Republicans promise to roll back everything Labor Day honors

Here's one way to understand just how anti-worker the 2012 Republican platform is. Look at this chart showing the relationship between the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's funding and fatal work injuries, and consider that the Republican platform says that:

But no peril justifies the regulatory impact of Obamacare on the practice of medicine, the Dodd-Frank Act on financial services, or the EPA's and OSHA's overreaching regulation agenda. A Republican Congress and President will repeal the first and second, and rein in the third.

These are people's lives we're talking about. And where lives are not lost, we're talking about injuries and illnesses. Saved by an "overreaching regulation agenda" that has, under President Barack Obama, amounted to 0.7 new safety regulations per year after eight years stalled at 0.3 per year under George W. Bush. OSHA has regulated two chemicals since 1997. There are two new chemicals developed every day. But to Republicans, this is too much regulation. They would make it basically impossible for the government to establish new regulations protecting workers from the new dangers they'd do nothing to rein in.

That's just one of the GOP's anti-worker planks. Republicans would also end laws protecting wage standards for federally funded construction projects and even ending construction project-specific agreements on wages and working conditions. They would turn the National Labor Relations Board from a body that sometimes supports workers and sometimes supports bosses to one that exists only to give more power to management and prevent workers from organizing. And they would turn the entire country into Wisconsin:

We salute the Republican Governors and State legislators who have saved their States from fiscal disaster by reforming their laws governing public employee unions. We urge elected officials across the country to follow their lead [...]

That's right: What the Republicans are planning, what their platform promises, is to bring to the federal level the assault on workers that Scott Walker, John Kasich and Mitch Daniels have been carrying out in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana. They announced that plan the week before Labor Day. They have nine more weeks to win the power to implement it. And we have nine weeks to stop them.