Bring on the union goon squads

Daily Secret-Ballot News: here
Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act" • More EFCA : here

Dems and Union Enforcers see eye-to-eye

Perhaps the real test of what kind of President Barack Obama will be, and what kind of Congress the 111th will be, will come over the perversely named Employee Free Choice Act. This piece of legislation would amend the National Labor Relations Act. Under current law, an employer can demand an election to determine whether his employees will organize under some new or existing union. The election is held by the National Labor Relations Board, and the voting is by secret ballot. The secret ballot, of course, is to protect workers against pressure by making sure that no one, neither their employer or the pro-union organizers, can know how they voted.

If the EFCA becomes law, the secret ballot election would be replaced by a "card check" procedure. If a majority of employees sign cards favoring union, then the workforce will be organized.

All the arguments in favor of the change turn on the disadvantages that unions have in getting access to workers. To be sure, employers have easier access to their employees than a union might have, especially if the latter means a union wishing to come into a previously unionized workforce, like Wal-Mart. But card check wouldn't remedy that problem. What it would do is give Union goons the chance to pressure workers. "Hey Joey, I heard you don't wanna be joinin the union! It would be terrible if something were to happen to youse. Or your beautiful children." Card check is a union leg-breaker free choice act.

Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act"


The Employee Free Choice Act of 2007 passed the House on a party line vote. 228 Democrats and 13 Republicans voted in favor of it. Two Democrats and 183 Republicans voted no. When it got to the Senate it was defeated by a Republican filibuster. The Democrats brought a vote of cloture, to end debate and vote on the bill. The vote was 51 yes and 48 no, on straight party lines. But a vote of cloture requires 60 votes. So card check failed. If it had passed Congress, President Bush would have vetoed it. President McCain would have done the same. But President Obama said he would sign it.

There is now a good chance that the Democrats will get a 60 vote majority. Stevens in Alaska is behind the count, and Al Franken's friend keep finding new votes in Minnesota. I think Chambliss in Georgia will put it out, but I am not certain. If the Democrats do get to 60, it looks like card check is a sure thing.

I would like to think that this was all for show. The Democrats wanted to show the Unions that they were all for them, while they needed their money. Card check is so obviously a terrible idea that, maybe, the Democrats don't really want to take responsibility for it. We might be about to find out.

(southdakotapolitics.blogs.com)

Job providers petition against EFCA

Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act"
More EFCA stories: here • card-check: here

Union bigs' fascistic forced-unionism scheme is a job-killer

That didn't take long. Six Maryland business groups, including the Maryland Retailers Association and the Restaurant Association of Maryland, put out a statement opposing the Employee Free Choice Act, which seems quite likely to pass the new Congress. The measure would let employees check a card to vote on whether to certify a union. Now they have to vote by secret ballot in elections supervised by the Feds. The letter, to Maryland's congressional delegation, reads:

On behalf of our over 10,000 member businesses, we are writing to express our strong opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800). While this legislation failed in this session of Congress, it will be before the Congress next year and we want you to know our position.

Commonly referred to as "Card Check" bill, this legislation would bypass the current secret-ballot process to form a union as regulated by the National Labor Relations Board. Whether voting for President of the United States or President of the student body, Americans have relied upon the private ballot to protect voters from undue influence or harassment. Current law protects the independent views of workers by providing for a federally supervised private ballot election. Under the Employee Free Choice Act, the private ballot would be replaced with a vote in-the-open process that would subject independently minded workers to coercion and harassment.

Additionally, this sweeping legislation would take wage and benefit negotiations away from employees and managers and instead rely on a single federal arbitrator with likely little or no prior knowledge of the company to make those decisions.

The Card Check legislation is a game changer and of the utmost concern to our member employers. We cannot overstate the strong feelings of our members against this legislation. Amidst the worst financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression, enactment of card check could not be more ill timed. Our members have enough challenges just trying to keep the doors open and meet their payrolls.

