TRIFECTA OF DIRTY TRICKS

What do you call a bill that combines a cut in the Estate Tax with a modest increase in the minimum wage with anti-labor loopholes with an extension of pro-business tax breaks? If you’re outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, you’d call it your pet project. If you are the rest of America, you’d call it an all-out insult. In one of the biggest acts of political cynicism to show its face in 2006, Frist pledged support for a much needed increase in the minimum wage... as long as it came with a substantial tax break for the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of Americans that will cost the government $1 trillion and other changes that would actually result in a pay cut for some workers. Lucky for current and aspiring middle-class Americans, who need both a minimum wage increase and the paved highways and cops and teachers paid for with revenue from the Estate Tax, the Trifecta Bill was taken off the table in August. This one merits the title “Worst of,” three times over.

PICKET THE FENCE

Proponents of immigration reform and anti-immigrant activists agree: the immigration policy we’ve got isn’t working. So it’s a shame that Congress spent this election year doing political posturing instead of actually fixing the system. Exhibit A: The Fence. Tacked onto annual appropriations legislation this year was a bill that authorized $21.3 billion in taxpayer dollars to build a fence-industrial complex along the Mexican border, replete with vehicle barriers and a so-called virtual fence. Securing the border is an important goal, but the immigrants from Mexico don’t come here because it’s easy. They are willing to risk their lives to attain economic opportunity—opportunity available because the American economy needs their labor. Congress should pass a real policy that addresses the critical role immigrants play in our economy— including the 12 million here illegally—while protecting American workers against a race to the bottom. Instead, it built a fence. And for that, this law is one of 2006’s “Worst of.”

PROMOTIONS WITHOUT PERKS

To avoid a health care crisis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that by 2014, 29.4% more new nursing jobs that will need to be filled. But when too few people are willing to enter the profession in the coming years, we’ll know where to place blame. In October, the National Labor Relations Board decreed that registered nurses—and many other workers—will be barred from union membership if they have minimal supervisory duties. While labor policy has long held that there are only two categories of workers, labor and management, this ruling creates a third: supervisors, who continue to do the same work as before but, like management, are barred from joining a union. Without the right to join a union—which translates into higher pay, protections against the verbal abuse suffered by more than 70% of nurses on the job, and more control over workplace conditions—we can bet that the already high job dissatisfaction rate among nurses will only increase. This short sighted anti-labor decision deserves a spot among the “Worst of.”

ZEROES FOR GROUND ZERO HEROES

Five years after the World Trade Center attacks, almost 70% of Ground Zero first responders and workers have become sick. And yet, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has consistently denied a link between exposure to Ground Zero and these illnesses. In fact, the Mayor made it his official policy to oppose legislation passed in the New York State legislature in August that gave sick first responders and cleanup workers adequate time to file claims for lost wages and medical bills and increased death and pension benefits for public employees. The reason for the Mayor’s opposition? Mayor Bloomberg felt that compensating these heroes for their 9/11 related injuries would simply cost the city “too much.” One wonders what would have happened in the aftermath of 9/11 had these workers made the same type of calculation. For favoring its own financial interests over the health of our nation’s heroes, the City’s official policy of opposing New York State’s recent workers’ compensation legislation deserves to be called one of the “worst.”

BLAMING BABIES

Approximately four million babies are born in the United States each year. The cost of one-third of these deliveries is covered by Medicaid because the mothers are low-income and uninsured. Up until this July, any baby born to a mother whose delivery was paid for by Medicaid was automatically covered under the program for a year. Not any more. The Bush administration announced that parents must now file an application and present proof of citizenship for coverage of their children to kick in. Their reason? A controversial interpretation of the Deficit Reduction Act. Doctors and immigrant activists have protested, arguing that this policy is legally unnecessary, that too many infants will go without coverage in the weeks while birth certificates and Medicaid applications are being processed, and that some families won’t file the applications out of fear of deportation. Opponents of the policy claim it is driven more by anti-immigrant sentiment than sound fiscal or health care policy. California has flat out objected, saying that any baby born in the U.S. is a citizen and should not need to prove it. That’s enough proof to add it to our “Worst of” list.

WELFARE WOES

The best way for women on welfare to permanently move out of poverty is to attain a college degree. So why does a government supposedly interested in reducing poverty cut away at access to education? As part of a larger revamping of the welfare system in July, the Department of Health and Human Services handed down a new, nationally uniform definition of the work that welfare recipients must perform in order to receive benefits. Instead of counting enough education hours to actually make pursuing a college degree a feasible option for people on welfare (as some states used to do under the old welfare system), the new regulations count mostly make-work tasks. These federal rules will only make it harder for a single mother working 35 hours a week in a workfare assignment and raising a family at an income 50% below the poverty level to find time and energy to attend classes at night and actually work her way out of poverty. This policy, which should be listed under “counterproductive” in the dictionary, also merits a place as one of this year’s “worst.”

RETURN TO DMI’S 2006 YEAR IN REVIEW MAIN PAGE