The Hudson Institute is sponsoring a forum on Capitol Hill Wednesday, “The Negative Employment Effects of the Paycheck Fairness Act.” If jobs are the priority, then this bill has to fail.

When the Senate reconvenes for its lame-duck session later this month, senators will consider the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that would vastly expand the role of government in employers’ compensation decisions. The bill would require the government to collect data from employers on the sex, race, and national origin of employees, significantly adding to red tape, paperwork, and hiring costs, and trapping firms in costly litigation.

At a time when the unemployment rate is above 9 percent and almost 15 million Americans are out of work, the Paycheck Fairness Act would impose substantial new burdens on employers that would encourage hiring overseas and discourage hiring in America. As the Washington Post concluded in a recent editorial, “Discrimination is abhorrent, but the Paycheck Fairness Act is not the right fix.”

Please join Hudson Institute to analyze the costs of the bill and its effects on employment from the economic, legal, and small business perspectives at this Capitol Hill event. Luncheon keynote speaker is the 24th U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao, now a Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

The event starts at 9:45 a.m. at the Capitol Visitors Center.

A new web memo from the Heritage Foundation charts the Department of Labor’s march in reverse on transparency requirements for labor unions. From “Decreasing Union Transparency: A Step Backward for Workers“:

President Obama campaigned on a platform of transparency and opposing special interest lobbyists. However, his DOL has violated both of those principles by revoking the improvements in union financial transparency that Secretary Chao implemented.

Union members deserve to know how their dues are spent. It protects them from corruption and allows them to hold their union accountable for bad decisions, such as the SEIU’s close relationship with the now-disgraced ACORN. Congress should act to protect workers if the President will not.

See also Mark Hemingway at The Washington Exmainer, citing how the reporting requirements gave members of Denver United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 enough information to inspire them to vote out their longstanding president, Ernie Duran, for nepotism and overspending.

Former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao spoke Saturday morning at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual conference, a prime slot in a morning lineup following Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Surprisingly, Chao spent little time on the Employee Free Choice Act, perhaps figuring that attendees were already familiar with this hot-button issue. Instead, after brief comments on EFCA, she covered the rest of the political agenda she says is being pushed by organized labor, Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration. Excerpt:

And another push is to empower “mini-unions.” Have you heard about mini-unions? This is the push to have the National Labor Relations Board recognize tiny cells of workers, who don’t represent a majority of any bargaining unit, but can recognition to demand recognition and force employers to bargain on wages and benefits.

Another initiative is resurrecting the $8 billion ergonomics regulation. Ergonomic inspections and enforcement can be expected to ramp up and target health care, hospitality, food services, transportation, construction, manufacturing, clerical support functions.

And, there would likely be an adoption of a private right of action to sue employees.

We expect also to see a ratcheting up of OSHA regulations, wage and hour employment standards enforcement, not to protect workers, but to harass employers, to soften them up for organizing campaigns. There are also proposals to hold employers personally and criminal liable for OSHA violations.

Interesting that she mentioned the “mini-unions,” which is a reference to “minority bargaining” — the recognition of smaller bargaining units even though the entire workplace might not be unionized. We highlighted the issue in this Shopfloor.org post from August 2007:

Michael Fox of Ogletree-Deakins, blogging at Employerslawyer, provides lots of background and useful links. Fox practices in Texas and he obviously has some familiarity with the SMU professor emeritus, Charlie Morris, who propounds the theory that the 1935 National Labor Relations Act requires employers to negotiate with even a minority within a bargaining unit. (Morris’ book is “The Blue Eagle at Work: Reclaiming Democratic Rights in the American Workplace” — Is this the full text via Google? So that’s what all the talk about Google’s attack on copyrights is about.)

Fox concludes:

The general consensus, which I share, is that this is a non-starter with the current NLRB, but is another agenda item if the political winds in Washington should shift. That agenda is beginning to grow, so much so that it probably merits its own category, the 2009 agenda. The 2009 agenda? Sigh…He’s surely right. And it’s looking like a pretty radical agenda.

Well, that was prescient. Alas.