Stomping labor. (Comments).

In early January of this year, the President decided to ban the presence of unions in the Department of Justice "out of concern that union contracts could restrict the ability of workers in the Justice Department to protect Americans and national security." This was as clear a symbol as any that the Bush Administration was seizing on September 11 to advance one of its central domestic priorities: the crushing of labor.

"A lot of these Justice Department workers have been members of unions for twenty years, and there's never been an allegation of a problem," said Steven Kreisberg, associate director for collective bargaining of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents more than 300 employees of the Justice Department. "It's a very cynical use of the September 11 tragedy by an anti-union Administration."

But worse news on the labor front was soon to follow. Next, Bush took advantage of a recess to bypass Congress and appoint two pro-business labor lawyers to the National Labor Relations Board: Michael J. Bartlett, formerly of the United States Chamber of Commerce, and William B. Cowen, the former chief attorney for Institutional Labor Advisors, which plotted with coal companies against the United Mine Workers.

A few weeks later, Bush again used the recess to make an anti-labor appointment. He placed Eugene Scalia, son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in the position of solicitor general for the Labor Department. The younger Scalia was an extremely controversial choice, and his nomination repeatedly hit bumps.

Scalia was a leading opponent of the OSHA ergonomics rule enacted by President Clinton. At public hearings on the rule, where Scalia served as the industry representative, he referred to ergonomics as "quackery" whose claims derived from "junk science." This must have come as a great shock to schools such as Cornell, Michigan, Louisville, and San Jose State, which offer courses in the field of ergonomics. Scalia accused OSHA, an office he will now represent, of pushing a "radical" ergonomics agenda. He dismissed union support of ergonomics regulations as occurring "only because new rules will slow the pace of work and force employers to hire more workers." As Scalia put it, unions simply want "dues-paying members."

As for the ergonomics rule, the writing was on the wall long before Scalia's appointment.

The repeal of the Clinton ergonomics rule was one of the first bills that Bush signed after entering office. The rule would have required businesses to inform their employees about the dangers of repetitive stress. If two employees came forward with injuries within eighteen months of each other, the companies would be responsible for taking care of the problem at its source.

The Clinton requirement was onerous for businesses, said Republicans, who claimed that it could cost companies more than $100 billion. OSHA disputed that number, claiming that complying with the law would cost less than $5 billion, while saving businesses $9 billion by increasing productivity and decreasing use of sick time by workers suffering from back injuries or tendinitis.

But on April 5, business got its wish when the Bush Administration announced voluntary ergonomics guidelines. Companies reveled in the victory. "We join employers and insurers in applauding the Bush Administration's proposal for voluntary safety standards, compliance assistance, and targeted enforcement to reduce ergonomics problems," editorialized the Crain publication Business Insurance. "This plan would be less costly and give employers much greater flexibility than the mandatory standard promulgated during the final days of the Clinton Administration."

Unions were horrified. "After a year of inaction, the Administration has come up with a meaningless measure that further delays action and provides no real protection to workers against ergonomic hazards which is the nation's biggest workplace hazard," said Peg Seminario, director of safety and health for the AFL-CIO, who denounced the plan as "a sham."

The Administration said it would compensate by accelerating the enforcement of existing work-injury laws. But it is far from certain that the Department of Labor will be inclined to enforce existing law. As the AFL-CIO notes, "The Bush Administration's Department of Labor regulatory agenda for 2002 withdraws or halts action on sixteen pending Occupational Safety and Health Administration and thirteen pending Mine Safety and Health Administration safety actions."

Unfortunately, many workers seeking redress may not be able to turn to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On March 27, the Supreme Court decided by a 5-to-4 vote in Hoffman Plastic Compounds v. National Labor Relations Board that a chemical plant worker was not entitled to $67,000 in back pay and fines even though he was fired illegally for union organizing. The court's reasoning? The worker, Jose Castro, was in the country illegally, and that fact overrode labor law.

Dissenting Justice Stephen Breyer gave a stern warning, saying that the decision would encourage businesses to hire illegal immigrants and then freely fire, "with a wink and a nod," any who try to start a union.

The decision dismayed labor and immigrants' rights advocates across the country. "The court went out of its way to ignore or reject its own precedent, and in the process embraced an immigration policy that is not only harsh, but also wrongheaded," R.S. Ghio, an attorney for immigrants, wrote in a column in National Law Journal.

The ruling would "motivate employers to hire more undocumented workers, because they know if they violate these employees' rights, they have no recourse," said Arturo Rodriguez, president of the United Farm Workers.

"With this ruling, many of our nation's farmers, factory workers, office and house cleaners, trash collectors, and restaurant and service workers have lost a basic human right," wrote Christine Ahn of Food First, in a column distributed by the Progressive Media Project. "They do the work undesired by most, their jobs lack benefits, child care, or a living wage, but if they dare fight for humane working conditions, they can be fired without just cause and back pay."

