Archive for May, 2010
EFCA’s Camel Nose Under Tent
You shouldn’t miss widely distributed blogger Warner Todd Huston’s take on the recent Obama Administration decision to change a decades-old rule on how unions are formed in the airline and railroad industries. He warns it’s “Obama’s first stealth EFCA styled rules implementation,” which means it’s a good reminder that the Employee Free Choice Act is still looming.
SEIU’s New Battle Cry: Charge!
LaborUnionReport.com has some timely insights and analysis regarding Mary Kay Henry, the next president of the nation’s most powerful union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). What caught our attention:
Henry said she has
Hot Off The (PR)resses
It appears the impact of recess-appointed Craig Becker on the National Labor Relations Board may be having subtle but important and negative effects on employers and employees, or at least that’s one of several plausible conclusions to be drawn after reading some great investigatory work by Chamberpost.com’s Brad Peck.
He did some digging and found out that the NLRB is now essentially doing public relations work for unions, putting out notices of union-won elections (which, of course, greatly undercuts the argument for the sinisterly misnamed Employee Free Choice Act). What Peck found was that the PR work was a significant break from the past, when the Board remained neutral, as one would expect given the wording and spirit of the National Labor Relations Act. This left him to conclude:
Unions and some Board folks have in the past cherry picked a few words out of the 1935 policy declaration in the Wagner Act that it is the policy of the US to “encourage” collective bargaining
Card Check Will Not Give Up The Ghost
The Washington Examiner has an editorial that (literally) offers the warning that card check isn’t dead. The paper argues that while the Employee Free Choice Act has moved to the back burner:
… Trumka and Big Labor aren’t giving up, they’re just switching strategies. The new plan is to attach card check to another, must-pass bill before the November elections, which look likely to send legions of new Republicans to Washington who will vote against the proposal. Thus Trumka told the Hill: “Anything we can get it attached to, there are multitudes of things we can get it attached to, and we will. We will get it done and it will be a good thing for the country.”
No, passage of card check would benefit only union bosses like Trumka, who heads an organization that once stood atop a labor movement that represented one of every three American workers. But today only 7 percent of all private-sector employees belong to unions. That’s why the labor bosses are determined to stamp out secret ballots in the workplace when employees vote on whether to join a union. It’s so much easier for union thugs to intimidate employees when everybody knows how everybody else is voting.
Good points, which is why we return to cinema for our favorite explanation of this issue.
After Card Check Comes … More Union Agenda
Glenn Spencer of the U.S. Chamber takes a look at the laundry list of, well, dirty laundry, that could be making its way through the process on behalf of Big Labor as the apparent fate of card check gets darker:
Although Congress has yet to move on Card Check, they have moved forward with other legislation to pay back their union supporters. Numerous bills have been introduced to increase class action litigation against employers and expand the Family and Medical Leave Act. And the health care reform bill also included copious perks for organized labor. As Anna Burger of the SEIU explained, unions can “tak[e] advantage of elements in the health care bill to organize health care workers.”
The fight over Card Check was a high-profile affair, full of drama and headlines. Yet much of the work to enact the union agenda has been going on behind the scenes, day in and day out in the trenches. America’s job creators would do well to pay attention and get involved, because it is this attritional warfare that will determine organized labor’s ultimate success or failure in fulfilling its goals.
Keep your eyes out for more!
Employee Free Choice Act: “Binding Arbitration, a Radical Shift”
Shopfloor.org’s Carter Wood points readers to an important item regarding the binding arbitration provision of the comically misnamed Employee Free Choice Act.
Of particular note should be one attorney’s reminder of a 1970 law involving the National Labor Relations Board:
Allowing the Board to compel agreement when the parties themselves are unable to agree would violate the fundamental premise on which the Act is based
