Posts Tagged ‘Rep. John Boehner’
Reverse Unemployment, Kill Card Check
Steven J. Davis, the William H. Abbott professor of international business and economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has some ideas on how to reverse unemployment figures that appear headed for 10 percent (which still underestimates the number of Americans who are out of work).
Among Prof. Davis’s ideas are experimenting and reacting, suspending the federal minimum wage mandates, roll back costly insurance benefit mandates, and … you guessed it, fight card check:
Renounce the grossly misnamed Employee Free Choice Act. This legislation, currently before Congress, threatens to stack the deck against employers in the union certification process. Current law requires a secret ballot election among workers when the employer opposes union certification. If the union wins majority support, the National Labor Relations Board certifies the union as the exclusive workplace representative in collective bargaining with the employer.
The Free Choice Act would eliminate the secret ballot requirement. Instead, union certification would require only that a majority of workers sign cards supplied by the union. This “card check” process is rife with potential for strong-arm tactics and intimidation by union supporters. Sign here or else!
It’s unclear whether the Free Choice Act and card-check provision will become law. Fears that the act might become law are enough to chill investment by firms that could be targets of card-check union certification. To allay these fears and remove the chill from investment, President Obama and congressional leaders should forcefully renounce the act now. If they won’t, moderate Democrats should step forward and publicly announce their opposition to the act. By taking this step, they would help restore business confidence and set the stage for more job-creating investments.
The academics — at least those not used and abused by the labor movement — agree: EFCA is bad for jobs.
UPDATE: It looks like plenty of people are seeing the need to address the jobs issue. Roll Call reports:
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) has assembled a group of economic experts to help Republicans lob attacks at Democratic assertions that the economy has begun to rebound as a result of the Obama administration
House Republicans Battle Jobs-Killing Card Check and Employee Free Choice Act
Over at FreedomProject.org, they are kind enough to link to the Free Enterprise Alliance’s latest ad highlighting the Employee Free Choice Act’s threat to jobs. They also point out that:
House Republicans introduced the Secret Ballot Protection Act to “permanently safeguard a worker’s right to a secret ballot union election in the workplace.”
Such protections are critical if our goal is to create new jobs and grow the economy. A recent nonpartisan study found that card check could destroy millions of jobs
