>You forgot the Family & Medical Leave Act.
>In fact, I'd say that labor policy is one of the areas where the
difference
>between the parties is smallest. You can't say that Clinton would have
done
>more for unions if he'd had a Dem majority in Congress, either -- I can't
>think of a single part of labor's agenda that he spent significant
political
>capital on, and the dead-set opposition of the whole union movement didn't
>give him any noticeable pause on free trade.
Actually, while it didn't stop him passing NAFTA, it did lead Clinton at Seattle to push labor standards hard enough to crash the whole WTO negotiations, which Bush has been desperately trying to revive for the last five years since Seattle. And it did lead to the first labor standards embodied in the text of a US trade agreement in the Jordanian free trade deal-- not a large country admittedly, but it is the trade deal he promised to embody in all future trade agreements, notably a standard that Bush has deleted from the Australian trade agreements recently negotiated and passed by Congress.
But let's emphasize a key point-- the difference in the parties is not just that Dems are more pro-labor. It's that the GOP is now vehemently and totally anti-labor. The GOP didn't filibuster the Family & Medical Leave Act because it would have killed them with the soccer moms, but they routinely and completely filibuster every labor bill.
It is in fact the filibuster that disguises how completely polarized the parties are on policy.
Look at Homeland Security. Even the most conservative Democrats refused to vote with the GOP to gut union protections for federal workers when they had control of the agenda. In fact, they stuck to a pro-union policy so hard that Senators like Max Cleland were union-baited (and accused of de facto treason) for their pro-labor policy and kicked out of office.
Don't even try to tell the hundreds of thousands of federal workers stripped of their right to unionize that there's no difference between the parties.
And as I've said, look to the states without filibusters to see the real difference between the parties on labor issues. Look at California where the Democrats in the state passed a raft of pro-labor laws before Arnie was elected. Look at Illinois where the Democrats have passed a slew of other pro-labor laws since the Dems took over all branches of government.
Then point me to a Republican state where similar laws have been passed?
Nathan Newman