Archive for March, 2010

Card Check: No Sleep Til Brooklyn

There can be no rest until card check is six feet under. That’s the message from Sen. John Thune, who has told a Chamber of Commerce crowd: “We cannot let up. We have to be vigilant. We’ve got to stay on this issue. This is organized labor’s No. 1 priority… We have to defeat this. … We have to be prepared because this could happen on very short notice.”

Indeed.

Employee Free Choice Act: Binding Interest Abdication

There’s a fantastic letter to the editor running up in Detroit that discusses the all-too-infrequently discussed binding interest arbitration provision of the Employee Free Choice Act. James Wahlman of Troy writes in:

Parties to first contracts could arbitrate their issues now, but rarely do, because they would be turning over their wages, benefits and working conditions to a third party who probably has little or no expertise in the parties’ business, no practical experience in their operations and, most important, will not have to live with the consequences of the decision.

The very important business of labor relations and bargaining is best left to the parties involved, no matter how imperfect the process may be.

Indeed, even the best-intentioned arbitrator can not know the full business needs of any firm or any single workforce. It’s like asking a general practitioner to do open heart surgery: you could get lucky, but more than likely the patient isn’t going to make it.

To leave an employer and employees in such a position as to have their interests superseded by a government bureaucrat is to totally abdicate business and moral responsibility.

Card Check: When You Wish Upon A Star

The Workforce Fairness Institute has a fantastic new web video up:

More Card Check Reading …

Card Check Reading To Kick Off Your Week

Given the ebbs and flows of news related to the horrifically misnamed Employee Free Choice Act and its apparent waning in likelihood of passage on Capitol Hill, we awoke this morning to find a decent group of mentions of card check going around.

Here are a couple worth checking out:

As we’ve said before, this issue refuses to go away completely, which means attention can’t be diverted from it completely.