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

Pat McCann is owner of Piggy Pat’s BBQ in New York. It kind of sounds like the kind of place worth checking out, and it definitely sounds like the kind of small business that keeps Americans employed and generates new jobs.

So it’s important to listen to people like Pat and his Piggy Pat warnings, which brings us to his article in yesterday’s Utica Observer-Dispatch.

Pat’s got a lot of concerns, some of which are shared by the Free Enterprise Alliance. In particular, note:

Our representatives in Congress and their party support the health care bill, the federal spending budget, Cap and Trade, Card Check (aka Free Choice bill), extension of unemployment benefits, paid for by employers, and raising the minimum wage.

Indeed, Pat’s right: card check is one of the main ways Congress can kill our competitiveness and small business. Instead, Congress needs to kill card check and save small business.

Our representatives need to listen to us. And order some BBQ.

Someone has finally gotten through to top union bosses to let them know that the public and elected leaders aren’t going for the Employee Free Choice Act. So, does organized labor scrap the bill? Heck, no! Change the sales pitch!

Hitting newspapers and websites near you is the new argument: drink your poison, it’s good for you! In the San Jose Mercury News, Netsy Firestein says EFCA is “good for the bottom line and for our working families.” And over at Huffington Post, Art Levine … well, contorts some anti-Glenn Beck sentiment and adds in some EFCA-is-good-for-small-business “thoughts.”

While Levine spends plenty of time attacking the relatively safe notion that a massive new government health insurance monolith would end up being bad for small business, much of his argument is focused on the EFCA’s effects on small business. To that end, he highlights a report from the union front group esteemed American Rights At Work that “points out that union-dense states have lower rates of small business failure.” In addition to that dubious finding, the report claims unions help small businesses in the following ways:

• Boost consumer spending — boosting wages for a few workers while causing job loss is no way to improve the economy (which is why the argument is pushed by an activist group and not an economist); this “analysis” would also miss the point that consumer spending won’t help many small businesses, while the increased costs and work rules are killers
• Access to training — ABC members know all too well about union-run training programs, which deny training to non-union workers (even if they just want to work on government-funded projects that ought to be open to everyone looking to work hard)
• Pooling to reduce health care costs — this is perhaps the most disingenuous argument imaginable since union lobbyists have worked to kill association plans that would allow small businesses to form their own bigger risk pools without having to go into poorly run union pension/health pools

A more cynical blog would think organized labor was grasping at straws, failing to address the crippling costs of red-tape work rules.

But let’s focus on the core concept labor advocates have the temerity to put forth: unions are good for small business. There is a decent body of evidence to show that union officials are not the best judges of how to run a business. Consider:

• Unions have run their balance sheets dangerously close to insolvency
• While union bosses have managed to secure their own retirements, they have run their members’ pension funds into the ground
• Union bosses don’t know how to treat their employees well at all. Working for the unions suck if you don’t want them to steal your pensionor slashed benefits by 95 percent or if you don’t want to be fired in mass layoffs … and especially if you want to join a union.

Taking organized labor’s advice on how to build up small businesses is like asking the fox to plan the hen house dinner menu, or like taking Bernie Madoff’s advice on sound retirement planning, or like … well, you get the idea.

Be sure to check out Jim Blasingame’s article on the threats the Employee Free Choice Act poses to small businesses. In short, he argues:

If the EFCA (aka Card Check) becomes law, the following year I will be forced to make this prediction: Many small businesses will make one of three unnatural management decisions if pushed to unionize due to EFCA: 1) move more jobs off-shore; 2) limit growth to stay under the number of employees that EFCA allows; or 3) just close up, rather than prolong the inevitable experience of GM and Chrysler.

The Republicans on the House Education and Labor Committee have come up with a lengthy response to the notion that small businesses widely support the Employee Free Choice Act:

But consider what small businesses themselves have to say on the matter:

Card-Check Agreements Bad for Employees and Small Business NFIB strongly opposes the deceptively named Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) or