(weblogs.baltimoresun.com)

Unionists lost in translation

Daily Secret-Ballot News: here
Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act" • More EFCA : here

Labor Front Groups To Push Card-Check Bill In New Ad

American Rights At Work, a coalition of labor advocates and progressive organizations like the Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO, is launching a nationwide TV ad on Sunday urging the incoming Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

This legislation, which has elicited a heated debate on both sides of the political spectrum throughout the election, would make it easier for workers to form unions. Critics argue that one provision of the bill, which would get rid of mandatory secret elections when employees are deciding whether or not to unionize, would leave employees vulnerable to intimidation and coercion.

With a Democratic majority in both chambers and President-elect Barack Obama having come out in support of the legislation, the group hopes the bill gains traction and passes early in the next session. "This needs to be a top priority in the new Congress and administration," said spokesman Josh Goldstein. "This ad couldn't have come earlier enough."

Related video: "Puppies for Big Labor Bailout"


Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act"


The ad will run nationwide for three weeks on CNN, MSNBC and Headline News, and on broadcast cable during political talk shows.

Check back Monday for more on the push for the Employee Free Choice Act.

(lostintransition.nationaljournal.com)

Union secret-ballot news - Nov. 15

Bookmark Secret-Ballot News posts: here • card-check: here • EFCA: here

Stories-of-the-day concerning Organized Labor's #1 priority.






• Bring on the union goon squads ... What it would do is give Union goons the chance to pressure workers. "Hey Joey, I heard you don't wanna be joinin the union! It would be terrible if something were to happen to youse. Or your beautiful children." Card check is a union leg-breaker free choice act. (southdakotapolitics.blogs.com)

• Unions place collect call to Prez Bam ... On election eve, Teamsters boss James P. Hoffa could hardly contain himself when he predicted card check would help unions recruit hundreds of thousands of new members and force employers to pay better wages. "This is going to be the law of the land when Barack Obama wins," Hoffa gloated. At a conference this year Stern predicted the effect of card check on union membership would be even greater. Unions, he said, would grow by 1.5 million members annually for 10 to15 years, increases that would fortify unionfinances. (theaustralian.news.com.au)

• Job providers petition against EFCA ... Six Maryland business groups, including the Maryland Retailers Association and the Restaurant Association of Maryland, put out a statement opposing the Employee Free Choice Act, which seems quite likely to pass the new Congress. (weblogs.baltimoresun.com)

• Special-interest payback: EFCA ... It also would impose penalties on employers for unfair labor practices, including triple back pay for workers who are wrongfully fired. Organizers would gather support by convincing workers to sign union cards, rather than holding secret-ballot elections. Once a majority agree to join, the employer would be obliged to negotiate a contract. If the sides fail to reach an accord within the 90 days, they could call for mediation, and unresolved contracts would go to binding arbitration.
(latimesblogs.latimes.com)

• Unionists lost in translation ... Critics argue that one provision of the bill, which would get rid of mandatory secret elections when employees are deciding whether or not to unionize, would leave employees vulnerable to intimidation and coercion. With a Democratic majority in both chambers and President-elect Barack Obama having come out in support of the legislation, the group hopes the bill gains traction and passes early in the next session. "This needs to be a top priority in the new Congress and administration," said spokesman Josh Goldstein. "This ad couldn't have come earlier enough. (lostintransition.nationaljournal.com)

• Federal Bailout for Organized Labor ... Obama claims his first priority is to create jobs and revive the economy. If he's a man of his word, he will stand up to this shameless pressure group. If he does not, the unions' job-killer bill will make a bad economy that much worse. Will it be business as usual whenever a Democrat president is browbeaten by unions that want to cash in for helping to elect him, no matter what the cost to the nation's economy? (pittsburghlive.com)

Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act"

Union embezzler sentenced in labor-state

More embezzlement stories: here
Related story: "The 28 labor-states"

National epidemic due to excess cash, lax management

The former business agent of a Trenton-based insulation and asbestos workers union was sentenced today to 2-1/2 years in prison for pocketing about $829,000 of the organization's money, which he spent gambling.

John DaBronzo, 57, had pleaded guilty to embezzlement in June and was sentenced in federal court in Trenton. U.S. District Judge Joel A. Pisano also ordered DaBronzo to repay the money.

