Latest in Bush's War on Labor

If you go to the U.S. Department of Labor’s website you might think the Bush administration's most important labor initiative of late was having Labor Secretary Elaine Chao meet with singer Ricky Martin. What the DoL is not trumpeting on their website is their latest salvo in their war against organized labor.

This week the DoL imposed a new set of reporting requirements that one member of Congress described as “Draconian.” He and over two dozen colleagues protested the rules when they were proposed last Spring as “costly requirements would be unduly burdensome. We believe that Union resources are best utilized when representing members during negotiations or grievance handling, not adapting and complying with an unprecedented level of detailed financial information and government forms.”
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This initiative has one purpose—to inhibit the ability of democratically-elected union leaders to use their unions’ resources to educate their members about public policy and political candidates. The more time union officers spend reporting every finance transaction to the Department of Labor, the less time they have to tell their members about George Bush’s latest attack on their right to bargain collectively and their right to earn a decent living.
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