behold uncle's audit hornets

  think SAM'S BOYS 
    are  
after union books for this:

"check em out 
thats how we 
brought hoffa  down...."

try on
     GROVER N'S 
       line for size :

 " audit audit audit
burn up their dues 
then audit em 
again and again and again
   till they throw in the towel"

If union leaders are feeling a little paranoid about
Bush's reelection, maybe it's because they really are
being persecuted. Republicans have both ideological and
strategic reasons for an offensive against labor.
Attacking unions pleases both Bush's corporate friends
and the movement's conservatives, and harasses the
strongest grassroots political operation opposing the
Republican right.

'There's been a strategy,' says former Democratic Rep.
David Bonior, now chairman of American Rights at Work.
'It's not a conspiracy. They're very open. [Key
conservative Republican strategist] Grover Norquist
says they want to get rid of unions, to break the labor
movement.'

But the rights of all workers, not just union members
and their organizations, are in jeopardy. Since Bush
took office, the Labor Department has significantly
reduced staff for enforcing employer violations of laws
on labor standards (such as child labor, the minimum
wage and overtime), occupational safety, and rights to
organize-laws that are important for everyone employed
in America.

Not that increasing the staff would help much if the
Labor Department's treatment of Wal-Mart is the
standard. The Labor Department recently fined Wal-Mart,
a company with $285 billion in annual sales, a paltry
$135,540-or less than $6,000 per violation-for breaking
child labor laws. What's more, the department promised
that its inspectors would give the company advance
notice of future investigations.

Of course, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao may figure that
there's no need to beef up enforcement if the laws are
getting weaker. Republicans plan to follow up Bush's
success last year in curtailing overtime protection
with legislation that would make both overtime payments
and the 40-hour week optional for employers.

But while protection of children and of worker health
is being neglected, the Office of Labor-Management
Standards, which investigates and audits labor unions,
is thriving. This year 48 new positions and a 15
percent budget increase were granted to the office, and
since Bush has been in office they have benefited from
94 new positions and a 60 percent overall increase in
the budget. Last year the Labor Department began
imposing extraordinarily detailed financial reporting
requirements for unions and related institutions, like
credit unions. Although the AFL-CIO is still pursuing a
legal challenge to the rules, the new
requirements-which far exceed those placed on
corporations-have already eaten up dues that could have
been spent on providing members with services. In
addition, the reports expose details about union
strategies that could be helpful to employers and
political opponents.

'The real motivation was to saddle unions with
expensive and time-consuming requirements to harass
them and to provide the kind of ammunition that a Right
to Work Committee researcher or Republican staffer
would find very useful, but union members would find
not useful at all,' says AFL-CIO General Counsel
Deborah Greenfield. 'I don't think it's an accident
that the head of the agency within the Department of
Labor who came up with the rule, Don Todd, was head of
research for the Republican National Committee.'

While unions are harassed more systematically, there
have been complaints that the NAACP and at least 60
tax-exempt groups have been investigated by the
Internal Revenue Service because of their political
activities-though the Treasury Department inspector
general recently found no wrongdoing. And the Los
Angeles Times reported on February 19 that Sen. James
Inhofe (R-Okla.), chair of the Senate Environment and
Public Works Committee, demanded tax and financial
records from two organizations of state and local
government environmental officials who had criticized
Bush's Clear Skies legislation.

Of course, for workers, the threat of expensive union
reporting requirements pales in comparison to Bush
initiatives to privatize Social Security and make the
federal tax system even more regressive. Also, Bush's
proposed Medicaid cuts hit two groups of vulnerable
workers: not only low-income individual aid recipients,
including many employees of companies like Wal-Mart,
but also many thousands of workers in nursing homes and
hospitals whose pay ultimately comes from Medicaid.

In addition, the federal government is attacking the
right of hundreds of thousands of Homeland Security and
Defense Department workers to unionize, and Republican
governors in Indiana and Missouri are curtailing
workers' collective bargaining rights (see 'The Midwest
Union Rollback,' March 14). The right is renewing its
efforts to pass state and federal right-to-work laws
that prohibit requiring employees in a unionized
workplace to pay dues to unions. What's more,
conservative Republicans in Arizona, California,
Georgia, South Carolina and Oklahoma are also pushing
restrictions on union political spending.

In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying to
shift public employees' pensions from a defined benefit
plan to a defined contribution plan similar to a
401(k). Beyond jeopardizing public employees'
retirement, it's a calculated attack on workers' power
through pension funds, like CalPERS, that push for
corporate reform. Bush's NLRB

But perhaps the biggest assault on workers will be
coming from the agency entrusted to promote collective
bargaining, the National Labor Relations Board. After
Bush was able to make his appointments to the
NLRB-including its chairman, Robert Battista,
management attorney for the union-busting Detroit
newspapers in the '90s-the board began issuing a string
of anti-union rulings. 'They're not just failing to
keep up with the times, but moving in the wrong
direction,' says Fred Feinstein, NLRB general counsel
in the Clinton years. He argues that the Bush NLRB,
more than past Republican boards, has adopted the
viewpoint of the ardently anti-union National Right-to-
Work Committee.

Jonathan Hiatt and Craig Becker, respectively general
counsel and associate general counsel for the AFL-CIO,
recently wrote, 'The members of the board appointed by
President Bush appear to be headed toward the most
radical non-legislative contraction of employee rights
in the agency's history.' While restricting the rights
of even non-union workers to seek help from co-workers
to protect their rights at work, the Bush board has
overruled or restricted the rights to form a union of
many workers whose jobs are typical of the new,
flexible economy, such as graduate teaching assistants,
handicapped workers, artists' models and temporary
employees.

The Bush board may also soon resolve a dispute about
the definition of 'supervisors.' This is a critical
question because supervisors are not eligible to join a
union. Feinstein fears that the board will define
supervisory positions in such an expansive way that 90
percent of nurses working in a nursing home could be
prevented from unionizing. Meanwhile, with no clear
definition, the board threw out a union election
victory because a worker the board deemed a supervisor
had argued for unionization.

Of course, having supervisors argue against a union-or
far worse-is standard procedure. For example, in
several recent cases where the employer threatened to
close a factory if workers voted for the union, fired
pro-union workers, offered bribes or selectively locked
out pro-union workers, the board either found no
violation by the employer or else imposed no special
remedies. In one case, the employer did not provide the
union the requisite full list of employees before the
election, but the board said it was close enough and
refused to call a new election. Adding insult to
injury, the decision came seven years after the
original attempt to organize.

An even bigger threat looms ahead. Increasingly, unions
organize, as they did many years ago, by getting
employers to recognize the union when a third party
verifies that a majority of workers have signed union
cards-a practice known as 'card check.' The board has
now signaled that it may make such recognition illegal
or at least permit union decertification elections
immediately, rather than after at least one year under
current rules.

In other cases, the board appears determined to narrow
the scope of agreements that unions and management can
reach before majority worker support is established. In
February a regional NLRB director challenged an
agreement between the Steelworkers and a manufacturing
investment company to establish management neutrality
during an organizing drive. Hiatt and Becker warn that
if the board decides