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

The Las Vegas Review-Journal has just about the best roundup of this year’s drive by organized labor to push a radical agenda which includes, of course, card check, Craig Becker’s nomination for the NLRB, and socialized medicine.

The paper’s advice to Big Labor:

Union membership in the private sector fell 10 percent during Mr. Obama’s first year in office, to a historic low of 7.2 percent. A poll last month from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that only 41 percent of those surveyed now have a favorable view of unions, compared with 58 percent in a similar survey in 2007.

It’s up to them, of course, but maybe the AFL-CIO should simply announce it’s going to work next fall for the party that has the best plan to cut government spending, cut taxes and thus allow private employers to create new jobs. Because a change of course seems advisable. And dumping the radical, far-left agenda — which the rank and file have never considered a hill to die for — might be a start.

That would be good advice, but we’re quite confident Big Labor is going in the wrong direction. It is pushing PLA’s, Davis-Bacon Act red tape, and now the unfortunately named “high road” contracting requirements that are the biggest threat to efficient government spending we’ve seen in ages.

There can be no rest until card check is six feet under. That’s the message from Sen. John Thune, who has told a Chamber of Commerce crowd: “We cannot let up. We have to be vigilant. We’ve got to stay on this issue. This is organized labor’s No. 1 priority… We have to defeat this. … We have to be prepared because this could happen on very short notice.”

Indeed.

There’s a fantastic letter to the editor running up in Detroit that discusses the all-too-infrequently discussed binding interest arbitration provision of the Employee Free Choice Act. James Wahlman of Troy writes in:

Parties to first contracts could arbitrate their issues now, but rarely do, because they would be turning over their wages, benefits and working conditions to a third party who probably has little or no expertise in the parties’ business, no practical experience in their operations and, most important, will not have to live with the consequences of the decision.

The very important business of labor relations and bargaining is best left to the parties involved, no matter how imperfect the process may be.

Indeed, even the best-intentioned arbitrator can not know the full business needs of any firm or any single workforce. It’s like asking a general practitioner to do open heart surgery: you could get lucky, but more than likely the patient isn’t going to make it.

To leave an employer and employees in such a position as to have their interests superseded by a government bureaucrat is to totally abdicate business and moral responsibility.

The Workforce Fairness Institute has a fantastic new web video up:

• Biden says B before C: Bank bailouts delayed card check
• Even with ‘card check’ on back burner, Colorado business groups are wary
• From the NYT: “Likewise, it’s increasingly clear that whatever happens with health care, Barack Obama isn’t going to pass all the big-ticket bills (from cap-and-trade to card check to immigration reform) that liberals were hoping would become law in his first four years in office.”

Given the ebbs and flows of news related to the horrifically misnamed Employee Free Choice Act and its apparent waning in likelihood of passage on Capitol Hill, we awoke this morning to find a decent group of mentions of card check going around.

Here are a couple worth checking out:

• Unions Toll Bell for Card Check
• Coloradans join U.S. Chamber’s bid to sink union-organizing bill
• Unions Regroup After Stunned by Losses Under Obama, Democrats

As we’ve said before, this issue refuses to go away completely, which means attention can’t be diverted from it completely.