Federal workers get tremendous win against Bush administrations anti-worker agenda

This is a huge win for Federal workers.

From: ILCA- The International Labor communications Association

FEDERAL WORKERS UNIONS VS. BUSH: ‘WE WON. THEY LOST. GAME OVER.’
By Mark Gruenberg PAI Staff Writer

Washington- Federal worker unions racked up two big wins against anti-worker GOP President George W.Bush after his regime, on Feb. 18, gave up its long-running attempt to impose new anti-worker personnel rules on the 135,000 employees at the Department of Homeland Security--and when Congress earlier dumped his similar scheme for 700,000 Defense Department workers.

The wins put paid to what AFGE General Counsel Mark Roth called “the Heritage Foundation agenda” to denigrate federal workers and to destroy worker protections. Of Bush’s plan, adopted from the Right Wing think tank’s treatises, Roth said: “We won. They lost. Game over.”

The federal worker union wins are important for all workers because AFGE President John Gage previously said that if Bush won at the two big federal agencies, he would try to extend the anti-worker personnel rules to other federal agencies, then state and local government workers and then to the private sector. In both DOD and the Homeland Security Department, theBush rules stripped workers of union rights, whistleblower protections, pay based on objective standards, and appeal rights, among other things. Pay and promotions would have been decided by presidential political appointees, and appeals of discipline rulings against DOD workers would have gone to a stacked board appointed by the Defense Secretary.

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