December 20, 2004
By David Swanson, ILCA Media Coordinator
Part of the Media Blackout series on underreported labor stories
The AFL-CIO will be 50 years old in 2005. Its leaders have sat down and met with every U.S. President during those 50 years, except one, George W. Bush.
The compassionate conservative will not talk to the representatives of organized workers. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney made this point in a speech on Labor Day of 2003, in which he called Bush’s refusal to meet “a travesty.”
Sweeney also referred to Bush’s as “the most anti-worker Administration in decades,” and ran through a partial list of Bush’s attacks on labor. The situation has only grown more extreme