Card Check Question: Can Media Matters Read?

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 by Admin

It wasn’t so long ago, really, that we wrote in an update on goings-on related to the Employee Free Choice and card check that:

Meanwhile, some are still fighting absurd battles. Media Matters for America is still claiming EFCA wouldn

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5 Responses to “Card Check Question: Can Media Matters Read?”

  1. February 10th, 2010 at 4:40 pm

    Matt says:

    The truth lies within your use of “effectively”. Technically the bill does not strip workers of the right to an employer held election — media matters is correct. Effectively it might because most employees would rather just sign a card which is quicker and easier than the election process which is long. The point is that most workers prefer cards and not elections, so the bill gives them that choice – hence the employee free choice act.

  2. February 10th, 2010 at 8:27 pm

    kevin says:

    You’re apparently the ones who can’t read, if a majority of employees want a secret ballot election, the NLRB will direct one. Saying EFCA “effectively” eliminates the secret ballot is purposely misleading and basically admits that it doesn’t in reality actually end them, or the “effectively” wouldn’t be in there, would it?

  3. February 11th, 2010 at 11:14 am

    admin says:

    Matt, the truth is the truth: the effect of EFCA is to remove secret ballots as an option.

    For Matt and Kevin, here’s the language in EFCA that makes it so:

    “the Board shall not direct an election but shall certify the individual or labor organization as the representative…”

    Once 50% of cards, plus one, are collected — with little respect to how they were collected and how informed an employee may be — then there is no election.

    The notion that employees get a choice is ludicrous on its face.

  4. February 11th, 2010 at 1:05 pm

    Warren says:

    Admin,

    Aside from your tautological proof that “the truth is the truth,” you might also point to public sectors where similar card check provisions have been implemented, such as Illinois, as evidence that card check diminishes the use of secret ballot elections. Matt and Kevin are correct, however: whereas present labor legislation does not eliminate voluntary recognition as an option, EFCA would not eliminate secret ballot elections as an option. What EFCA would do is prevent management from using captive audience speeches and coercive innuendo to dissuade a fully-mobilized majority workforce from getting what they deserve under a law that has been abused and manipulated for almost 70 years: the right to unionize.

    More importantly, it would force management to bargain in good faith with its unionized workforce by eliminating stall tactics. Even as EFCA appears to be dead in the water, management, newspapers and periodicals are circulating memoranda explaining that the best way to avoid union organizing drives is to keep employees happy. If corporations all stopped exploiting their workers tomorrow, the rate of unionization in the private sector (already dismally low) would be nil.

    Instead, corporations are putting their money on long-term benefits for shareholding by funding misinformation sites like this one, greasing the wheels in Washington, continuing to cut wages, benefits, and implementing RIFs, all while outsourcing every job they can manage to developing nations.

    If a majority of a workforce already knows that it wants a union, streamlining the certification process does not strip those employees of their choice: it prevents management from intimidating them through the historically unbalanced campaign period. In any case, the secret ballot election is a red herring. Anyone who has read the bill knows that the true threat to management is the interest arbitration provision. Unfortunately, the interest arbitration provision is a little more difficult to digest and therefore has been a less popular target for pro-management interests like the Chamber of Commerce and The Truth About EFCA.

  5. February 11th, 2010 at 5:38 pm

    admin says:

    Warren,

    Thank you for your comment. You write:

    “whereas present labor legislation does not eliminate voluntary recognition as an option, EFCA would not eliminate secret ballot elections as an option”

    … but there is no option with language that — as we pointed to above — “the Board shall not direct an election but shall certify the individual or labor organization as the representative