Op-Ed Columnist: Another Battle for Bush By BOB HERBERT, NYTimes

The front-page headline in The Daily News on Thursday said, ”Santa Comes Early to Wall Street.” It was accompanied by a photo of Philip Purcell, the chairman and C.E.O. of Morgan Stanley, who was described by The News as ”the first titan to cash in at the end of a banner year.”

The article cited several executives who were expected to receive year-end bonuses in the $12 million to $17 million range.

The Bush crowd will tell you that these economic goodies are bound to trickle down. Jobs will become plentiful. Pay envelopes will fatten. Nirvana is just around the corner.

The problem with this scenario is that there are no facts to back it up. The closer you look at employment in this country, the more convinced you become that the condition of the ordinary worker is deteriorating, not improving.

The problem is that we are not creating many jobs, and the quality of those we are creating is, for the most part, not good. Job growth at the moment is about 80,000 per month, which is not even enough to cover the new workers entering the job market.

And when the Economic Policy Institute compared the average wage of industries that are creating jobs with those that are losing jobs, analysts found a big discrepancy. The jobs lost paid about $17 an hour, compared with $14.50 an hour for those being created. …

A fierce and bitter war — not bloody like the war in Iraq, but a war just the same — is being waged against American workers. And so far, at least, the Bush administration has been on the wrong side. …

That’s the reality for workers. The corporations would like to hire as few people as possible, keep wages as low as possible, provide as few benefits as possible and work the workers as long and as hard as possible.

The president of the United States should be allied with working families in this struggle.