Senate Votes $170 Billion in Tax Breaks
For Business; Zilch for Jobless Workers

By a vote of 92 to 5, the U.S. Senate passed a bill on May 11 that would give tax breaks and giveaways of $170 billion over 10 years to benefit domestic manufacturers and multinational corporations. A helluva lot of Democratic “friends of labor” voted for this bill at a time when the federal budget is drowning in red ink and federal funding for education and health care is shrinking.

The 900-page bill, a bonanza for corporate lobbyists, offers tax breaks for virtually every business interest, from pharmaceutical companies, energy industries and domestic manufacturers to cruise ship operators, race track owners and archery promoters.

The new tax package would replace a tax break for exporters that the World Trade Organization had found illegal. It would lower the corporate tax rate from its current 35% to 32% for domestic manufacturers. It provides American multinationals with an assortment of provisions to help them compete in the global marketplace. It also contains scores of special-interest items that business lobbyists have been trying to include in the tax law for years.

In their excessively generous gift to business interests at the expense of the nation’s taxpayers, Republican and Democratic senators were of one mind: this being an election year, they expected wealthy corporate donors to return the favor.

In their desire to curry favor with the business community, both Republicans and Democrats overlooked the soaring federal budget deficits and the escalating costs of the war in Iraq, now at $5 billion a month. They also dismissed critics who say that, with profits showing strength and productivity on the rise, there are more important sectors of the economy that need government assistance.

To ensure passage of the tax bill, Senate Republicans had reluctantly agreed to Democratic demands for a vote on an amendment to extend unemployment payments to 1.5 million workers who have exhausted their benefits. That amendment, however, fell one vote short of the 60 needed for passage.

It was disturbing to union members that Senator John Kerry, the AFL CIO’s candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was the lone senator who failed to vote on the unemployment benefits issue, that might have made a difference in the outcome

Kerry was on the campaign trail when the vote was taken. He said that his vote would not have helped, since some of the Republicans who had voted for the amendment would have changed their minds if they thought the measure would pass. Nevertheless, Kerry’s absence from the voting is regarded as, at the very least, a symbolic blunder.

It is troubling how the AFL-CIO, with 13 million dues payers, who play such an important role in producing the goods and services of our economy, are treated with so little respect by Congress. In the 2000 election, union households accounted for a spectacular 26% of the total national vote. Yet organized labor has not won a single piece of legislation on its agenda in years, even when Democrats occupied the White House and both houses of Congress.

Why does the AFL-CIO spend many millions on candidates fir high office, supplying them with thousands of volunteers--and getting nothing in return, even when they win?

The Sweeney administration played this disgraceful, servile role in the presidential elections of 1996 and 2000. Are we going to get the same brush-off treatment in 2004, after we spend $44 million of dues-payer money? Isn’t it time for our national leaders to show some spine?

weekly “LaborTalk” and ”Labor and the War” column can be viewed at our Web site www.laboreducator.org. Union members who want information about the AFL-CIO rank-and-file reform movement should visit www.rankandfileaflcio.org.