Washington, D.C.
The following statement was approved by the AFL-CIO Executive Council in Washington, D.C. on January 9, 2001.
The AFL-CIO is committed to working with President-elect Bush and his administration to advance the interests and well-being of working Americans and their families. We firmly believe our economic boom is the result of labor, government and business working together over the past eight years and we want to continue those efforts over the next four.
Toward this end, we will support the great majority of the President's cabinet nominees, despite differences with many on critical issues. Most of the nominees do not support our agenda to benefit working families. But we have confidence that we can work together to find common ground, and recognize that it is divisive as well as self-defeating to refuse to support appointees of good will and character solely on partisan grounds.
Three nominees, however, have—with their records of public service—thoroughly rejected the politics of unity that President-elect Bush has said he will champion. The nominations of former senator John Ashcroft for attorney general, Gale Norton for interior secretary, and Linda Chavez for secretary of labor pose a profound and direct threat to civil rights, workers' rights, women's rights, and the protection of the environment. The extreme positions of all three are seriously out of step with the priorities and welfare of the American people. We cannot support, and will work to defeat, their nominations.
Norton's nomination is a massive affront to environmentalists and to all who are concerned about the water we drink, the air we breathe and the earth on which we live together.
Senator Ashcroft and Chavez have been nominated to the two cabinet positions explicitly responsible for the enforcement of worker protections in the United States. The extensive records of both nominees show they would, if nominated, be entrusted with enforcing laws with which they have publicly disagreed—and for which they have in fact evidenced total disrespect.
Senator Ashcroft lacks the integrity, the temperament and the commitment to equal justice under the law required for an Attorney General. Were his views to become those of the Justice Department, they would threaten every federal labor and employment law currently protecting working families. His views are at radical odds with the laws over which an Attorney General has authority—from the role of the federal judiciary, to the role of the federal government in protecting the rights of all Americans, to the rights of women in the workplace.
Senator Ashcroft's highly partisan attacks on executive branch and judicial appointments, together with his statements about litmus tests for these appointments, demonstrate a temperament at odds with that required for Attorney General. He is clearly a divider, and not a uniter, and his rabid partisanship was displayed in an interview in the April 10, 1998 edition of "Human Events," when he said:
"There are voices in the Republican Party today who preach pragmatism, who champion conciliation, who counsel compromise. I stand here today to reject those deceptions. If there was ever a time to unfurl the banner of unabashed conservatism, it is now."
In the United States Senate, Ashcroft flew his banner high by compiling an extremely conservative and anti-working family voting record. He tried to undermine the public education system co-founded by labor at the turn of the last century by promoting religious school vouchers as the hope of the next. He refused to condemn crimes based on sexual orientation, gender and disability by voting against the Hate Crimes Act of 1999. He showcased his disdain for the elderly by voting against measures designed to preserve Social Security and in 1988 told a middle school class, "Social Security is a bad thing."
He demonstrated his lack of integrity when in 1999 he savagely sabotaged the federal judicial appointment of Judge Ronnie White, the first African-American to sit on the Missouri Supreme Court. In the press and in the Senate, he lied about Judge White's record, labeling White "pro-criminal" and saying he had a "poor record on the death penalty" in direct contradiction of the known facts.
Chavez's nomination could reasonably be denied solely on the basis of the many questions that have been raised about her personal conduct with respect to the law. But Chavez is more properly rejected for her consistent and vitriolic opposition to the many laws and regulations she, as secretary of labor, would be charged with upholding and enforcing.
She opposes basic worker protections such as the minimum wage and suggested that labor department personnel who disagree are "Marxist." She supports rolling back overtime protections and the 40-hour work week, opposes the federal family leave law and dismisses the role of discrimination in explaining lower earnings of women. She opposes nondiscrimination programs, including affirmative action, which the Secretary of Labor is charged with enforcing. She has belittled women who file sexual harassment lawsuits as "crybabies" and ridiculed the Americans with Disabilities Act as "special treatment in the name of accommodating the disabled." She has expressed insensitivity to the privacy rights of injured workers. And she has indicated that she will work for passage of federal laws that will undercut unions' capacity to represent their members in the political arena.
As staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under President Reagan, Chavez provided a preview of how she might perform as secretary of labor when she hired temporary staff and consultants to overrun career staff and attempted to disembowel the agency. If confirmed, she will emerge as a disabler and dismantler of the federal protections and programs working people and our families depend upon, and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney spoke for all of us when he called her nomination "insulting" to American workers and our unions.
The weight of evidence against confirmation of President-elect Bush's nominee for secretary of labor has, in fact, become unbearable; we call upon Linda Chavez to withdraw her nomination.
We believe it is the job of ordinary citizens to pass final judgement on cabinet appointees, just as it is our legal right to elect the president and members of the U.S. Congress. The working men and women and the unions of the AFL-CIO will, therefore, do everything in our power to persuade the Senate to reject these nominations. We are proud to stand for equal justice, basic rights and common decency, and we are heartened to stand with our allies. Together we represent America's majority and its best ideals.