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

Be sure to check out this great little article on how card check and it’s continued looming threat create a drag on stocks (which millions of Americans count on for their retirement)

We pointed to this story, which says “card check lives.” A friend of this blog suggested the following movie to accompany (thanks, Ben!)

According to The Washington Examiner’s David Freddoso, Sen. Tom Harkin “is now openly discussing the possibility of passing pro-union legislation after voters have already rendered a verdict on the union-friendly 111th Congress.” Harkin today told The Hill that:

The Birmingham News isn’t letting up on its watchful eye on the Employee Free Choice Act. The paper’s editors warn today that the bill isn’t dead and goes on to opine:

Big labor has made some mistakes in its frenzy to get politicians to support card check, and that may be what’s behind the renewed effort to get card check in front of Congress before adjournment. Labor targeted Arkansas U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln because Lincoln, a moderate Democrat, opposed card check. She defeated the labor candidate in the June 8 primary, and she’s not likely to be a friend to unions now if she wins in November.

With unions continuing to lose membership, they should be investigating what they’re doing wrong instead of trying to change the rules so drastically that they get an unfair advantage.

As we’ve tried to remind readers, the Employee Free Choice Act isn’t just about card check — it’s also about who gets to decide what wages, work rules, and retirement plan governs when organized labor and employers settle on a contract. EFCA contains a “binding interest arbitration” clause that would allow government-imposed outsiders to set those terms of employment, rather than allowing the normal negotiation process to take place.

What happens in real life when arbitration is forced into the situation? You get terrible financial messes like the ones experienced in Vallejo, California, where citizens seeking to clean up their fiscal morass are attempting to rid themselves of a law that requires the city to go into binding arbitration with public employee unions.

The goal is to pass Measure A, which the San Francisco Chronicle says is “poised to pass.” The paper also explains, “Measure A would eliminate binding arbitration from the city charter, which means the city will no longer be required to adopt contracts ordered by an arbitrator after union talks fail.”

That’s important to understand because when this kind of forced arbitration is in place it removes the need for organized labor representatives to bargain in good faith. Instead, they can simply wait for an outside party — who may know little to nothing about the industry — to throw some slapdash agreement together and call it a day.

Moreover, binding interest arbitration actually harms employees by forcing on them a contract that they may have chosen to “leave” under a different “take it or leave” scenario. They are stuck with a contract they may not even get to vote on.

One of the issues that has been raised as it’s been discovered that the National Labor Relations Board has issued a request for cost estimates of a system that would allow employees to use electronic ballots in union-representation elections is whether the process will open employees to intimidation in the same way as the card check provision of the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act.

Keith Bogardus of the The Hill, who has been tracking this issue for years, ran an article yesterday examining employer concerns. The piece highlighted a letter by the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, of which Associated Builders and Contractors is a member: