thetruthaboutefca.com | The Truth About The Employee Free Choice Act & Card Check

Cato Institute scholar Doug Bandow has a new article over at National Review Online, and it’s worth checking out. He looks at elections unions win, and the ones they lose (make sure to especially note the number of decertification elections that end up removing unions as bargaining representatives). But here’s the real point, and it comes down to perception:

In organized labor

We have mentioned before, and NAM’s Carter Wood has been documenting, a scandalous effort on the part of union officials and their surrogates to blatantly lie about a key point in the debate over the Employee Free Choice Act.

Knowing it is incredibly unpopular to take away secret ballots, EFCA proponents are denying the realities of the law. Worse, they have taken part of a sentence from the Wall Street Journal to support their cause. The Wall Street Journal was not kind of amused. Having set the record straight, it should have been a closed case. But then comes the latest edition of the Dallas Morning News, which carries this letter to the editor …

I enjoyed John Palter’s diatribe against unions and AFL-CIO leader Jim McCasland’s response. The right-wingers are trying to make it a union vs. business thing, when it’s actually corporations vs. employees. Palter’s contention that the new legislation would cancel the secret ballot is false. Even the corporate-friendly Wall Street Journal editors acknowledge that it wouldn’t. — Gene Lantz, Dallas

You know what they say about lies spreading half-way round the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. Time to lace up again.

A legal scholar has already advanced the idea that portions of the Employee Free Choice Act are unconstitutional — primarily on the grounds that they curtail employer speech and violate basic laws of private contract. But this morning former Department of Justice lawyers David B. Rivkin, Jr. and Lee A. Casey argue that EFCA’s card check provision’s elimination of secret ballots during union campaigns would also violate the constitution.

They argue:

Sanctioning — and thereby promoting — demands that employees publicly disclose how they feel about unionization clearly violates their First Amendment entitlement to vote and practice their speech privately. Significantly, unlike other cases in which such restrictions have been upheld, union organizers cannot articulate even a semblance of an offsetting First Amendment value. While they may complain that the current system does not favor unionization and hence inhibits their associational rights, the problem, if any, arises from possible employer intimidation — not from the secret ballot as such.

In this context, the new law would entitle organized labor to the government’s imprimatur of its card-check choice. With the government thus supporting demands that employees publicly state their opinions on a controversial matter, the courts should view card-check’s provisions as being ill-tailored to meet the problem of employer intimidation, and thus, unconstitutional.

For art that is among the best to capture the problem, see David G. Klein’s accompanying cartoon:

From Sunday’s Public Opinion in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania:

In response to the Employee Free Choice Act — it can’t be passed. If it does, I can guarantee you there will be millions of people out of work.

I was in a union for 23 years and in that amount of time, it bankrupted four big trucking companies and put at least 5,000 people out of work.

Also, when I went to withdraw my union pension, they didn’t credit me nine-and-a-half years of my 23 years of service, because I lost my withdraw card. Plus, I know some other employees who didn’t get credit for two years up to five years.

With regard to what was published in the paper concerning Jim Martin, I worked there for approximately eight years. I really enjoyed working and he gave us better health benefits, profit sharing, retiring, and actually I made more money there and wasn’t on call 24/7 like I was with those corrupted unions.

So please call your senator and tell him to vote against this bill.

Robert D. Peterson Sr.

Chambersburg

This morning, the Wall Street Journal’s great columnist Kimberly Strassel examined the current state of play for the Employee Free Choice Act. Her conclusion? A worried “Business Beats Card Check

A disturbing trend continues with union officials and their front groups telling only half the story of stealing secret ballots.