It’s the bottom of the ninth inning for supporters of the Employee Free Choice Act – and they are getting desperate. With only a few weeks left in the legislative season, the AFL-CIO swung for the fences this week by co-sponsoring a full-page pro-EFCA ad in three Capitol Hill newspapers. It featured the ad’s other co-sponsor, another notable labor union. Was that union the Teamsters? The Internati... Read more »
They tried mail-in ballots and even considered voting by Internet. But in the end, residents of a small Canadian city wanted to go back to the best method of voting: secret ballot. City elders in Clarington, Ontario, voted to restore the secret-ballot method for the 2010 local elections after hearing from a number of residents concerned about the “unsupervised” nature of both mail-in and online vo... Read more »
A recent MediaNews Group editorial that appeared in California’s Contra Costa Times praised Sen. Dianne Feinstein for her reluctance to support the Employee Free Choice Act, whose card check provision is a “slap in the face to democratic principles.” The newspaper chain makes an effective case against legislation to do away with secret ballot unionizing elections. Its arguments echo the concerns o... Read more »
There are four ways for Congress and President Obama to create more jobs in America – and one of them is to “renounce” the Employee Free Choice Act. That’s what University of Chicago economics professor Steven J. Davis says in a recent essay for Forbes magazine. Davis writes that instead of extending unemployment benefits or pursuing other policies that would drive up the deficit, lawmakers should... Read more »
With recent figures at 9.4 percent, 9.7 percent, and 9.8 percent, how high will the national unemployment rate go? It’s a question that should give supporters of the Employee Free Choice Act pause. Here are some grim details of the September unemployment figures, courtesy of The New York Times: “During the technology boom of the late 1990s, Mr. Lamirande, 62, worked for I.B.M., where he drew a sal... Read more »
Although the Employee Free Choice Act has been tied up for months in Congress, we already have an idea what one federal agency thinks about “card check,” a key part of the legislation. Its verdict? “Unreliable.” In September, The Washington Times reported that the Legal Services Corp., which provides grants to legal-aid groups that help the poor, determined the card check method of organizing to b... Read more »
There’s a compromise version of the Employee Free Choice Act that’s almost ready … or is it? In a speech before the AFL-CIO last month, Sen. Arlen Specter said an EFCA deal had been “pounded out” and it would pass before year’s end. The newly Democratic lawmaker received great applause from the crowd in response to this surprising announcement. He also received a great many questions from reporter... Read more »
Call it “Attack of the EFCA Clones.” Like a flying saucer in a science fiction movie, the Employee Free Choice Act has been hovering over the Capitol for months. Thanks to bipartisan opposition, though, it hasn’t attacked the U.S. economy yet. But measures similar to EFCA are staging economic assaults that are equally troubling. Take federal Project Labor Agreements. Popular among EFCA backers, th... Read more »
It seems there’s more than one way to meddle with organizing elections at the expense of workers. While most of Capitol Hill’s attention has been on the misleadingly named Employee Free Choice Act – with its ability to kill jobs, set aside the secret ballot, and crush small businesses – there’s another attempt to rig organizing elections underway in a little-known federal agency. The Wall Street J... Read more »
Picking up where we left off last week with the list of 10 more reasons the so-called Employee Free Choice Act must fail is an obvious indicator of legislative doom: The act has drawn the ire of elected officials on both sides of the political divide. Although the act’s supporters don’t highlight this fact, it’s not just Republicans opposing EFCA. More than a few Democrats oppose the job-killing b... Read more »
