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 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.

From The Washington Examiner, “Union officer pension funds remain flush as rank-and-file retirement plans deteriorate.”

“This issue of rank and file pension plans being funded less than the officer pension plans is extraordinarily serious and shows a great moral failing on the part of the unions,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute who authored the study.

“They’re just not putting enough money into the rank and file plans. My suspicion is that when unions bargain with an employer for a benefits package they are focusing on wage increases because this is more visible to the membership and they are not focusing on pension benefits.”

And an earlier commentary from Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the Department of Labor, “The Hidden Agenda Behind Card Check.”

Organized labor has finally found a way to replenish the coffers of its underfunded pension plans. The key is mandatory binding arbitration between newly-formed unions and employers, one of the main provisions of the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act.

From today’s Wall Street Journal, “Unions in Debt,” with the secondary headline, “Big labor has big financial problems it wants to keep quiet.”

‘We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama,” declared Andy Stern last month, and the president of the Service Employees International Union wasn’t exaggerating. The SEIU and AFL-CIO have been spending so much on politics that they’re going deeply into debt.

That news comes courtesy of federal disclosure forms that unions file each year with the Department of Labor. The Bush Administration toughened the enforcement of those disclosure rules, but under pressure from unions the Obama Labor shop is slashing funding for such enforcement. Without such disclosure, workers wouldn’t be able to see how their union chiefs are managing their mandatory dues money.

And an insight:

[Unions] can’t resist the lure of the Beltway precisely because they fare so poorly in the private marketplace. The union red ink helps explain why Mr. Stern and AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney are lobbying so hard for Congress to rig the rules to make it easier for unions to gather more dues-paying members.

Former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao outlined the attacks against disclosure and the Department’s Office of Labor Management Standards in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month, “Obama Tries to Stop Union Disclosure: No more sunshine on how worker dues are spent.”

Brian Worth of the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace has a letter in The Oregonian newspaper, responding to a columnist who suggested “postcard check” is a legitimate alternative to card check and could possibly be included in a Congressional “compromise” on the spuriously named Employee Free Choice Act.

The column by Jeff Mapes reported that Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), elected in November with heavy union backing, had issued a news release decrying the criticism of the mail-in card, comparing the process to the Oregon’s all vote-by-mail elections.

Worth responds (scroll down):

Postcard check’ scheme
There is no comparison between Oregon early voting and congressional efforts to find alternatives to the wildly unpopular card check scheme (”Mail voting proposed in union ‘card check’ fight,” June 4).

The most important distinction is that there’s no ballot involved in the mail-in
card proposal. It merely substitutes the discredited card check ruse with a “postcard check” — a new and equally flawed variation. The postcard check proposal increases the power of the professional union organizer, eviscerates secret ballot elections and further weakens workers’ privacy rights.

Like regular card check, mail-in cards do not provide the guaranteed security and privacy of a voting booth, thus inviting fraud, intimidation and coercion with more visits to workers’ homes by union organizers.

This latest attempt to fix what is wrong with the Employee Free Choice Act opens the door to abuse through ACORN-style campaigning that is prone to fraud and increases the possibility of worker intimidation and coercion. As National Labor Relations Board career staff noted, mail-in cards increase the “potential for interference by any party.”

You can’t fix card check by simply adding postage and this alternative further expands the attack on worker privacy from the workplace to the home.

The National Association of Manufacturers is a member of the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and glad of it.

A. Mutually acceptable outcome that resolves previous disagreements between two or more opposing sides.
B. Political cover.
C. Don’t know, but if it involves strong supporters of the Employee Free Choice Act agreeing with not-quite-as-strong supporters of the Employee Free Choice Act, it’s not a compromise.

From The Washington Examiner, “Dems try new approach on ‘Card Check’“:

The Senate is now working on a compromise version of the controversial “Card Check” bill that would allow employees to vote by mail on whether to unionize, rather than sign a petition in public.

While union and business groups remain at odds over the new proposal, Democratic backers of the bill are meeting privately this week with moderate lawmakers who have so far been unwilling to back a labor reform bill. [See B above.]

Those lawmakers, including Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and Mark Pryor, D-Ark., will also meet with business groups who are descending on the Capitol this week in a coordinated effort to lobby against the latest proposal.

And how is it that business groups “are descending” on the Capitol? It’s Capitol Hill, isn’t it? Business groups are ascending on the Capitol.

Except for their meetings in the Capitol Visitors Center, which is subterranian.

A group, Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, has bought TV time in Washington for a half-hour advocacy program criticizing single-payer health care. The program, done in a professional documentary style, ran starting at 11:30 a.m. Sunday morning on NBC Channel 4 in Washington, D.C., and what we’ve seen has been very critical of the Canadian and British health care systems, although supporters are given an opportunity to speak, as well.

Ah, and now there’s a 30-second spot from activists that supports expanded government control of health care, “Health Care for America,” an attack ad against Rick Scott, founder of CPR and former head of the Columbia/HCA health-care company. You know the kind of campaign commercial – threatening voice, ominous warnings, personal attacks. A writer at the prominent left-wing blog, Daily Kos, described the efforts:

Dr. Howard Dean, from Democracy For America, has teamed up with other health care reform organizations such as SEIU and Health Care For America Now (HCAN), to fight back against the new swiftboating of the public option that we NEED in health care reform…[snip]

Well, we’re NOT going to sit by and let him lie so freely on the air! Let’s help out DFA and HCAN out by FIGHTING BACK HARD TODAY by asking NBC not to violate the FCC laws in running a misleading ad full of deceit, hatred, and lies for the public health of Americans.

Not satisfied with using the many, many resources they have available to them, the unions and activists want to ban speech, prevent expression, block a point of view. It’s typical enough. The SEIU and other unions spend tens of millions of dollars trying to elect candidates and win passage of the Employee Free Choice Act so labor can silence employees and employers who don’t want their companies forced into unionization.

A suggestion to all sides in the health-care policy debate: Let’s support vigorous discussion of all the issues, move deliberately and thoroughly to examine the costs to the taxpayers, the effect on economic competitiveness, and most importantly, the quality and availability of patients’ care. To those who would squelch debate, we ask: What are you afraid of?

P.S. The Washington Post wrote about Rick Scott, Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, and the TV spots in this story, “Ex-Hospital CEO Battles Reform Effort.” 

P.P.S. The NAM’s policy statement on health care and employee benefits is here.  NAM President John Engler had an op-ed on health care policy in Investor’s Business Daily, “Keep Best Of ‘Employer-Based’ Coverage.”