thetruthaboutefca.com | The Truth About The Employee Free Choice Act & Card Check

Our friends over at the Chamber of Commerce and Chamberpost.com have a powerful image:

Does this mean good things? Is it a sign that we can finally put away — like these banners — the threat of the Employee Free Choice Act and with it the assault on small business, jobs, and the economy?

Chamberpost reports, nay:

A second banner just around the corner was taken down as well. But now the bad news. BNA reports today that the AFL-CIO is “not backing away” from EFCA. So removing the issue from public view might not indicate surrender, but merely that a decision has been made by the AFL-CIO to bypass a public debate on card check in Congress to try and slip it through the back door.

SEIU is running some powerful quotes from the President, who says he’s a “pro-union guy.”

Lots of quotes worthy of note …

But a lot of things that we’re doing have to do with how is the Department of Labor operating to make sure that workplace safety rules are enforced; to make sure that if the federal government is helping to finance a program, that we’ve got a project labor agreement in place that assures that people are paid a decent wage and they’re getting a fair deal. Who am I appointing to the National Labor Relations Board, so that when a union tries to organize, it doesn’t take five years before you can even get a ruling, and then it turns out that the ruling somehow conveniently always is against the union.

And this view of economics …

And sometimes people say, well, unions are what’s making us not competitive. Well, that’s just not true. Unions are only, at this point in the private sector, probably less than 10 percent of the economy. So the notion that somehow that’s what is creating competition with other countries that pay lower wages, that’s not the case. The fact of the matter is that is what’s going to help us become competitive is if we’ve got middle-class workers making middle-class wages with middle-class benefits, who can then go out and shop, and support a family, and buy a new car and pay their mortgage, which will create more business opportunities and maintain America as the greatest market on Earth. And if we do that, then we’re going to be successful.”

And then there’s this:

Now, look, some people don’t want unions, and that’s great. If you feel that you can look after your own interests, I respect that. But what we — but one of the things that we stand for as Americans is the freedom to decide I’m going to join with my brothers and sisters at that workplace to try to get a better deal — not through force, not through coercion, but just by us agreeing to bargain. And we just want to make sure that there’s a level playing field in that process. That’s something that I strongly believe in, and it’s part of the American tradition.

Notice that “not through force, not through coercion” part? So did we. It’s unfortunate that those reasonable values haven’t led to a vocal rebuke of the Employee Free Choice Act, which the president says he supports. EFCA is all about taking away the voice of an individual worker who doesn’t “want unions” and that’s not great.

This is a case where rhetoric and policy aren’t matching up.

An avid reader and friend of The Truth About EFCA points us to an alarming story…

A federal judge has ordered Illinois Central Railroad Co. to reinstate a conductor who spent 16 months in federal prison for embezzling union funds (United Transp. Union v. Illinois Central R.R. Co., N.D. Ill., No. 08 CV 4001, 3/16/10) …

Click through for the entire absurdity, Aside from being bothersome, why does it reach to the level of alarming? Simple: It shows how ridiculous an arbitrator’s decision can seem, and the so-called Employee Free Choice Act — even if stripped of the most notorious “card check” provision — carries language that would impose a government arbitrator into the labor-relations process. That spells trouble, and it’s yet another reason EFCA is the wrong track for America.

Oklahoma’s state Americans For Prosperity leader writes in the Edmond Sun regarding recess-appointed National Labor Relations Board member Craig Becker:

Becker is a controversial NLRB nominee for a good reason: He thinks he can implement the so-called Employee Free Choice Act

We have long known — and long documented — the heavy costs associated with the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act. These costs include the sacrifice of important principles, such as workers’ rights to choose in a free and fair election whether to join a union, and the right for employees to get a vote on their contract terms (rather than have a federal bureaucrat impose them on workers and small business).

But the costs are much more direct than that. We have long hosted the study by Dr. Anne Layne-Farrar, which found that the economic toll of EFCA would include job decreases ranging from 600,000-5 million. Now, the American Enterprise Institute has taken out its calculator and best estimates in a new study, which finds:

If the EFCA returns unionization rates to 1970s levels, it could reduce economy- wide employment and gross domestic product by close to 4 percent. This translates to about 4.5 million jobs lost and over $500 billion in lost output and income. Job loss resulting from EFCA will tend to fall disproportionately on workers with relatively low levels of education and skills. Ironically, these are the very workers the proposed legislation is intended to help.

The one thing worse than just killing jobs in this economy would be to attack the engine of job growth, which is small business. But lo and behold, AEI finds:

EFCA will be particularly costly to small businesses, which typically start out with small profit margins, face high initial failure rates, and are less likely to have specialized human resources staff to deal with labor disputes and union organization. Between 2003 and 2006, 84 percent of new union certification elections were held at companies with less than 100 employees.

The Congress has yet to officially kill EFCA and card check “compromises” are still floated routinely in the hallways and smallways of power. The longer these concepts are allowed to fester, the longer millions of jobs and small businesses are under threat.

Well, perhaps not babes, but certainly college students. Two of them write in Pomona’s college paper that the food staffs working at the institution are looking to unionize. No problem there, right, it’s a free country.

Where the issue becomes a bit absurd is the nature of the students’ argument, captured rather well in their headline: “Card-Check Is Still The Best Path To Labor Peace.” The pair seem to be worried that some sort of food fight, if you will permit the pun, will break out and starve the school of its sanctuary status.

Instead, they want card check — as do all student activists who have been put up to their protests by union bosses (see here for one great example). So what they really want is less voice for each individual worker as long as it means a greater voice for the union and NO voice for the employer.

Certainly this can’t be the lessens with which we hope to educate our nation’s college students.