President Bush's new campaign ads, which feature fleeting images of firemen removing the remains of victims from the attack on the World Trade Center, have ignited a firestorm of criticism from the union representing New York firefighters. The president of the International Association of Firefighters, Harold Schaitberger, called the ads "disgraceful" and "disgusting," while the union's executive board passed a resolution accusing the president of "trading on the heroism of those 343 FDNY members who fell during the terrorist attacks ? to win sympathy for his campaign."
The union's complaints should come as no surprise since the IAFF was an early supporter of Sen. John Kerry; in fact, they were the only union to endorse Kerry before the New Hampshire primary. Less well known, however, is the IAFF's own exploitation of those fallen heroes of September 11 to advance the cause of forced unionism for all public safety workers.
Two days after the terrorists struck, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee -- chaired at the time by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) -- passed the IAFF's top legislative priority, the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act. A few nights later, Sen. Kennedy tried to sneak the bill through the full Senate on "unanimous consent," a maneuver more appropriate for non-controversial items such as National Dairy Week. Despite its innocuous-sounding title, the bill was a huge power grab by public employee unions to force individual police and firefighters to accept union representation regardless of whether they want it. The legislation would not only have forced those 18 states that do not have collective bargaining laws for public safety workers to recognize unions as exclusive bargaining agents for police and firefighters, it would also have pre-empted existing state collective bargaining laws if they were more restrictive than the federal legislation.