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Secret Ballot Watch

Throwing the Book at EFCA

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 24, 2009 | Alexa Marrero ((202) 225-4527)
Leave it to National Review to cite not one but two literary giants in its opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act.

The brainy conservative opinion journal noted, as have others, that the name of the act would make George Orwell proud.  (In his classic novel 1984, Orwell wrote about a government that used phrases such as “War is Peace” and “Freedom is Slavery” to lull its citizens into submission. A bill that would restrict workers’ ability to freely and privately choose to form a union with the protection of a secret ballot being dubbed the Employee Free Choice Act? Can it get more Orwellian than that?)

But the magazine’s editors also noted that content of the act itself, especially its parts about forced government contracts, is “pure Kafka”:    

“If a union enters the picture and the owners of a business are unable to negotiate a satisfactory contract, then the NLRB is empowered to impose ‘binding arbitration,’ meaning that the government will write the contract and force the firm to abide by its terms. This amounts to extortion. President Obama has picked a like-minded lawyer culled from the ranks of the Teamsters to chair the NLRB, and another Obama NLRB pick, Craig Becker, is a labor radical who wrote that ‘federal policy should not acknowledge employees’  ‘choice to remain unrepresented.’ Given that these are the people who will be making the calls, businesses find themselves in a double-bind: They are at a disadvantage when negotiating with union bosses because the unions have every reason to believe that arbitration will be handled by one of their own. So business owners are left either to negotiate with the unions from a position of weakness or to throw themselves on the mercy of the union-dominated NLRB.”

Editorial, “Card-Check Is A Trojan Horse,” National Review, 07.21.09 

Kafka often wrote about people struggling against forces beyond their control. But he and Orwell wrote fiction. The Employee Free Choice Act is very real – as would be its effects on this nation’s weakened economy.  

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