In a last minute move, the Bush administration this week the finalization of two major changes to federation regulations that will harm women and working families, labor leaders and women's health activists stated.
Bush imposed new rules on workers seeking to use provisions in the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) to take time off of work without penalty to care for their families. He also moved to finalize ideologically-driven rules that allow health care providers to discriminate against women who try to purchase or seek advice about contraceptives.
New Department of Labor rules will now require workers to give their employers advanced notice before taking time off under the FMLA to care for their family members or tend to their own health care needs.
The new rule ignores the fact that most people who use this provision do so in the case of sudden illness or injury that usually cannot be known in advance, labor advocates noted. The order will force many people to choose between their families and their jobs.
The rule further allows employers to demand more personal medical information from workers seeking to use the federal law in order to protect their jobs in emergency situations.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney accused Bush of using his "final days in office to give business interests one more gift." The new rules, Sweeney added, put greater restrictions on workers and promote job insecurity.
"Given the worsening economic situation facing families, we should be talking about how to expand successful laws like the FMLA to provide workers more job security and flexibility to deal with urgent family situations, not less," he said.
"The new FMLA regulations for workers take us in the wrong direction and are harmful and unnecessary," Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, told reporters. "They will restrict access to protections that workers have relied on for 15 years."
On a separate issue, the Bush administration's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is moving forward with finalizing a rule that will allow health care providers to deny birth control to women clients and patrons despite nationwide protests from women's health care groups and civil liberties groups.
In a letter this week to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and the Center for Reproductive Rights jointly protested the decisions and demanded that the OIRA hold the HHS accountable.
The letter charged that the new HHS rule violates the administration's own regulation against "historical tendency of administrations to increase regulatory activity in their final months."
"The purpose of the deadline was to ensure that agencies did not engage in ill-conceived rulemakings prior to a change of administration," the letter pointed out. As such, the letter went on, women's health care advocates want OIRA to conduct "more formal accounting of the costs and benefits of the proposed Provider Conscience regulation."
In both instances, it is clear that an extremely unpopular president has used executive authority to make one last bid to win the approval of the extreme anti-worker and anti-women constituencies that seem to still support him.
