Is Card Check Unimportant?

Thursday, January 21st, 2010 by Admin

Labor leaders are in disarray following the Republican win in Tuesday’s special Senate election in Massachusetts, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Kris Maher. The whole story is worth reading, but a couple parts in particular caught our eyes:

First, one labor leader says:

Tuesday’s win by Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts dealt a blow to labor’s multiyear, multimillion dollar effort to put Democrats in the majority of the House and Senate. Labor officials viewed the 60-vote Democratic majority in the Senate as essential for passing the organizing bill, which would benefit unions by shortening the time period before union-organizing elections, mandating arbitration of first contracts and boosting penalties for employers who violate labor laws.

The bill was already on shaky ground, due to strong opposition from business, Republicans and some moderate Democrats. Now some labor officials believe it’s doomed.

“Personally I think that becomes a dead issue for the year 2010,” said Thomas Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists. “It’s an election year and I think people are going to focus on what’s most important.”

Most important? We thought EFCA was supposed to be the one-stop economic cure-all. At least that’s what several years worth of blathering propaganda promised, though it didn’t seem to convince many folks.

But here’s this other little gem:

“Congress and the White House need to focus like a laser beam on the jobs issue and failure to do so will have consequences in November,” said Thea Lee, deputy chief of staff for the AFL-CIO. She declined to comment on specific strategy.

Shouldn’t we assume our elected leaders have been focusing like a laser beam on jobs this whole time, since that’s all we’ve heard about for the last two years? Perhaps that focus on jobs is why Congress has been so reluctant to pick up the issue of card check, since it is a jobs-killer.

Still, other labor officials are saying now is the time to double down on the union agenda. Our friends at Shopfloor.org noted this quote from SEIU’s Andy Stern:

The reason Ted Kennedy

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One Response to “Is Card Check Unimportant?”

  1. January 22nd, 2010 at 6:47 am

    Silence Dogood says:

    EFCA is the jab that keeps the oppo at a distance while the aggressor takes openings to pound away with devastating inside body-shots. EFCA has forced the oppo to consume its energy defending away from the real battleground, and into retreat.

    Or you could consider a ‘Trojan Horse’ metaphor.

    It’s not clear how much run remains because a strategy that drags on becomes a drag.

    Either way, EFCA is/has been a brilliant Alinsky-style ‘military’ tactic that ought to be remembered and deployed by our side as the tide turns against the Left.