DaBronzo, of Hamilton Square, worked for Local 89 of the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers of the United States and Canada for 18 years. He pilfered the money from two union funding sources between January 2005 and April 2007, U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said.

About $396,000 of the stolen funds came from the union's apprenticeship fund, intended to train new workers, prosecutors said. The other $433,000 was from checks that employers sent to Local 89 to cover the members union dues, prosecutors said.

(nj.com)

ACORN loses Catholic support

More ACORN stories: here • Voter-fraud: here • Wade Rathke: here

Union-backed social justice fraud exposed

Editor: The best news to come out of the recent election is that since ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) has been exposed by the media, the Catholic Church’s upcoming Thanksgiving appeal to “fight poverty” (CCHD-Catholic Campaign for Human Development) has withdrawn its $1.13 million 2008 grant from ACORN. ($7.3 million granted to ACORN over the last 10 years!)

ACORN’s radical class warfare, community organizing tactics of intimidation and its left-wing affiliations (many of them pro-abortion) have been known for decades. However, it took the million-dollar embezzlement by Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke and chief ACORN organizer, to get the attention of the CCHD. Money talks.

Now it remains to be seen whether the CCHD, a project of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), will follow through and also withdraw its annual donations (33 percent of what it collects from generous Catholics) from the other radical Alinskyite groups it funds — the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), Gamaliel, Pacific Institute for Community Organizing (PICO) and Direct Action and Research Training Center (DART).

Until that happens, the surest way to fight poverty and actually help people is to keep the money at home and put it in the local St. Vincent de Paul basket, not the left-leaning CCHD sieve.

- Carol Suhr

(paysonroundup.com)

Barack Obama to AFSCME

More AFSCME stories: here

The Nation: Obama to replay FDR collectivism

More collectivism stories: here

New New Deal is the same old Depression-prolonging wine

The pundits were quick to evaluate Barack Obama's election in light of African-American political traditions going back to the civil rights movement and even Reconstruction, but they have turned increasingly to lessons from the history of the New Deal.

Obama invoked that legacy repeatedly during the campaign, from the account of how his grandfather benefited from the GI Bill to his proposals to create jobs and economic growth through federal investment in education, industrial innovation and infrastructure. Such rhetoric allowed him to claim the legacy of the most popular and successful government programs in American history, but it also displayed some of the limitations of New Deal policies, particularly in their ability to address racial inequality. We can thus turn to the history of those programs for an indication of how the Obama administration will confront the interrelated problems of economic and racial inequality in the twenty-first-century United States.

Despite conservatives' alarm about "the slippery slope to socialism," Franklin Roosevelt displayed a strong aversion to direct control over the economy. Instead, his administration relied on civil society groups to implement and enforce government policies. Rather than impose wage and price regulations to stabilize the economy, for example, the National Recovery Administration allowed business associations to establish standards and then empowered unions to enforce them. That unprecedented mobilization of civil society sowed the seeds for the industrial union movement, which proved critical to Roosevelt's re-election in 1936 and deepened his commitment to social democratic reform in the late 1930s and early '40s.

It was this synergy between federal policy and popular mobilization that created the "greatest generation" that, as Obama stated in June, "conquered fear itself, and liberated a continent from tyranny, and made this country home to untold opportunity and prosperity." Increased protection under the National Labor Relations Act allowed unions to raise wages and benefits steadily in the 1940s and '50s, while the GI Bill and other programs helped workers invest those gains in new homes, college education, health insurance and pensions. By 1951 even Fortune magazine had to admit that the expansion of organized labor had made the worker "to an amazing degree a middle class member of a middle class society."

But there is a more troubling side to the New Deal's legacy, which will not be resolved through populist appeals to the struggling middle class. A growing body of scholarly literature has shown that the same reliance on civil society that inspired the labor movement also prevented the Roosevelt administration from addressing deeply ingrained racial inequalities. While unions improved wages and conditions for industrial workers, they had little impact on the agricultural and service sectors, where the vast majority of blacks and Latinos labored for low wages without collective bargaining rights, health insurance or even Social Security. The GI Bill offered mortgage assistance and scholarships to all veterans but did nothing to ensure that African-Americans could use those benefits to attend segregated colleges or buy homes in segregated neighborhoods. Indeed, had Obama's paternal grandparents lived in the United States it is unlikely they would have shared the sepia-toned vision of the New Deal era that was so pervasive in his campaign material.

