by

Andrew Bard Schmookler

So, the Bush administration is planning once again to veto legislation requiring employers to hold the jobs of American who are compelled, by family emergency, to take a little time off work. How can the president get away with stuff like this and remain popular? This is no "special interest" legislation. We've all got parents, spouses, children-- someone who might need some help from us in a crisis. Even people who drive Jags and Porsches are made of stuff that can break down. Not all of us work for bosses who can fire us if we spend some time at a loved one's bedside. But most of us do. Bush is clearly aligned with that powerful minority that does the firing. That he can get away with it and stay high in the polls shows how much we Americans are suckers for rhetorical sleight of hand. The president who has vetoed family leave legislation before and is about to do it again --the one who is our "environmental president" and our "education president"-- can say a few words about the importance of the family and be our "family president" too. Sometimes the Bushites justify their opposition by waving the banner of economic vitality. Requirements like those that would be imposed by the family leave legislation would be too burdensome for American businesses. What's bad for American business is bad for American jobs-- and that's all you folks out there. But many of the very nations that are overtaking us in the world economy already have such legislation in place. How debilitating can the burden be? The rhetoric can work, however, because we have developed a myopic political culture, one in which public debates are conducted as if there were no other countries in the world whose experience we could draw upon. This myopia suits the entrenched monied interests just fine. It wouldn't pay for us to look too closely at the industrial democracies of Western Europe, for many of them are less captivated than the U.S. by the narrow view that the good life can be measured by the coarse measures of gross national product. Again and again, we are scared away from progressive solutions to our social problems by dire warnings that can seem plausible only if we don't look at the rest of the world. A national health care system? Wouldn't work, too expensive, an abridgment of freedom. Never mind the evidence of countries that stay healthier than we do and spend a good deal less at it. Let's protect the freedom of doctors and hospitals to bleed us from the wallet. A stiff energy tax to promote energy conservation and help close our huge budget deficit? It would strangle our economy. Never mind that the Japanese and Germans spend twice what we do for gas and have leaner, more efficient and faster-growing economies. The oil companies like us better with our present addiction to profligate energy consumption. Thus also with family leave, we are told, we must protect the American corporation from being required to allow the American worker to act like a decent human being in a family emergency without cutting his or her economic throat. Forget the evidence. That's foreign. It's fine for us to be imitated by others, but our political culture discredits it as unAmerican to suggest that we might sometimes learn from the example of other countries. Sometimes, the Bushites shift their ground and provide another rationale. Here is unfurled the banner of liberty. The policy of family leave is a good one, it is conceded. But it should be voluntary. It should be left up to the free choice of individual business, not imposed by government from above. Like Eden with no one watching to see who eats what. Sounds good. Liberty is a great thing, and surely it must include providing room for people to choose wrong. But why is it that when it comes to businesses doing the right thing, these folks sound the libertarian trumpet, while when it comes to our private lives --to matters of abortion, or homosexual relationships, or the use of mind-altering substances-- they want the government right there, in our living rooms and bedrooms, enforcing the right thing and punishing the wrong? The same people who want businesses to be free to fire a mother who stayed home from work to nurse her sick kid are also happy to have workers compelled, without cause, to urinate into cups to see whether they've been doing the wrong thing in their spare time. The same people who are all for law and order when it comes to the guy who takes someone's car don't think society should do anything to protect a worker whose job has been taken from him because he did what he must as a loving and responsible spouse. The rhetorical banners used to justify a veto of family leave legislation are just a cloak for what is really going on. The Bush administration is simply rallying to the defense of its true constituency: those few who already have more --of power and wealth and freedom-- than the rest of us.

Andrew Bard Schmookler is the author of the forthcoming The Illusion of Choice: How the Market System Shapes Our Destiny. ??