Posts Tagged ‘Vallejo’
Measure A Is Evidence A In Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act
As we’ve tried to remind readers, the Employee Free Choice Act isn’t just about card check — it’s also about who gets to decide what wages, work rules, and retirement plan governs when organized labor and employers settle on a contract. EFCA contains a “binding interest arbitration” clause that would allow government-imposed outsiders to set those terms of employment, rather than allowing the normal negotiation process to take place.
What happens in real life when arbitration is forced into the situation? You get terrible financial messes like the ones experienced in Vallejo, California, where citizens seeking to clean up their fiscal morass are attempting to rid themselves of a law that requires the city to go into binding arbitration with public employee unions.
The goal is to pass Measure A, which the San Francisco Chronicle says is “poised to pass.” The paper also explains, “Measure A would eliminate binding arbitration from the city charter, which means the city will no longer be required to adopt contracts ordered by an arbitrator after union talks fail.”
That’s important to understand because when this kind of forced arbitration is in place it removes the need for organized labor representatives to bargain in good faith. Instead, they can simply wait for an outside party — who may know little to nothing about the industry — to throw some slapdash agreement together and call it a day.
Moreover, binding interest arbitration actually harms employees by forcing on them a contract that they may have chosen to “leave” under a different “take it or leave” scenario. They are stuck with a contract they may not even get to vote on.
