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

Over at EFCAreport.com with today’s round-up.

Gary Bauer, the former presidential candidate, offers thoughts over at Human Events.

The Wall Street Journal has the latest gossip about the likelihood of a vote on the Employee Free Choice Act this year:

Chances that Congress will vote on a union-organizing bill this year are dimming as lawmakers make health care and appropriations the top priorities.

Some Democratic senators have been trying for months to find a way around the bill’s most contentious provision, the “card check” rule that would let workers to unionize by simply signing up rather than running a secret-ballot vote.

While attempts at a compromise have made headway, less progress has been made on the bill’s other divisive element: imposing a government-appointed arbitrator to set contract terms — including wages and benefits — if companies and newly formed unions can’t agree within 120 days of bargaining.

Frankly, tha’ts pretty much par for the course as rumors ping back and forth from side to side. But the irony of the union-busting, union-raiding, employee-harassing Service Employees International Union claiming to stand up for workers is a bit too rich to let pass:

Members of the Service Employees International Union are expected to deliver petitions signed by 18,000 members to Congress, arguing that card-check should be part of a final bill. SEIU president Andy Stern said having a majority of workers sign cards is “the fairest way for workers to negotiate for better job security and wages, given the intensity of employer harassment and intimidation.”

Given the union’s history, we shudder to think how they collected those signatures.

As employer groups and free market advocates have been saying for years, the secret ballot elections process for choosing union representation is the best guarantee against retribution fro an employee’s preference. Union officials and their allies have played coy and said there’s no such need for protecting privacy and they’ve tried — increasingly unsuccessfully — to bring Congressional Democrats with them.

Thankfully, many Democrats, especially in the Senate, have decided that the Employee Free Choice Act’s secret-ballot-reducing “card check” provision. And now, even if unintentionally, they are raising the possibility of using secret ballots in their own chairmanship decisions, as reported by The Hill’s Alexander Bolton today:

In an apparent warning to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), some liberal Democrats have suggested a secret-ballot vote every two years on whether or not to strip committee chairmen of their gavels.

Baucus, who is more conservative than most of the Democratic Conference, has frustrated many of his liberal colleagues by negotiating for weeks with Republicans over healthcare reform without producing a bill or even much detail about the policies he is considering.

Continuing to follow news that “card check” is out of the Employee Free Choice Act, the Beltway is still aflutter over what comes next. Here are a couple views.

The Associated Press reports binding arbitration is now the focus:

The willingness of some Democrats to drop the “card check” portion of a union organizing bill has led opponents of the measure to intensify their attack on another major provision: Binding arbitration if a new union and management can’t agree on a first contract within 120 days.

“We suspected from the beginning that the binding arbitration was packaged with the elimination of the secret ballot in order to create a straw man they could take down later,” said Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.

A small group of senators led by Democrat Tom Harkin of Iowa is working out a compromise of the Employee Free Choice Act, one of the most polarizing measures in Congress and the top legislative priority of labor leaders, who want to reverse years of declining union membership.

But … wait … apparently card check isn’t really dead. The Washington Examiner’s Kevin Mooney reports:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is still scheming on behalf of labor bosses to force a vote on Card Check that would short circuit legislative procedures, according to the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (CDW) …

Lots of minor noises coming out of the world of the Employee Free Choice Act. There’s plenty of sound, tons of fury, and it signifies next to nothing. But a couple things to keep in the back of one’s mind:

• Sen. Harkin downplays likelihood of quick EFCA passage and says “We’re not doing anything right now.”
• Pro-Union Legislation Still Anti-Business, Sen. DeMint Says, Signaling GOP Fight
• SEIU attacks wrong group, then gets the group right but the issue wrong.
• The Truth About EFCA, Pensions & The Failing PBGC