The dire predictions almost immediately came true. Employers began to misinterpret, and take advantage of, the ruling, reported The Los Angeles Times in late April. "Employers across the nation are testing the limits of a recent Supreme Court decision to deny back pay to an undocumented worker, seeking to use the ruling to avoid minimum wage and workers' compensation awards, even asking for the documents of a worker who complained of sexual harassment, according to advocates for low-wage workers," it said.

"Everyone is reeling from this," Della Bahan, a Pasadena attorney who represents immigrant janitors, told the Times. "It's created a lot of confusion and a lot of fear. However it's ultimately interpreted, the overall message is, `You complain at your peril.'"

Even before Bush entered office, Americans were suffering from the decline of labor power. Only 13.5 percent of workers have union representation, down from a peak of 39 percent in 1954. In private industry, the figures are grimmer yet. In 2001, 9.1 percent of those workers were members of unions. With shrinking membership, organized labor has been unable to pressure Congress to lift the federal minimum wage to a decent level. "Hard-working Americans paid the minimum wage earn just $10,712 a year," Holly Sklar, author of Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies That Work for All of Us, wrote in a Labor Day editorial published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last year. "That's a third less than their counterparts earned a third of a century ago, adjusting for inflation. A couple with two children would have to work a combined 3.3 full-time minimum-wage jobs to make ends meet. That's 132 hours a week. It just doesn't add up."

As Sklar points out, the plight of the working poor reveals economic perversions. "They are health care aides who can't afford health insurance," she writes. "They work in the food industry, but depend on food banks to help feed their children. They are child care teachers who don't make enough to save for their own children's education. They care for the elderly, but they have no pensions."

In 2000, the International Labor Organization reported that, during the 1990s, the amount Americans were working climbed by nearly a week a year from the decade before. In addition, said the group, Americans were putting in more hours than workers in all other industrialized nations, including Japan.

"Americans work 137 hours, or about three-and-one-half weeks, more a year than Japanese workers, 260 hours (about six-and-one-half weeks) more a year than British workers, and 499 hours (about twelve-and-one-half weeks) more a year than German workers," said The New York Times in a summary of the report.

A National Sleep Foundation study poll discovered that "the average work week was forty-six hours, and 38 percent of those surveyed said they work sixty hours or more a week."

The increase in work hours coincides with a loss of sleep. That study, which was released in 2001, found, in the words of National Science Foundation vice president James Walsh, "an epidemic of sleepiness in our society." According to the poll, 63 percent of Americans sleep fewer than eight hours a night; 31 percent sleep fewer than seven hours. "The survey found that the more time you spend at work, the less sleep you obtain," Walsh explained. It showed that the people who worked sixty hours or more per week were chronic sleep-cutters, averaging six hours of sleep a night. By contrast, those who work forty-hour weeks average 7.1 hours per night.

The drowsy American worker might seem like a side note to labor's pains except for one bit of information: People who sleep less than an average of eight hours a night don't tend to live as long as those who sleep the recommended amount.

One of the few positive signs for labor is the ongoing passage of living wage ordinances across the country.

Pressed on by unions like SEIU and grassroots groups like ACORN, cities, beginning with Baltimore in 1994, have mandated an increase over the paltry federal minimum wage of $5.15 for workers who generally are employed by companies that contract with the city. So if a company does business with the city, it has to pay its employees more--sometimes exceeding $10 an hour.

Since Baltimore, "more than sixty municipalities have ... passed such laws, including the broadest yet in New Orleans in February, and another last week in Santa Fe," observed The Christian Science Monitor on March 15.

And, as some surprising people are noting, the ordinances work.

It's not every day that a conservative economist sees the light. So when David Neumark, an opponent of the minimum wage, came out with a study in March that showed how beneficial living wage ordinances can be, it was worthy of note.

Neumark, a professor at Michigan State, looked at the thirty-six cities around the country that have living wage ordinances. He concluded that even though they may lead to some job loss, "the steep wage increases make it less likely that families with a living wage worker will live in poverty, especially in cities where the law applies more broadly." The net effect, he concluded, is a modest decrease in family poverty.

(Neumark did the study, "How Living Wage Laws Affect Low-Wage Workers and Low-Income Families," for the conservative Public Policy Institute of California. You can find it at www.ppic.org.)

Neumark told the Los Angeles Times: "Going into this, I would have been pretty negative. But I come away saying these things work reasonably well, and there's no reason to condemn them on empirical grounds."

Hear that? For all those business shills out there who have brayed about how living wage ordinances only hurt the people they're designed to help, here's unbiased evidence that they actually do what they say they're going to do.

That's why activists in one city after another have been able to persuade local politicians to sign on to living wage ordinances, which prevail not only in Baltimore, New Orleans, and Sante Fe, but in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, L.A., Minneapolis, New Haven, San Francisco, and San Jose, among other places.

The living wage movement proves that we can establish a floor of decency in this country, one community at a time, no matter how hostile the White House.