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

The Daily News carries this editorial with good points:

The Service Employees International Union, a strong supporter of the so-called Employee Free Choice Act, would appear to be having second thoughts on a key provision of the bill

A great op-ed running in the Visalia Times in California looks at the history of protecting secret ballots for the state’s farm workers and efforts there — like the national effort to pass the ballot-impairing Employee Free Choice Act — to open up employees to intimidation by union organizers through a “card check” process.

Don Curlee writes:

California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act was established in 1975. It is often referred to as landmark legislation, and touted as a showcase because of its provision for secret-ballot elections.

Now, suddenly, union adherents are saying they need a different mechanism by which workers can choose to be represented by them, one that doesn’t involve secret voting. They offer the notorious “card check” procedure as an alternative.

Wherever the “card check” system has operated, it has demonstrated how easily workers can be intimidated by union representatives who seek their signature or mere check marks in the union organizer’s presence. In the secret-ballot process, nobody knows who approves or rejects a union. Only the final vote count is important.

Current “card check” supporters have turned reason and facts on their heads by saying workers feel intimidated by their employers when the secret-ballot process takes place.

In a Daily American news story suggesting that a vote on the Employee Free Choice Act may be imminent, ABC member Brett McMahon offers thoughts on how important this fight is:

In the Chicago Tribune, Mary Halm writes:

Eliminating the voice of the employer, and the employee in some circumstances, seems like an odd way to go about giving workers a direct path to form unions. Toughening penalties against employers who break the law sounds fair, except the bill would not toughen penalties against unions that break the law. And, binding arbitration – which would essentially put business decisions in the hands of a government bureaucrat – would eliminate jobs and drive up the cost of doing business in Illinois and the rest of the country.

Small business owners are the engine of America, not the government, and definitely not the unions. It seems to me this bill should not only be “compromised;” it should be killed.

You might not know it (but probably have an inkling) that the Teamsters have some pensions that are so bad there are companies willing to pay billions of dollars just to get out of the plans and then still pay their obligations to retired employees. Talk about a ringing non-endorsement.

Anywho, it’s worth remembering when you read that the Teamsters are trying to use the Employee Free Choice Act to temporarily fix their broken plans at the expense of workers’ rights, private ballots, and a healthy free enterprise system.

Three cheers for Rep. Buck McKeon, who writes in The Hill:

[The Employee Free Choice Act] is a proposal that could organize workers against their wishes and impose a contract that neither workers nor management approved. Its reach could extend to businesses as small as a dozen workers or fewer, driving up the cost and complexity of doing business.

If the question is how to keep and create jobs in this country, the answer is to start by rejecting policies that would destroy them.