Archive for January, 2010
Political Prediction: Card Check Is SAD
Running over at Roll Call (behind a subscription password/login):
Now that increasingly beleaguered Democrats have succeeded in securing health care legislation, the primary question haunting the Beltway is whether Big Labor will get a vote on its coveted
Can A “Progressive Victory” Be A Loss For Employees?
Randy Shaw at BeyondChron, San Francisco’s “alternative daily news,” takes stock of the progressive agenda and eyes possible “victories” in 2010.
Oddly, the Employee Free Choice Act is one of them. Why odd? Because progressive values tend to run along the lines of these described by George Lakoff in The Nation: “care and responsibility, fairness and equality, freedom and courage, fulfillment in life, opportunity and community, cooperation and trust, honesty and openness.”
All sound pretty good. So where’s the value of denying working Americans the right to vote on whether they join a union? Where’s the value of substituting government bureaucrats for the time-tested method of contract between consenting parties?
No, EFCA would offend any true progressive’s ideals. Arguing otherwise is at best a stretch designed to assuage one’s guilt over pushing such an atrocious piece of legislation.
Theme: Card Check and 2010
The meme continues: Will politicians try to force card check through in 2010? It’s something we’ll be hearing about until the issue is finally resolved. The latest to discuss it is Terence Scanlon, who writes in the Washington Times:
Unions don’t like losing unionization elections, so they want the U.S. government to accept the sign up cards that they use to call for an election instead. This would effectively replace the private ballot with the public clipboard and open up workers to intimidation and manipulation.
Card check was all but declared dead last year. Senate Democrats had the votes to end a filibuster, but there were enough moderate Democrats who didn’t want to go along with it. Where have we heard that one before?
SEIU: “Ruining” Card Check “For The Whole Labor Movement”
Great find by LaborUnionReport.com, which points to a blog highly critical of executives for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
We’ve pointed out many of the worst points of hypocrisy of SEIU when it comes to the sanctity of ballots, allegations of coercion, and more, but this list of SEIU’s Top 10 Bloopers is great.
Number nine is of particular interest:
9. Ruining EFCA for the whole Labor Movement. The boss tactics, the bullshit legal challenges, firing leaders, threatening loss of benefits if workers vote for the union–a cornucopia of violations. It would merely be embarrassing if it weren’t about to play a starring role in 2010′s national debate on labor law reform. You think the Chamber of Commerce hasn’t already cut some ads on this? Andy, Tasty hopes you are smarter than you appear and there is a super secret plan at work on this one!
It’s probably far too late to come up with a “super secret plan” that distracts Americans from EFCA’s unpopular aspects — effectively eliminating secret ballots and imposing federal bureaucrats to set labor contracts for small businesses.
SEIU has indeed played an important role in the debate over card check — as a cautionary tale.
