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Reid Keeps Pro-Union Bills on Senate Agenda
By Kathleen Hunter, CQ Staff

No matter how slim the odds of getting the bills on organized labor’s wish list through the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid is going to keep queuing them up for floor action.

Organized labor and its Democratic backers may fall short of the 60 votes needed to move anything controversial through the Senate, but in an election year, putting senators on the record with roll call votes can be enough.

“It shows who’s for working families and who’s not,” said Democrat Robert Menendez of New Jersey.

In some instances, swing-state Republicans might even be persuaded to cast a vote that lets them avoid being targeted in a campaign ad — a possibility that only adds to GOP annoyance with Reid’s agenda choices.

“Even a blind person could see a concerted strategy of pro-union legislation coming to the floor,” said Richard M. Burr , R-N.C.

“Everything we’ve had has a labor component,” said Tom Coburn , R-Okla. “They’re buying the Congress.”

A bonus, from the Democratic point of view, is that the votes will show that their presidential nominee has a different philosophy from that of GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Every pro-union vote on the agenda will give Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York a chance to burnish their labor scorecards.

Litany of Pro-Union Legislation
In the next several weeks, Reid, D-Nev., intends to call up a number of union-friendly measures.

Among them:

• Legislation drafted in response to the tide of home foreclosures (HR 3221);

• A manager’s amendment to climate change legislation (S 3036), which the Senate is scheduled to take up Monday, including language requiring that workers on projects to bolster renewable-energy facilities be paid the local prevailing wage — the latest in a series of attempts to expand the Davis-Bacon Act;

• Legislation to expand collective-bargaining rights for firefighters and other public safety employees (HR 980); and An unemployment insurance extension and a moratorium on seven proposed Medicaid regulations.

The unemployment and Medicaid measures had been incorporated into an emergency war supplemental (HR 2642), but the Senate will have to deal with those again if President Bush follows through with a threatened veto.

Lobbyists for organized labor say their short-term efforts are focused on proposals intended to help low-income people in the current economic downturn.

They expect to be promoting a second economic stimulus bill, this time focused on help for states with budget problems and funding for infrastructure instead of tax rebate checks, which were the centerpiece of the first stimulus package (PL 110-185).

Looking ahead, unions will also be pushing for stronger penalties for workplace safety violations, an expansion of family and medical leave, and the defeat of trade agreements with Colombia and South Korea.

The chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, has said he intends to seek another floor vote before the November elections on legislation (HR 2831) intended to bolster the right of workers to sue employers for wage discrimination.

The outcome is unlikely to change, but the wage discrimination issue “remains an important priority for the senator and a number of Democrats,” said a member of Kennedy’s staff.

And union lobbyists are confident that prospects for that measure and for other bills they care about will improve in the next Congress, particularly if Democrats clinch the White House or pick up Senate seats.

“If we don’t have 60 Democrats but we have a majority that closes in on 60, I think we’ll be able to persuade the Republicans that we need,” said Bill Samuel, the AFL-CIO’s director of government affairs.

Votes Determine Ratings
Many, if not all, of the labor-oriented measures that Reid schedules for floor action will be tracked by interest groups that grade senators according to their union-friendly or business-friendly voting records.

Most often, those scorecards show differences only between the majority and minority parties.

For example, every Senate Democrat but one, Indiana’s Evan Bayh , received perfect marks on the AFL-CIO’s interim scorecard for 2008, which tracked three votes.

By contrast, 36 of the 49 Republicans voted “no” on all three votes: a motion to limit debate on the wage discrimination bill, an unemployment benefits extension that was later stripped from the economic stimulus package, and the fiscal 2009 budget resolution (S Con Res 70).

“I think it’s a very definitive way to show the difference between Democrats and Republicans,” said Menendez. “At the end of the day, if you can’t give people the simple power to organize themselves for better working conditions, better wages and better heath and retirement benefits, you don’t stand for working families.”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Labor Issues, Democratic Politics, Republican, Economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.