Toast of the Town to Toast!

Editor’s Note: the following article by Bob Kelley, President of the St. Louis Labor Council, was reprinted with permission from the Labor Tribune (Vol. 66, No. 18), St. Louis, MO.

You cannot help hearing about Kurt Warner’s problems everywhere you go. The two-time MVP of the National Football League first had a bad pinkie, and now a busted hand. If that’s not bad enough the whole city seems to have fallen in love with his number three substitute and turned against Kurt.

People are fickle there is no question about it. One day or season you are the toast of the town and the next you are just toast.
I suppose the president could learn something from Kurt’s fall from grace. Everyone concedes that George W. Bush was the MVP in last month’s election [November, 2002]. Running from coast-to-coast he scored one victory after another. In some cases they were come from behind wins in places where he pulled weak candidates across the finish line.

Last week the president declared an “economic emergency” and cut the pay raise of all federal workers by one percent.*
Perhaps that doesn’t seem like much, but like the “broken pinkie,” little things can be the beginning of big problems. Don’t forget there are tens of thousands of federal workers and they will not forget.

Personally I don’t know when the “emergency” in the economy came up. It must have been after the election because George W. never mentioned any problems on the campaign trail. I thought I heard him telling us that things were so good we needed a bigger tax cut for whoever got the last one to put more money in the economy. Certainly, federal workers would have happily spent the $12 + billion that the president cut from their paychecks.

The president said a lot of things last month, among them, that if his team was elected, he could fix things he thought needed fixing. I sure didn’t think that cutting the pay of the people who work for him was solving a problem.

I was wondering if he thinks there needs to be something about Labor that needs fixing? “What do you think?”

* President Bush’s proposed 1% cut in federal pay increases was ignored by Congress, which recently passed the full 4.1% increase thanks to the work of the American Federation of Government Employees and other public sector unions.