More than any other industry, the construction industry will be the starkest example of how quickly jobs will be lost under the hallucino-genically-named Employee Free Choice Act.

As a non-union contractor can bid on jobs based on price and reputation, if he is unionized under EFCA, for as long as negotiations take (be it EFCA’s 120 days or longer), he will be unable to bid the work which will result in near immediate job losses.

As/if there is binding arbitration, nearly all trade unions have area-wide agreements which forbid individual contracts with more favorable terms. This means that unions will have to rely on arbitrator decisions to place newly-unionized contractors into the area wide agreement or abandon the employees of the newly unionized employer.

If the former is the case, the immediate jump in costs will put the newly unionized employer in a severly uncompetitive position if he can no longer bid the work (which means his employees go onto the union bench with all other unemployed construction workers).

Or, if the latter is the case and the union abandons the workers but the damage has already been done to the contractors bidding capabilities, there will be unemployment on that end as well.

In all cases, for construction workers, EFCA is a lose/lose proposition.