Sneaky tactics poison legislation for AFT members
Bush slips vouchers, limits on overtime pay into federal funding bill

Legislation and policy decisions coming out of Washington, D.C., in recent months make it clearer than ever why having a White House and both houses of Congress controlled by unfriendly lawmakers is bad for AFT members.

Let’s start with the Medicare prescription drug legislation, which Congress narrowly approved and President Bush signed in December. Rather than providing a true prescription benefit to the country’s seniors, the Bush-sponsored legislation fundamentally undermines Medicare and undercuts employer-provided retirement health insurance. Medicare serves more than 85 percent of the nation’s senior citizens; the new law threatens to privatize the traditional program in 2010 by substituting a voucher in place of Medicare insurance. (Does the voucher concept sound familiar? More on that shortly.)

Perhaps most alarming to AFT members, the law may jeopardize the retiree health plans employers provide. A Congressional Budget Office analysis shows that literally millions of workers may lose retiree health plans. While the law contains both a direct subsidy and a tax subsidy to encourage employers to maintain retiree coverage, those subsidies are not sufficient to prevent employers from dropping coverage, and they are not available to public plans that cover many AFT members.

Back-door tactics

While the Medicare legislation was at least debated and voted on by elected representatives, other harmful proposals were slipped into a huge funding bill after failing to get enough support in Congress. One change that could be detrimental to AFT members who work as PSRPs, healthcare professionals, and state and public employees are new overtime rules that the Labor Department wants to impose. While the department claims the new rules would benefit 1.3 million low-income workers, AFL-CIO figures indicate that they would strip 8 million higher-paid workers of their right to overtime pay.

Last fall, both the Senate and House of Representatives voted to stop the Bush administration’s attempts to implement the changes, but the new rules were slipped into the overall federal funding bill. As if these changes aren’t bad enough, the Labor Department also published tips for employers on how to avoid paying overtime for the smaller number of workers who would still be eligible. The department advises employers, for instance, to cut workers’ hourly wages and then add overtime to equal the original salary or to raise salaries to the new $22,100 annual threshold, which would make them ineligible for overtime pay.

Another unpopular initiative—which also failed to pass in Congress—slipped into the funding bill was private school vouchers for the District of Columbia.

Like many urban districts, the D.C. schools are badly in need of additional support for proven programs, such as research-based math and reading curricula, early-childhood programs and extra help for struggling students. The vouchers will take

$14 million to help a mere 1,700 D.C. students attend private schools, while the funding bill provides only $13 million for the other 65,000 students who attend the city’s public schools.

“Vouchers and overtime limits didn’t survive straight up-or-down votes on their merits, so the Bush administration pushed their inclusion in the omnibus appropriations bill,” AFT president Sandra Feldman says. “This maneuver is an affront to the American public. They have rejected school vouchers every time they have had a say on the issue, as they have twice in the District of Columbia. They expect that when they work an hour of overtime, they will be paid for that work. Just as important, they expect such fundamental rights to be protected, not ripped away from them through back door tactics.”