The civil rights movement was in many respects an effort to address those shortcomings. Voting rights and equal protection had been central to African-American political objectives since Reconstruction, but demands for equal access to education, housing and employment addressed the more immediate racial injustice of New Deal policies.

President-elect Obama has an opportunity to further racial and economic justice by fusing the New Deal and civil rights traditions. He expressed that link directly in Philadelphia in March, when he insisted that unless Americans confront racial inequality directly, they will "never be able to come together and solve challenges like healthcare, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American." Such a confrontation would entail strengthening the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other civil rights agencies, while addressing racial inequalities in primary school funding, economic development and incarceration. Just as the GI Bill benefited white veterans more than black ones, race-neutral policies are likely to exacerbate existing inequalities.

Many of Obama's supporters have already made that connection. Union density is roughly the same now as it was before Roosevelt's election in 1932, but organized labor has incorporated the lessons of the civil rights movement perhaps more consciously than any other institution. African-Americans are more likely to belong to unions than any other racial group, and many have risen to positions of power in the nation's largest and fastest-growing unions. Those same unions have built close alliances with organizations dedicated to civil rights, not only for African-Americans but also Latinos, women and gays and lesbians. Obama has promised to sign the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for unions to organize and thus bolster their ability to support his re-election in 2012.

There are certainly risks to this approach. Journalist Matt Bai noted during the campaign that Obama's appeal depended at least in part on his refusal to "behave like a civil rights leader." Just two days after the election, the New York Times reported that Obama had already "begun an effort to tamp down what his aides fear are unusually high expectations among his supporters." His transition team is dominated by veterans of the Clinton administration, which retreated from its attempt at healthcare reform and adopted the conservative mantra that "the era of big government is over."

Some will certainly advise Obama to adopt a similar stance. But that would likely prevent him from implementing the reforms that inspired his supporters in the first place. His victory depended on his ability to mobilize a broad, multiracial majority, an achievement slighted by John McCain and others who restrict its "special significance" to African-Americans. That majority acted out of the belief that Obama was best prepared to address the economic crisis, but many voters, white and black, also saw in him a chance to overcome the racial inequalities that have plagued the United States since its founding. History tells us that Obama may not be able to deliver his promise for economic change without also embracing the civil rights movement's call for race-conscious reform.

(thenation.com)

Organized Labor's Detroit Disaster

More collectivism stories: here

Collective bargaining boondoggles to be rewarded by Prez Bam, Congress

While Detroit's big three automakers grovel for a tax-funded bailout, 14 U.S-based, international automakers announced last year's additional investments of $39.3 billion in 69 facilities that employ 92,700 people with an annual payroll of $6.3 billion. Why are the U.S.-based international automakers expanding, while Detroit's big three are grasping for a life-saving handout? The answer, of course, is labor unions; only two facilities of the U.S.-based international automakers are unionized, one in California, the other in Illinois. All the others are union-free and are doing quite well.

The big three domestic automakers have already been granted $25 billion to retool. Now, they want another $50 billion, half of which is needed to fund union-mandated benefits.

Non-union automakers produce nearly one-third of all new cars and trucks. They now control nearly 40 percent of the market, while the union-controlled "big three" are reducing production, losing market share and going broke. The thousands of union workers who now face unemployment must hang much of the blame on their unions.

Labor unions came into existence to counter the absolute power of employers. The history of the labor movement is boisterous and bloody. In the evolution of American business, labor has, at times, been noble; at times, it has been corrupt. Like every other institution that amasses power, labor has abused its power by requiring its employers to provide more "goodies" than can be supported by a free market.

The government should not use tax dollars to fund these benefits. If the market will not support union demands, then the demands should be modified or ignored.

Union officials are not rushing to the rescue of the automakers by offering to modify their demands. They are rushing to their favorite well-funded politicians demanding payback for their election support.

