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

ABC members continue to stand up against the Employee Free Choice Act. Today, Brett McMahon of Miller and Long writes on Project Labor Agreements, EFCA, and those who will pay the real price for bad laws. He writes:

… unions stand to gain easier unionization if the controversial Employee

We’re not investing ourselves too much in trying to read the tea leaves on recent comments by Sen. Tom Harkin, which seemed to blame the health of former Sen. Ted Kennedy on the failure to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

Shopfloor has an interesting look at Harkin comments, then and now.

We simply remain hopeful that the Senator’s new-found faith in secret ballots carries over to his work on EFCA.

It’s the oldest problem around: how does a sales team pitch a product that a lot of people aren’t wanting to buy? If you’re a Dilbert fan, the answer is here. If you’re an organized labor fan, the question is much more complicated.

Apparently the head of the AFL-CIO has decided to give organized labor a PR makeover. According to US News and World Report’s website:

Richard Trumka, expected to be elected head of the AFL-CIO later this week, knows labor has an image problem. And he’s ready to take it on. “Our goal,” he says, “is to try to begin to speak again for all workers.” Already, he’s planning to reach out to blacks, young workers, and the working poor. He blames the media in part for the bad image, suggesting that editors cut or trash broader stories on the labor movement.

There’s going to be a number of problems for this re-branding campaign because there are a number of very serious and legitimate objections people have to the way union officials have set up to represent only some workers. Here are some of the not-so-small obstacles:

• Approval of unions in the U.S. is at an all-time low, with 46 percent saying unions mostly hurt the companies they organize, 51 percent saying they mostly hurt the economy, and 62 percent saying they mostly hurt non-union workers
• It will be difficult to explain how unions speak for all workers when they push for union-only Project Labor Agreements that raise costs for taxpayers and cut out most of the construction industry from vital public projects
• It’s also going to be difficult to speak for all workers when organized labor spends heavily to push an unpopular political agenda

All that — and, of course, the wildly unpopular Employee Free Choice Act. So, good luck to union officials hoping to put lipstick on this proverbial pig. We recommend that they address the core concerns of Americans before they go investing too much hope in smoke and mirrors.

Item: Gallup reports that “Americans

Reaction continues to stream in over the apparent disconnect between the federal government’s rule against card check union organizing for its employees and the bill before Congress that would institute the same scheme for the private sector workforce.

As an example of some of the response, see this post over at Hot Air. To be fair to the Administration, the law is already in place for federal employee unionizing efforts so it’s possible they’d want to extend card check there, as well.

But here’s the interesting thing: who is covered by EFCA and who isn’t. Because EFCA alters the National Labor Relations Act, it would NOT affect some interesting groups:

• The federal government, as we’ve seen, would be immune from card check organizing under the EFCA
• State and local governments are also exempt
• Railway workers, in-home care providers, and a handful of other small carve-outs

Frustrating Interesting that state and local governments have ensured that they wouldn’t have to live by the same rules as those running a business.

Also, it’s important not to let those small carve-outs distract from the really important numbers. According to the Heritage Foundation, the Employee Free Choice Act would impact 4 million small businesses and would threaten the right to a private ballot for 105 million working Americans.

While President Obama has been busy telling labor he supports the Employee Free Choice Act, his administration has been busy making him the latest Democrat to protect private ballots in practice but support a bill that would effectively end them in most workplace union elections.

In an exclusive today, the Washington Times’ Amanda Carpenter reports:

While the Obama administration and its Democratic allies in Congress press to allow private-sector workers to unionize by signing authorization cards instead of voting by secret ballot, the government’s legal-aid program for the poor has declared the so-called “card check” strategy “unreliable” and rejected an effort by some of its own workers to organize that way.

The Legal Services Corp., a congressionally chartered, taxpayer-funded entity, even hired a law firm to rebuff the efforts of workers in its oversight offices to gain union representation by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), forcing the workers to conduct a vote by secret ballot later this week.

The LSC’s decision has prompted concerns on Capitol Hill that the government may be trying to impose a solution on private businesses that its own agencies and panels are reluctant to follow.

Indeed, it’s against the law to use card check for federal agencies:

“They have to go through the secret-ballot election,” said Sarah Whittle Spooner, legal counsel for the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which has jurisdiction over government agencies. “There is no process for voluntarily organizing in the federal sector.”

The president is not the first Democrat to be put in this position. We were encouraged when Sen. Harkin recently endorsed secret ballots for internal Democratic politics.
That’s to say nothing of Big Labor’s own hypocrisy on the matter. Then there was the infamous letter from Democrats, including EFCA House author George Miller, who recommended secret ballots for Mexican workers. There was the case of now-Labor Secretary Solis.

And the list goes on over at Shopfloor.org.