conflict with the department’s new national security mission.

• The Homeland Security bill is hung up in Congress because Bush is demanding the power to eliminate the union rights of some 170,000 government workers who would be transferred from other departments into Homeland Security, again citing national security concerns.

• In federalizing airport security screeners Bush has unilaterally negated the union contracts of those already working those jobs.

• For one year Bush’s Labor Department has refused to release back pay owed to more than 200 mostly Chinese immigrant garment workers who labored for months without pay checks and are owed more than $1 million. The DoL has collected more than $400,000 from manufacturers whose labels were sewn on garments at the California factory, but the workers haven’t received a penny.

• The Bush administration is currenly requiring that United Airlines’ union workers give up some $9 billion worth of concessions to the company before the government will give United the $1.8 billion loan it needs to avoid bankruptcy.

            “The Bush labor policy appears to be that union rights, legal rights Americans have had for nearly 70 years, are a national security threat,” Spinosa said. “As the November mid-term elections approach, we want Bush to get the message loud and clear—we will not be intimidated. We will not allow him to turn back the clock to the days when workers had no civil rights.”

The demonstration will take place:

Thursday, Sept. 19 at the Biltmore Hotel at 506 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles at 8:00 a.m.

For more information contact ILWU Communications Director Steve Stallone at 415-775-0533 (office) or 510-390-4748 (cell) or visit www.ilwu.org.

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