Losing Ground: Outsourcing Jobs, Harassing Labor Unions, Repealing Safety Regulations, Undercutting Benefits: The Bush Administration Is Clearly Winning a Great Victory in Its War on America's Workers

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DURING THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL TV DEBATES, George W. Bush relentlessly repeated the tired Republican mantra that government, especially the federal government, is the enemy of American workers. As president, he's turned that rhetoric into reality.

Actually, Bush is as much a big-government guy as was Lyndon Johnson or FDR. But in his case, Bush has used federal power to undercut workers' bargaining power, dumping workers out of the middle class and kicking the ladder away from those trying to get in. Jobs in factories and services that pay good wages and offer decent benefits are disappearing. As a result, the overwhelming majority of Americans--those who must work to put food on their tables and roofs over their heads--are more financially insecure and have seen their living standards erode. In 1980, Ronald Reagan famously asked the American people, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" When John Kerry poses that question later this year, the answer, by virtually every measure, will be "no."

Jobs and Unemployment. Three years after George W. Bush was inaugurated, the U.S. economy had lost a net 2 million jobs--the worst job record of any recovery since the Great Depression. Laid-off workers are now unemployed for an average of five months; when they're finally hired, they go to firms paying 20 percent less. The jobless rate released in February was 5.6 percent. But, in fact, the labor market is much weaker than that. For one thing, most of the jobs that have been created have been temporary. What's more, reacting to …