The next four years will see union activists and progressives waging a largely defensive fight to protect ordinary working Americans from unprecedented attacks by President Bush and the Republican Congress.

As AFL-CIO Legislative Director Bill Samuel told an interviewer, “Our focus will be on protecting all the gains we’ve won over the last 70 years.”

High on the list will be Social Security and Medicare, two of the baseline programs that provide millions of seniors and others with a tenuous lifeline to the diminishing middle class. President Bush wasted no time after his reelection in vowing to step up his drive for an “ownership” society — a code word for privatization of the two programs.

Bush also plans to try for fundamental overhauls to the U.S. tax system, by first making his disastrous tax cuts permanent, then by pushing for some type of shift away from taxes on wealth to taxes on consumption. If Bush succeeds in enacting a national sales tax, for example, the burden will fall overwhelmingly on those with the lowest incomes, who spend the highest percentage of their income on basic necessities.

Labor’s battle to protect overtime for millions of workers became more daunting Nov. 2, as the margins in Congress to block Bush’s new overtime rules tipped further in the president’s favor.

Those margins also will make it harder to increase the minimum wage or to enact the Employee Free Choice Act, the proposal in Congress that would make it easier for workers to join unions. Upcoming vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board also are more likely to be filled by conservatives under Bush, as are the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

The president also can be expected to continue catering to corporate interests in enacting policies on jobs, health care, trade and job safety.

Union activism and hard work will be ever more critical in the next four years — both to fight Bush’s policies, and to continue strengthening labor’s political efforts for 2006 and 2008.