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

Personal testimony:

A public service announcement, courtesy of the hard-working Republican staff of the House’s Education and Labor Committee:

Whether the card is collected by a union organizer or mailed, it still denies workers the privacy and protections of the voting booth.

Without that privacy and protection, workers will always be vulnerable. They could be intimidated, coerced, or threatened by union organizers or management. No one should ask workers to publicly declare

The future of the Employee Free Choice Act remains shrouded in mystery as we head back toward the September reconvening of Congress. There is little “news” but plenty of chatter.

Consider this report from The Hill’s Michael O’Brien:

A top labor official said Monday that President Obama and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have indicated that they will not bring up “card check” legislation until after healthcare reform is done in Congress.

AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, the expected incoming president of the influential union, pledged during a web chat on the liberal blog firedoglake that organized labor would work to pass healthcare reform in order to move onto one of its top priorities, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

“The President/and Emanuel have both said they dont intend to bring Employee Free Choice Act up until Health Insurance Reform is done,” Trumka wrote on the blog. “Which gives us an additional reason to do Health Insurance Reform now!”

Meanwhile, over at the Washington Examiner, Brian Johnson writes “there is one provision that labor will never give up: binding arbitration.”

He’s absolutely correct. While unions such as SEIU may want to invest themselves in the “card check” provision to increase the dues-paying membership in the short run, many AFL-CIO unions are dead-set on binding arbitration because it’s the key to getting new employees to prop up failing pension funds.

Johnson concludes on this note:

EFCA-Plus leaves too many questions about arbitrators unanswered while simultaneously giving them unprecedented power. There is no provision that lays out how arbitrators will be chosen, leaving questions about qualifications and bias.

Government is increasing its influence in every part of your life, from what car you can buy to your health insurance. Now they want to dictate to employees and employers the terms of negotiation. Go figure.

Wrong! It’s about many things … control, buckets of money union bosses expect to haul in, and — you guessed it — the political power that money can buy. The folks from Netroots Nation 09 were apparently kind enough to post video of the importance union density plays to electing Democrats:

A more cynical blog would conclude that legislators who support EFCA are doing so for a political advantage. We, however, will simply conclude that some legislators have been genuinely misled about the bill’s attack on workplace democracy and the resulting loss of jobs.

But were EFCA to pass, ignorance would be no excuse for legislators having voted for it or any form of EFCA-lite. Just one more thing for the political calculus.

This weekend the Employee Free Choice Act popped up again in Virginia’s newspapers. This time it was First Piedmont Corp’s Ben J. Davenport laying out the case against the sequel to EFCA, “EFCA 2: More of the Same Same.” Davenport eyes possible alternatives being floated around D.C. corridors:

One provision would shorten the timing of union elections from the current time frame of 42 days to only 5 to 10 days after a union files a petition for election with the NLRB.

So why do the unions want to speed up the time to just a few days? The current system gives both sides ample time to present information to the employees and give them an opportunity to ask questions and challenge the validity of assertions from both sides. Common sense should tell you that 5 to 10 days is not enough time to debate an issue of this importance and make an informed decision. Of course, unions know that the more informed employees become, the less likely they are to vote for a union.

To further limit employer

Ben Smith over at Politico has an interesting story on the increasingly popular political term of “astroturf” — we’ll let you read it to get the gist and decide for yourself what is “genuine” activism and what is bought-and-paid-for support.

What we were interested by is Politico’s repeated inclusion of unions into the groups using astroturf campaigns, including this from a conservative group’s point of view:

The group cited the event