NEW ORLEANS — The Bush Administration’s FY 2003 budget submission “neglects major transportation needs, fails to offer serious assistance to the unemployed, and embraces misguided privatization schemes,” leaders of 34 transportation unions today declared at the winter Executive Committee meeting of the Transportation Trades Department, AFL-CIO.
The Executive Committee expressed outrage that “this Administration seems indifferent to the needs of the unemployed,” and that the President’s budget is a “major disappointment . . . by not providing extended unemployment benefits and serious health care assistance to laid-off workers.”
The transportation union leaders issued a strong rebuke of the President’s almost $9 billion cut in highway spending that will claim tens of thousands of jobs at a time when the economy is reeling and workers are suffering from massive job cuts. The statement endorses pending legislation (H.R. 3694/S. 1917) to correct a funding shortfall the President could have addressed but chose not to despite a $19 billion surplus in the Highway Trust Fund.
“The last thing the Bush budget would do is put people back to work,” said TTD President Sonny Hall. “Transportation workers across the country will mobilize in favor of a better budget, one that understands that Americans are hurting and invests in jobs and rebuilding our nation.”
The Executive Committee also pledged to shore up the failing finances of Amtrak by endorsing a $1.2 billion appropriation for the passenger rail carrier in FY 2003. Transportation labor pledged to “redouble its effort to deal with Amtrak’s current government-inspired fiscal crisis, a result of years of anemic federal funding, that last month claimed 1,000 jobs and is threatening the future of the passenger carrier’s entire long-distance train network.”
The policy resolution said that if Amtrak is funded at $521 million as proposed by the President, 7,000 Amtrak workers could lose their jobs and service to 8 million passengers could be eliminated. TTD leaders also said that the budget’s support for breaking up and privatizing Amtrak was “downright dangerous,” adding that the British experience with privatized rail has been a tragic failure, with accidents, chronic delays and system failures, and high fares leading to the overall breakdown of that nation’s passenger rail system.
The White House budget also attempts to breath new life into a tired, old – and dangerous – idea: privatizing our air traffic control system. The policy resolution noted the Administration put ideology ahead of safety, ignoring recent public reports that the privatized British system, Nats, is “on the brink of bankruptcy” and may need a government and bank bail-out.
“Transportation labor warned in the 2000 elections that then Gov. George Bush had already embraced dangerously flawed proposals to privatize or commercialize the air traffic control system,” the executive committee notes. The President’s budget “validates our worst fears about this Administration’s pro-privatization bias.”
Equally disturbing, TTD leaders said, were the comments the Bush Administration made in releasing its budget that indicated it plans to open the U.S.-Mexico border to commercial motor carrier traffic from Mexico before a series of congressionally-mandated safety requirements are fully implemented.
“We will call on Congress to assert its oversight authority in demanding that the Administration fulfill and fully fund the new safety requirements mandated in Murray-Shelby before, not after, operating authority is granted to Mexican motor carriers,” the executive committee declared.
The policy statement also criticizes the budget’s elimination of shipbuilding subsidies and calls for $7.2 billion in mass transit funding as reflected in the Bush budget and required in the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century.
For a copy of the resolutions, visit www.ttd.org.
TTD represents 34 member unions in the aviation, rail, transit, trucking, highway, longshore, maritime and related industries.