From a Politico story on the political pressure Senate Democrats face over the anti-democratic Employee Free Choice Act:

“We don’t know if we have 60 yet. We’re at 59 [for cloture] right now,” said Josh Goldstein, a spokesman for American Rights at Work, a pro-labor group. “The issue has become front and center, and the worse the economy gets, the more support we get. [Business groups are] trying to make this a volatile issue for senators.”

That’s some spin.

You can claim the 59 votes for cloture with some measure of sincerity. It may be wrong, but it’s not a dishonest claim.

Otherwise, the issue of card check has been front and center since the Senate voted to block H.R. 800 in June 2007. As for the other nonsense:

“The worse the economy gets, the more support it gets.” Sure. The worse the economy gets, the more the public demands the employees be forced into unions against their will. The more attention given to labor’s fault for the domestic auto industry’s difficulties, the more the public says, “Give us more of that!”

“Business groups are trying to make this a volatile issue.” Snort. It’s not business groups that are trying to destroy the secret ballot in the workplace or enact the biggest shift in employer-employee relations since the 1935 Wagner Act. Throw gasoline on the fire of labor relations and don’t be surprised when things get “volatile,” Mr. Goldstein.

Next thing you know labor representatives will try to claim that the Employee Free Choice Act doesn’t eliminate the secret ballot. Do they think the public is stupid?

UPDATE (4:13 p.m.) Well, that didn’t take long. From Dow-Jones:

An aide to Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said that the bill doesn’t address the question of secret ballot votes at all.
It would compel employers to agree to the creation of a union when presented with 50% of worker support, the aide said.

Or more like re-establishmentarianism…

In a basic, thorough examination of organized labor’s push for the Employee Free Choice Act and business’ resistance, Bloomberg ends its story with an interesting claim from Richard Trumka, treasurer of the AFL-CIO. From “Labor Seeks Obama Help in Battle With Business Over Organizing“:

“Unlike in the past, instead of saying `OK, we’ve elected you, now do what’s right by us,’ we are going to keep our machinery in place,” Trumka said. “We are going to make sure that our interests are considered at the front of the parade.”

Keep our machinery in place? Certainly hope that doesn’t mean in place, institutionally, at the Department of Labor.

Meanwhile, in the Las Vegas Review Journal, local business talks. From “Election result rekindles card-check debate“:

When members of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce’s government affairs committee met Thursday morning, the Obama-supported Employee Free Choice Act proved a hot topic.

The proposed federal law would replace secret-ballot unionizing elections with face-to-face card-check procedures, and both unions and businesses agree it would make organizing workers easier than it is today.

“We’re really worried about the way the law is written,” said Steve Hill, a member of the committee who’s also incoming chamber chairman and president and chief executive officer of concrete company Silver State Materials. “It has not reached the level of attention it needs. It’s been discussed and killed (in Congress), and people don’t know it’s still out there. We need to do a better job getting word out that it’s a possibility, and tell businesses what it means to them.”

After all the work the NAM and our members have put into explaining the fundamental anti-democratic nature of the Employee Free Choice Act, it’s a little discouraging to read our friends in business say, “It has not reached the level of attention it needs.” Steve, we’re working, honestly!

But he’s probably right. People only have so much time to follow issues — even important ones like how labor markets are structured — and “card check” is not a self-explanatory term.

Still, seems like we’re making progress. The union, American Rights at Work, released carefully scrubbed results and predictable commentary on a post-election survey of U.S. Senate elections in which the Employee Free Choice Act was an issue. Check out this comment from the executive summary from Peter D. Hart Research Associates:

Voters in Senate battleground states who voted for the anti-Employee Free Choice Act candidate overwhelmingly describe their vote as being FOR (67%) that candidate rather than AGAINST (28%) the pro-Employee Free Choice Act candidate who was the target of negative advertising. If the attacks on supporters of the Employee Free Choice Act had made a significant impact, we would expect the proportion of voters saying they cast their ballot against those supporters to be higher.

Twenty-eight percent of those who voted against the candidate who supported the Employee Free Choice Act did so BECAUSE of the candidate’s position? That’s huge, a reflection of an informed electorate, educated through the advertising of groups like the NAM-supported Coalition for a Democratic Workplace.

If in promoting a survey designed to show that voters supported pro-union candidates American Rights at Work has to admit that 28 percent of the votes against their candidate were influenced by the Employee Free Choice Act, well…think of the results they didn’t release.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal and Best of the Web Today  reports from a panel discussion out in Denver, a forum sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future:

One of the participants was David Bonior, who served as a congressman from Michigan for a quarter century and Democratic whip for 12 years before retiring in 2003. Bonior now heads a group called American Rights at Work. Although the name sounds like “right to work,” it is actually a pro-union outfit.

Bonior was making the case for “card check,” a regime that would eliminate secret balloting on whether to organize a workplace, thereby making it easier for unions to impose themselves. Card-check passed the House but was stopped by a Senate filibuster. Bonior urged his audience to work for Democratic Senate candidates in states like Maine and Mississippi, where Republican incumbents are favored but not prohibitively.

If card-check passes, Bonior claims, it will set off “a torrent of organizing like my father saw in the 1940s. . . . The progressive movement will not only be in ascendancy–we will be on rockets.” This, he says, will result in “universal health care,” an expansion of civil liberties and “an end to this rotten war that these monsters have created in Washington.”

Taranto notes that Bonior went on a Saddam-excusing trip to Baghdad in 2002 and rightfully objects to the former Congressman calling elected U.S. officials monsters. Meanwhile, we’re certainly not enthusiastic about the prospects of a progressive movements on rockets, targeting freedoms.

In related “America is a lousy place and we’re all suffering” news, American Rights at Work has launched a new ad campaign promoting the Employee Free Choice Act, which is a legislative attack on American rights at work. Guess they want to keep the Orwellian rhetoric consistent.