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.

Some new items to keep you up to date:

• Card Check called a “lie”: Card Check is Obama
  

Thank goodness for the ardent defense of workplace democracy being demonstrated by the AFL-CIO, whose president writes:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that shouldn’t even have to exist.

The question in New Process Steel v. National Labor Relations Board is whether decisions by the NLRB-the body created under the National Labor Relations Act to protect workplace democracy-are valid when the board has only two of the five members provided for in the act.

Hmm. Notice that part, “protect workplace democracy”? Interesting.

All this time we were worried that union bosses had forgotten about workplace democracy. After all, they’ve been pushing the card check bill, which would effectively eliminate secret ballot elections from the workplace and threaten an employee’s right to vote on an eventual contract proposal.

And SEIU has faced allegations by union rivals of subverting democracy for their own members of changing ballots, showing up at workers’ homes as many as five times a day to pressure them to vote for SEIU, questioning the legal status of one worker, and threatening the wages and benefits of a worker if they voted the wrong way.

Glad we’ve cleared up where they stand on workers’ rights.

UPDATE: Shopfloor’s Keith Smith writes: “It

We have documented the way in which NLRB nominee Craig Becker’s testimony has failed to assuage the concerns that the former SEIU attorney’s anti-employer views would impair his ability to function in his potential new role.

But there’s also the concern that his mild-mannered answers — which could have left many thinking he has changed his view that he could use the NLRB to replace the current secret-ballot system with card check — didn’t tell the whole story.

LaborUnionReport.com points out this claim by AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka organizing boss Stewart Acuff on using the NLRB to pass card check when legislators would not:

It [sic] we aren’t able to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, we will work with President Obama and Vice President Biden and their appointees to the National Labor Relations Board to change the rules governing forming a union through administrative action to once again allow workers in America access to one of the most basic freedoms in a democracy–the freedom of speech and assembly and association so that workers can build the collective power to challenge the Financial Elite and Get America Back to Work. [Emphasis added.]

Hmm. Certainly worth keeping in mind as Senators send his nomination one more important step into the process Thursday morning.

Card check, and its legislative embodiment, the smirkingly named Employee Free Choice Act, continues to be the point of debate. Some think the issue is dead, while others say it is a done deal. Whom to believe, then?

Tough to say, so here are some items that can act as food for thought.

One advocate of organized labor says card check is dead, and that

Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) 2009 National Chairman Jerry Gorski, president of Gorski Engineering, Collegeville, Pa., today issued the following statement in reaction to news that the AFL-CIO will support Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter