WASHINGTON (PAI) – Comp time for overtime. Vouchers. More tax cuts for the rich.

Another attack on Davis-Bacon.

Those are just a few of the issues labor legislative representatives expect to battle in the Republican-controlled 108th Congress, which opened Jan. 7.

“What we face in the coming years may be far more than we ever faced before,” AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney warned in December about the legislative plans of labor’s foes. “It will be fueled by enormous amounts of money and power.”

With the complete Republican takeover on Capitol Hill, fueled by almost $1 billion in corporate campaign contributions, “it’s payback time from the Bush administration” for its business friends, AFSCME Legislative Director Chuck Loveless told PAI.

That payback will be in anti-worker legislative initiatives both wide-ranging and industry-specific, the interviews reveal. “There are people out there who want to do bad things” to workers, the Laborers’ Don Kaniewski said.

The representatives offer three ways to stop the anti-worker agenda, but concede they might not always work:

• Grass-roots lobbying by unionists and their allies.
• Senate filibusters. Even GOP Senate aides admit the new Republican majority there will need 60 votes to accomplish anything, since 41 votes can keep a filibuster going. The Republicans hold 51 seats, to 48 Democrats and independent James Jeffords of Vermont.
• Point out the political hazards and hope the White House will try to moderate its supporters’ fanatic impulses as GOP President George W. Bush plans his re-election campaign.

“Maybe it’s the optimist in me, but I think they’ll be sensitive” to the damaging potential of extremist legislation, says AFT Legislative Director Charlotte Fraas. “And anti-worker initiatives fall into that category. The question is how much the White House will have an eye on the prize of ’04 and moderate how much the Republicans go off the deep end,” she added.

“A lot of what the White House will be doing will be through the prism of (election year) 2004, but it remains to be seen” if Fraas is right, Kaniewski cautions.

Workers must battle other legislation, with the comp time bill atop the list. The Republican comp time legislation would allow employers to schedule substitute compensatory time for workers in place of overtime – but the employer would have the final say on when comp time would be scheduled, and workers could lose the ability to get overtime pay. “The comp-time-for-overtime bill will pass the House and will be difficult to stop in the Senate,” Loveless says. “The only way is a successful filibuster.”

But even if that works, Roofers Legislative Director Regis Maher points out that time spent battling it and big business brainstorms “will prevent us from doing anything” positive. As Fire Fighters President Harold Schaitberger said: “We’ll probably see enough egregious proposals to keep us back on our heels.”

The legislative representatives agree the economy will override everything, as will the battle over GOP-big business plans to deal with it by putting more money in management pockets. The impact filters down to local workers: Bush’s tax cuts and the recession leave states and cities strapped for cash.

The result: layoffs. With states facing a projected $80 billion deficit combined in 2003, and no help from Washington, AFSCME’s Loveless predicts the impact will in cuts in education, transportation, social services – and workers’ jobs.

Other anti-worker measures labor expects to combat include:

• Incoming Senate Education and Labor Committee Chairman Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) may resurrect a “flextime” bill to let employers have workers toil up to 80 hours – in any pattern – over a two-week period before paying overtime, says AFSCME’s Marge Allen, who tracks labor-specific legislation. She warns Gregg may fold flextime into the comp-time-for-overtime bill.
• Gregg plans to review alleged worker “abuses” of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which grants workers 12 weeks of unpaid leave for birth, illness, or to care for sick children or elderly family members. The business community generally hates the FMLA.
• Health insurance. Federal commissions shined a spotlight on the rising millions of uninsured, and co-pays and premiums for the insured are skyrocketing. The Fire Fighters, the Teachers and AFSCME all told PAI health care will be a key issue for unionists – but they expect little aid for workers from Congress.
• Bush’s plan to make his $1.6 trillion tax cut for the rich permanent. The cuts are scheduled to take effect between now and 2010, but expire in 2011. Bush, citing the recession that began virtually the day he was seated, wants to remove that deadline. Business wants to add its own tax-cut goodies to the Bush economic stimulus package, the legislative reps say. “Corporate dividends would be exempt from taxation, which would be an enormous boon for wealthy investors while average people get nothing,” Loveless comments. Same story for tax cuts for quick business purchases of new plants and equipment, and for 401(k), Enron-type account contributions, he adds.
• Expect another attack on Davis-Bacon, the 1931 law that guarantees prevailing wages on federally funded construction projects, Kaniewski predicts. But he notes the building trades have pieced together bipartisan coalitions to defeat past Davis-Bacon attacks and expects to do so again.
• Phony versions of pro-worker legislation. AFT’s Fraas forecasts the health insurer-backed phony Patients Bill of Rights – passed last year by the GOP-run House but killed by the then-Democratic Senate – will go through.

Same thing with a leaky prescription-drug benefit bill for the elderly, which Bush is expected to demand. In 2002, drug lobbyists wrote the legislation for the House GOP, and then the firms pumped millions of dollars into GOP campaigns, touting it.

“They’ll get it through because it’ll be too complicated to make the distinctions” to the public “between a bill where the benefits are run by Medicare, and a drug company bill,” Fraas explained. Her two predicted results show the power the GOP can wield just by controlling – and framing – the congressional agenda.

(From Press Associates)