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

The AP is reporting the local and International Teamsters bodies are split over the endorsement of a North Carolina Democratic Senatorial candidate who’s position on the Employee Free Choice Act is about as mirky as the bill is troubling (for beginners, that’s a lot).

What was the offensive statement that got Cal Cunningham’s union support pulled? He told the AP “I support elections. I think that what we’re about to see emerge from the Senate, if anything, protects elections as the sole way for there to be unions created. That’s something that I would support.”

That seems pretty reasonable to us, and it suggests a union official who doesn’t think that is good enough has an agenda that needs to seriously be examined.

Friends of the U.S. Chamber are asking you to send a postcard to retiring SEIU president Andy Stern and at the same time help say no to card check.

Who knew it was a Hallmark moment?

The American Enterprise Institute is taking a look at events at the National Labor Relations Board and sums up: “If Craig Becker justifies his critics’ fears, the Obama board could push labor law a long way in the wrong direction.”

That is one of those bigger “ifs” and isn’t worth the risk.

The Hill’s Michael O’Brien is reporting comments by Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, who says card check isn’t on the docket for the rest of 2010:

“I don’t think that card-check is going to come up,” McCaskill said during a weekly conference call with Missouri journalists. “It has not come up, and believe me: If card-check, the way it was drafted, was going to come up, it probably would have come up early in 2009, as opposed to now.”

Which is not to say that and an Employee Free Choice Act-like piece of legislation is off the table:

McCaskill said that while senators were still negotiating the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a controversial bill to reform union organizing rules, it was unlikely to even include the actual “card-check” provision itself, which has been the subject of heavy fire from conservatives and business groups.

An EFCA without card check may sound like a good deal, until one remembers the other provisions of the bill are binding interest arbitration — which allows government imposed arbitrators to tell small business how to run their business — and one-sided fines that punish employers but don’t touch abuses by union organizers.

The political calculus reflected in the Senator’s comments seems right to us. We simply hope enough Senators continue to block legislation that is bad work employees, bad for employers, and bad for jobs.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has a look at what Big Labor has gotten, and not, from Democratic majorities in the U.S. Congress and turns the paper’s keen eye toward card check:

he union-supported Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was the first bill President Obama signed into law. Former Rep. Hilda Solis, a union favorite, became secretary of Labor. The government bailout of General Motors saved thousands of union jobs. A health care overhaul passed. And Obama used his recess appointment power to place two labor lawyers on the National Labor Relations Board.

But labor’s biggest wish

Louis Hallacy II has a keen eye for the truth about EFCA, card check and anti-worker measures. He writes into the Holland (Michigan) Sentinel challenging some half-truths on card check and throws the brakes on claims about card check use by the broken-down United Auto Workers:

A card check