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

The Heritage Foundation has released a new document arguing, in part, that uncertainty about the future of business conditions is causing firms to delay or forego hiring of working Americans.

Interesting conclusion:

While layoffs have increased, the larger factor increasing unemployment has been businesses cutting back on investment and entrepreneurs starting fewer companies. Consequently they have created fewer jobs. Increased federal spending will not spur the private-sector investment and risk-taking necessary to create jobs and reduce unemployment. Congress should instead reduce government spending to free up funds for private investment while committing to not passing any measures — such as card-check, cap and trade, or the health care mandates — that would make creating new jobs more expensive.

Many in the construction field are suffering greatly right now, and many employers are forced to reduce hours or cut back on employment.

These policy suggestions, particularly the suggestions of what not to do, certainly sound like the best bets for a healthy economy with job growth.

The GOP side of the Committee on Education and Labor has a great post up on the Employee Free Choice Act vs. jobs. As the Administration hosts businesses and many, many labor leaders — who are pushing EFCA — the committee staff notes that there’s just one problem: “EFCA itself would be a significant hurdle for the job creation the President and his allies at the summit claim to be pursuing.”

Several good items have hit our in-box recently that we thought best to pass along. In the Houston Chronicle, it’s “Goodies for labor tucked away in health bill.” Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundations says “Big Labor Is Bankrupting Our Country.”

Perhaps even more interesting, though, is the note from New York Times’ Ross Douhat on the importance jobs will play as a political issue in 2010. Writing of Democrats, Douhat argues:

It’s hard to imagine any legislation that might be attacked as “job killing” — like the Employee Free Choice Act, immigration reform or even cap-and-trade — finding traction in Congress next year.

It will be interesting to see if he’s correct. EFCA is not only to be “attacked as ‘job killing’” — it is a factual statement that must be made repeatedly. EFCA will kill jobs, not create them.

It’s not just Virginia’s gubernatorial race that is considering key issues related to workplace flexibility — now card check and the state’s right-to-work law are making their presence a key fight in the race for attorney general.

The News-Virginian points out the positions of Republican Ken Cuccinelli and Democrat Steve Shannon:

Cuccinelli said Shannon is focusing on one part of the job. Cuccinelli fully expects constitutional challenges if elected, including the threat of federal card-check legislation to Virginia’s right-to-work law.

Critics charge that the card-check bill could end secret ballots in union elections — a provision that could be scrapped — and would tilt collective bargaining unreasonably in unions’ favor.

Cuccinelli is prepared to enforce the Tenth Amendment’s state sovereignty provision to protect the right-to-work law.

When economic times get tough, these laws are especially worthy of public focus. Workplace flexibility helps keeps employers employeing, and employees employed.

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’s policies.

The “kitchen cabinet” of advisers is part of a latest offensive in the GOP’s “Where Are the Jobs?” campaign, launched this summer by House Republicans and being pushed by Boehner.

No doubt Mr. Boehner and his kitchen cabinet will — like the professor above — focus heavily on job-killing laws and regulations like the Employee Free Choice Act.

The Economics blog over at the Wall Street Journal has an important post today on the severe unemployment afflicting the construction industry and asks, “Without Construction, What of Blue-Collar Men?” Good question.

Consider this:

“There’s no question this is the most severe recession we have had in this industry in at least the last 25 years,” said Lee Smither, managing director of consulting at FMI Corp., a Raleigh, N.C.-based construction research company and investment bank. “We don’t expect the industry to start coming back until 2011.”

And this …

The million-dollar question now is where — and how soon — this group of workers will be able to find work, in an economy that increasingly values brains over brawn. It’s little surprise now that one-third of the nation’s 15 million unemployed have been so for 27 weeks or more — a postwar record.

And now ask yourself, why in the heck would legislators and the president support the Employee Free Choice Act, which is expected to cost another 600,000 to 5 million jobs in our economy, with a hefty chunk coming from the construction industry?

To hit the breaks on job losses for blue-collar construction workers, the sure sign is to yield on EFCA.