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

California’s card check bill — yes, the one that was vetoed by the Governator — is saying, “I’ll be back,” according to the Capital Press.

The Governor was to be commended for vetoing the bill last time because card check is just plain bad.

Then again, unions in California aren’t known for being great on the economic outlook:

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.

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

The Service Employees International Union is becoming Big Labor’s biggest pain in the neck as union bosses seek to pass the sneakily misnamed Employee Free Choice Act.

The latest comes from the Wall Street Journal, which reports that a rival union is accusing SEIU of intimidating workers and changing ballots in an election.

The NUHW filed charges Nov. 6 with the California Public Employment Relations Board, which oversees the election. Included in the charges are statements from a former SEIU organizer, who said that he was encouraged “to pressure voters to change the ballot” and that on one occasion he himself changed a vote to SEIU’s favor.

The charges also contain statements from workers who said SEIU representatives came to their house as many as five times a day, pressuring them to vote for the SEIU. In one instance, a woman said she was questioned about her legal status. Others were told they would lose wages and benefits if they voted for the NUHW.

SEIU, for its part, denies the allegations, but the case certainly recalls concerns that employers and labor reformers have long harbored about “card check” and the Employee Free Choice Act because they would strip away the protection of the secret ballot. Now it looks like even that is under attack, once again, by SEIU.

Don’t forget the long list of recent allegations against SEIU that directly relate to the fight over card check: accused of intimidation, threatening employers, muscling other unions and their own members, and making demonstrably false claims about EFCA, just to name a few. See more here.

No one seems to really know what’s going on with the Employee Free Choice Act right now. BusinessWeek, citing AFL-CIO president-in-waiting Richard Trumka, says “A Card Check Compromise by Year End” while The Hill runs with “AFL-CIO suggests a hedge on card-check.” Meanwhile, it’s mixed signals as we get “Employee Free Choice Act” battle renewed” from the Denver Post.

There is considerably less confusion over who opposes the bill, though. In Madison, Wisconsin, a group of businessmen have come out adamantly against EFCA. In California, the Governator has once again vetoed card check language in his state. And in Washington, D.C., leading Republican Senator Mitch McConnell says GOP won’t support EFCA.

A great op-ed running in the Visalia Times in California looks at the history of protecting secret ballots for the state’s farm workers and efforts there — like the national effort to pass the ballot-impairing Employee Free Choice Act — to open up employees to intimidation by union organizers through a “card check” process.

Don Curlee writes:

California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act was established in 1975. It is often referred to as landmark legislation, and touted as a showcase because of its provision for secret-ballot elections.

Now, suddenly, union adherents are saying they need a different mechanism by which workers can choose to be represented by them, one that doesn’t involve secret voting. They offer the notorious “card check” procedure as an alternative.

Wherever the “card check” system has operated, it has demonstrated how easily workers can be intimidated by union representatives who seek their signature or mere check marks in the union organizer’s presence. In the secret-ballot process, nobody knows who approves or rejects a union. Only the final vote count is important.

Current “card check” supporters have turned reason and facts on their heads by saying workers feel intimidated by their employers when the secret-ballot process takes place.