is bush worse than reagan?

for workers, that is. the century foundation sums up the bush administration's violation of worker rights:

* According to Government Executive magazine, in the private sector, the administration has blocked more strikes than any president in recent history.
* The administration denied collective bargaining rights to the 62,000 government employees of the Transportation Security Administration, many of whom previously belonged to unions.
* The administration reduced the collective bargaining and other rights of employees of the 177,000-member Department of Homeland Security
* The administration has tried to privatize hundreds of thousands of unionized public employee jobs

someone was telling me recently that she didn't think teachers' unions would be around in 20 years, and that in general she thought labor unions were on the way out. this may be true, but it's not for the reason she thought - it's not because there aren't rights being violated or fights to be fought anymore.

when that story broke about wal-mart's illegal hiring of workers to clean the stores, someone was quoted as saying that they had to work every single day, because if they missed even one day they might not be allowed to come back. they didn't get a weekend because they weren't thought of as having any rights. wal-mart saw them as being so desperate for work that they'd do anything to keep it, and that desperation made them tools rather than humans (as it's put in matewan).

wal-mart is the king of taking away people's authority over their own time. bathroom breaks are timed, because even one extra minute in the bathroom constitutes "time theft." wal-mart can do it because it convinces its workers that they don't have a right to that time; their time belongs to wal-mart as long as they're on the clock. it convinces its workers that they are wal-mart's property.