Capitol Hill Shop Steward  A Nice Little  Summer Hit List

September, '98
Labor Party Press

As summer sets in, it’s easy to try and pretend that the anti-labor forces stationed here in Washington, D.C., have taken some time off. Not so. The enemy is hard at work. In recent days Congress has selected a couple of targets for its renewed attack, namely federal workers and salespeople.

Our brothers and sisters in the public sector have already taken some big hits. Under the Clinton-Gore administration, over 300,000 federal jobs have been eliminated. And now Congress wants to eliminate more – hundreds of thousands more. It’s a wonderful little 13-page bill called the Freedom from Government Competition Act (HR716/S314). But a better name for this bill would be something like the Let’s Fire Federal Workers and Enrich Private Contractors Act.

The bill would force government agencies to create a hit list of "commercial-type" jobs that can be done by private contractor companies, and then compel the agencies to hand over to the private sector 20 percent of these jobs every year for the next five years. I can hear the heads rolling already. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) believes that if this bill passes, up to 1.4 million federal employees could lose their jobs. No wonder AFGE is a founding union of the Labor Party.

The premise of this legislation is just plain crackpot. The introduction to the bill says that "government competition with the private sector of the economy is detrimental to all businesses and the American economic system" and that "government competition with the private sector of the economy is at an unacceptably high level both in scope and dollar level." And take a look at this gem from the section where they really get down to business: "No [government] agency may begin or carry out any activity to provide any products or services that can be provided by the private sector." It seems there’s just no place on the planet for a federal workforce. Everything should just be turned over to Manpower Inc., if possible.

It’s not hard to figure out where this line of reasoning comes from. In fact the bill’s language isn’t too far from a confidential letter a group of contractors sent to the Office of Management and Budget a while back: "At the most fundamental level," the contractors wrote, "the federal government should not be in the position of competing with the private sector. It is simply not the American economic model and tradition and it is not in the interest of the U.S. taxpayer." That’s right. And public libraries, public schools – they’re un-American too.

The big pushers of this bill are some of the usual anti-labor Republican suspects, led by House Republicans John Duncan of Tennessee, Chris Shays of Connecticut, and John Porter of Illinois. They are joined by 68 other co-sponsors, including three Democrats – so far. They would be none other than House Reps Jim Traficant of Ohio, Chris John of Louisiana and Ralph Hall of Texas.

The big business backers behind the bill are hoping it will slide quickly through Congress, and eventually they hope that President Clinton will go for it when it lands on his desk. This bill is right up Clinton’s alley, since he’s long led the charge against "big government." He hasn’t yet come out in favor of it, but he’s also failed to take an aggressive stand against it.

AFGE and other public sector unions have launched a counterattack against this outrageous scheme to liquidate what remains of the federal sector. AFGE President Bobby Harnage was recently joined by AFSCME president Gerald McEntee and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney in a meeting with Vice President al Gore. The veep was told in no uncertain terms that this bill must be stopped. It is hoped that Gore’s plans to run for President in 2000, coupled with his need for labor support, will bring him around to opposing this scheme. It sounds simple, but remember that Gore was the cheerleader for Clinton’s "Reinventing Government" project that has scorched federal workers.

As a byproduct of this huge privatization legislation, the U.S. General Accounting Office has issued a nifty, pocket-size book that explains how you can go about privatizing a government agency or service without ruffling too many feathers. The booklet is a version of a report the GAO completed at the request of Congress.

After studying numerous privatization cases at the state and local level, the GAO has some good advice for Congress:

1. Find a politician willing to lead the privatization attack.

2. Plan a good attack strategy.

3. Change whatever laws need changing to promote privatization.

4. Cook up some reliable cost data so your privatization effort looks and sounds credible, and not incredible.

5. Figure out some minimal "safety net" for all the public sector workers you’re going to fire.

6. Promise everyone that you will monitor the results of the privatization.

I’ll add steps number 7 and 8.

7. Collect cash from private contractors as they bankroll your next reelection campaign.

8. Tell fired workers that you "feel their pain" in the "transition to a more competitive lifestyle."

And while our fellow workers in the public sector are wondering if the politicians are going to have them all fired, our friends who work as salespeople can be grateful. The only thing Congress took from them is their overtime pay. In a little reported move, Congress voted 261-165 on June 11 to eliminate overtime pay for more than 540,000 sales workers. This disgraceful bill is a product of a bipartisan coalition of House members who figure that the way to eventually repeal overtime altogether is to take it away from certain categories of salespeople, whose earnings comes mostly from commissions anyway. Despite strong opposition by some pro-labor Democrats such as Major Owens of New York, 43 Democrats joined 218 Republicans in supporting this rip-off. It now goes to the Senate.

What’s the lesson here? What do we do when Republicans and Democrats increasingly gang up on working people? Here’s my suggestion: fight back, and then join the Labor Party. Ask your local to affiliate. And then arrange to attend the Labor Party Convention on November 13-15, where we’ll be laying plans to take those two parties on.

Chris Townsend is Political Action Director of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE).

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