If you’re out and about over the Independence Day holiday — attending a Fourth of July parade, perhaps — and you spot a member of Congress, be sure to let him or her know why the Employee Free Choice Act will harm employers, employees and the right NOT to be unionized.

Here’s an NAM-produced video about EFCA, including the voices of workers who think EFCA is a bad, bad idea.

Thanks to the NAM’s Matt Preiss and James Skelly for producing the video.

Closer to 60 votes for the Employee Free Choice Act?  Well, yes, by definition, but …

Seth Borden at EFCA Report reaches a conclusion that we tend to share:

Expect a renewed wave of enthusiasm by the bill’s supporters in the days to come.  Still, once Franken is seated as the second Senator from Minnesota, EFCA in its current form faces an uphill battle.   Many of the 60 votes possibly controlled by the Democrats have openly questioned the bill’s current provisions – Sens. Lincoln, Feinstein, and Bennet to name but a few.  Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA), whose recent famous party switch put the Democrats this close to the prospect of cloture on any given measure, has consistently criticized EFCA as currently drafted. 

With lots of links, including more speculation about Specter’s position and Sen. Tom Harkin’s “compromise.”

President Obama has announced his intention to nominate George Cohen for a role that not too many folks outside of Washington have ever heard of: the Director of Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service. So what’s the big deal? Why is this post important?

Well, if the misleadingly named Employee Free Choice Act becomes the law of the land, the Mr. Cohen will be the one that oversees the agency charged with forcing government contracts on newly unionized private employers.

You may think that’s outrageous, but I refer you to read the details of the legislation:

S.560
Section 3
`(2) If after the expiration of the 90-day period beginning on the date on which bargaining is commenced, or such additional period as the parties may agree upon, the parties have failed to reach an agreement, either party may notify the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service of the existence of a dispute and request mediation. Whenever such a request is received, it shall be the duty of the Service promptly to put itself in communication with the parties and to use its best efforts, by mediation and conciliation, to bring them to agreement.

`(3) If after the expiration of the 30-day period beginning on the date on which the request for mediation is made under paragraph (2), or such additional period as the parties may agree upon, the Service is not able to bring the parties to agreement by conciliation, the Service shall refer the dispute to an arbitration board established in accordance with such regulations as may be prescribed by the Service. The arbitration panel shall render a decision settling the dispute and such decision shall be binding upon the parties for a period of 2 years, unless amended during such period by written consent of the parties.’.

Yikes. George Cohen, a person you may have never heard of before today may become the person that oversees the system that determines how you can you manage your own workforce.

Not seeing any coverage of Vice President Joe Biden’s remarks to the Communications Workers of America on Wednesday, we transcribed his remarks related to the Employee Free Choice Act.

The quotable parts:

You know, the National Labor Relations Act says we should “encourage” – paraphrase – “encourage” unions, not mandate them, encourage them. Why? It’s good for the economy. It’s gotten lopsided, folks.

The guys who were supposed to be wearing striped shirts have been wearing black shirts the last eight years. We don’t have referees out there doing it the right way. We’re switching out the shirts, because we’re switching out the people wearing the shirts.

Black shirts? As in Italian fascists? We assume that’s just a slip, a hasty conflation of black hats and striped shirts, but man…

And:

So if we were just able to get a fora [sic] in which we could debate this honestly and straight-forwardly, without all the baggage, without all the hyperbole, this is something I believe right-thinking, decent Americans, Democrat and Republican, if they hear it out, would be supportive of.

No hyperbole, but the Vice President believes “right-thinking, decent Americans” would support the Employee Free Choice Act. Elsewhere, he suggests that “the good guys in the business community” understand the need for card check, and it’s the “business elites” who oppose it. Isn’t there a possibility employers might oppose the EFCA as a matter of principle? Apparently not.

The Vice President’s premise is that the system is stacked against unions that are trying to organize workplaces. But unions won more than two-thirds of the representation elections in the first half of 2008. How is that stacked against them?

Here are the transcribed remarks from the Vice President’s appearance yesterday at the joint convention/legislative-political conference of the CWA.

The AFL-CIO blog is promoting a piece by the union’s secretary-treasurer, Richard Trumka, published in International Union Rights, the journal of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights (ICTUR). It’s the usual foam-flecked attack against business and therefore dull, but Trumka does use a term we’ve been meaning to mention: front group.

Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act have launched a $200 million campaign to defeat it. Working through front groups with innocuous-sounding names like the Center for Union Facts, organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and giant corporations are bombarding the airwaves and filling major newspapers with pricey advertisements designed to turn public opinion against the proposed legislation. More crucially, their lobbyists are deluging lawmakers in Congress with repeated visits and contacts to pressure them into voting against the bill when it comes up this year.

Labor calling business coalitions “front groups” is meant to imply shadowy, dishonest organizations created to hide one’s alliances. It cannot conceivably be applied to the Coalition for Democratic Workplace, the group the National Association of Manufacturers is active in. In our Shopfloor.org posts on the CDW’s activities, we almost always include a line associating the NAM with its efforts, such as, “The National Association of Manufacturers is a member of the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and glad of it.” And here’s the CDW’s membership list.

If Trumka wants his attacks against “front groups” to have some modicum of intellectual honesty, he might want to level them via some other group than the International Centre for Trade Union Rights.

It always seemed strange that organized labor has solicited the support of the environmental left in pushing for passage of the undemocratic Employee Free Choice Act. (See earlier posts.) Why make common cause with groups that oppose the kind of human activities that keeps union members employed — construction, transportation, mining and manufacturing? Especially when history tells you the environmental groups will agree on a consensus, a compromise, or a modus vivendi on an issue and then a month later file a lawsuit in federal court. (Think Northwest timber harvests.

Perhaps the tactics themselves unite these groups. Developments in California suggest as much, as recounted in Walter Olson’s post at Point of Law, “California unions’ environmental extortion“:

Today’s Times:

As California moves to license dozens of huge solar power plants to meet the state’s renewable energy goals, some developers contend they are being pressured to sign agreements pledging to use union labor. If they refuse, they say, they can count on the union group to demand costly environmental studies and deliver hostile testimony at public hearings.

If they commit at the outset to use union labor, they say, the environmental objections never materialize.

“This does stress the limits of credibility to some extent,” the California energy commissioner, Jeffrey Byron, said at one contentious hearing, “when an attorney representing a labor union is so focused on the potential impact of a solar power plant on birds.”

It seems Bob Balgenorth, chairman of the labor group accused of exploiting the environmental laws this way, “has cultivated strong ties with conservation groups”. I wonder whether there’s a tie-in with the Sierra Club’s and NRDC’s endorsement of EFCA?

So jobs or the environmenta are not at issue, just the raw use of power to accrue more power.

Eventually, of course, one side will betray the other. It’s in their nature.

The National Right to Work Foundation has put up a new video highlighting the dangers of card check schemes. These are real employees explaining how aggressive union organizing can be. If the Employee Free Choice Act becomes law these scenarios may unfortunately become all too common.

Highly recommended, Daniel Howes’ column, Detroit News, “U.S. letting manufacturing slip away“:

Forget the bailouts and the billions of taxpayer dollars pumped into the rescue of Detroit’s auto industry — the crisis in American manufacturing is far from over.

“We’re absolutely still falling behind,” Richard Dauch, chairman of American Axle & Manufacturing Holdings Inc., told me in an interview Tuesday, day two of the National Summit at the Marriott Renaissance Center. “We’re now immersed in a global war and we simply need to learn how to compete again in America.”

But America, judging by the government-imposed burdens weighing on its manufacturers and the headlong rush toward a green promised land that may or may not deliver as advertised, increasingly looks like a country unsure whether it wants to fight to preserve the jobs that countries around the world want because they create wealth — now.

Howes highlights corporate taxation — second highest statutory rates in the world — as working against competititiveness, and there are many other damaging policies being pushed at the same time U.S. manufacturing slips, e.g. “Made in America” protectionism and the Employee Free Choice Act.

The Clown from Cesar Gamino on Vimeo.

On behalf of the United Adworkers Local 208, who describe themselves a Milwaukee-based organization dedicated to the pursuit of marketing communications excellence. And that is indeed an excellent video.

The writer probably doesn’t even understand what’s wrong with his grotesquely utilitarian view of a man’s life.

Holocaust Museum Shooting Demostrates Need for Employee Free Choice

– by Dave Johnson

Security guards at the Holocaust Museum, members of the Security, Police and Fire Professionals of America, had tried to get protective vests from the company that employs them. The company didn’t want to bother with this “cost” and wouldn’t provide vests. Now one guard is dead.

Employees need to be able to have a say in their workplace. The “security” company was concerned with profits. The employees were the ones concerned with security. The company won out.

This is one more reason why we need the Employee Free Choice Act.