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

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 labor needs a new survival plan. EFCA, of course, was the primary survival plan meant to push employees into unions without getting the right to vote on the union and potentially not even vote on contract terms that govern their work lives.

AFL-CIO honcho Richard Truma says card check will pass in 2010. His rather rosy economic view — we don’t believe he’s an economist — includes this prediction:

“The Employee Free Choice Act, John, is not just good for unions; it’s good for the economy because it will bring more money into people’s pockets across the board, so that everybody can spend a little more and create an economy that really does work for everybody…And that’s where we’re going to go to.”

Economists have an entirely different prediction, of course, and that would be that EFCA would kill hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of jobs. So “everybody can spend a little more” if they aren’t one of those millions.

The prediction is interesting for another reason: a report for the AFL-CIO is already blaming union members for the death of card check. That seems like a pretty petty way of losing, but we’ve noted before that union members and union households oppose EFCA.

Meanwhile, some are still fighting absurd battles. Media Matters for America is still claiming EFCA wouldn’t strip the right to a secret ballot for working Americans. We’ve explained that canard again and again, but Media Matters either chooses to mislead readers or simply can’t read themselves.

What does this all mean? Some people are still fighting old battles about what EFCA is or isn’t, others are fighting to try to make it law, some are saying its dead, some are blaming their own members for killing it, and the majority legislative party in the United States refuses to simply kill the bill and focus on jobs.

Tags: AFL-CIO, Protecting, Union Households