Labor unions want even more. They want "The Employee Free Choice Act," also called "Card Check." This legislation would remove unionization from the control of the National Labor Relations Board's secret ballot process. Instead, labor bosses would be allowed to put a card in front of an employee and say "sign here." When a majority of employees sign the card, the entity is unionized.

It's hard to imagine that any legislator would even think of voting for legislation that would so clearly authorize the probability of intimidation and abuse. But it passed the House of Representatives 241 to 185 and garnered 51 of the 60 votes needed in the Senate.

Labor unions own far too many politicians. Labor unions, with help from their well-funded and endorsed politicians, have bitten the hand that feeds them. Now the hand, in Detroit, is a bloody nub that can hand out no more food.

The root cause of this problem is interference with the free market. Unions and government are the source of this interference. Since its heyday in the 1960s, both unions and government have continually required the Detroit auto industry to adopt policies and procedures that could not be supported by a free market. The cumulative effect of this interference is the disaster that now faces the industry, the government and the nation.

A free market economy, as opposed to a government-managed economy, is a fundamental principle of freedom. Every market intrusion erodes both the economy and freedom, whether the intrusion comes from unions or from government. Sadly, neither unions nor government seem to care about freedom or free markets. Their actions demonstrate their faith in the Marxist philosophy that government must manage markets.

It was government intrusion into the free market that required banks to lend to unqualified homebuyers, which caused the housing bubble and the inevitable collapse that has so devastated the financial industry. The consequential credit crisis hastened the inevitable collapse of the overburdened auto industry. The ripple effect from these collapses has only begun to be felt across the entire economy.

The paramount question now is whether to kick the inevitable collapse a little further down the road by confiscating more tax dollars to bail out failing enterprises, or to let them collapse now.

It's hard to imagine the United States without the big three automakers. It's even harder to imagine the pain and suffering that would accompany their collapse. It's not hard to imagine, or even predict, the consequences of continuing to confiscate taxes or print new (valueless) money to reward the past mistakes of government, unions and industry.

Even a casual look around the world or across history reveals that government-managed economies are a poor substitute for free enterprise. Each new government bailout is another step deeper into a government-managed economy for America. This change in direction from free enterprise to a managed economy has but one destination: total collapse. Ultimately, blame must finally be placed where it belongs – upon the people who elected the officials who decided to make this change.

- Henry Lamb

(wnd.com)

Puppies for Big Labor Bailout

Daily Secret-Ballot News: here
Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act" • More EFCA : here

Special-interest payback: EFCA

Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act"
More EFCA stories: here • card-check: here

Dance with the ones who brung you

Barack Obama might not be president-elect without the tens of millions that organized labor spent on his behalf.

Now, a union-backed organization is hoping to hold Obama to one of his promises. It is launching an early salvo in what could be a major fight at the start of the new administration.

Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act"


The group, American Rights at Work, plans to start airing its new ad on Sunday, hoping to build support for the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation authored by Rep. George Miller, chair of the House Education and Labor Committee.

American Rights at Work was founded by David Bonior, a former Democratic congressman from Michigan. Now, Bonior is part of Obama’s transition team of economic advisors, and stood along side various members from Wall Street and Washington when Obama held his first press conference last week.

“When it comes to looking for economic solutions for the middle class, this should be a top priority,” said Josh Goldstein, the group’s spokesman.

Goldstein noted that Obama and Joe Biden both cosponsored the legislation when they were in the Senate. Obama talked of the need for the measure while on the campaign trail, particularly when addressing union leaders and workers.

The measure would make it less difficult for unions to organize workers. It also would impose penalties on employers for unfair labor practices, including triple back pay for workers who are wrongfully fired.

Organizers would gather support by convincing workers to sign union cards, rather than holding secret-ballot elections.

Once a majority agree to join, the employer would be obliged to negotiate a contract. If the sides fail to reach an accord within the 90 days, they could call for mediation, and unresolved contracts would go to binding arbitration.

Glenn Spencer, the chamber executive leading the fight to kill the measure, said he expects that the House would approve the measure but hopes to block it in the Senate.

“From the perspective of the White House, President-elect Obama needs to think about how much political capital he wants to put behind this,” Spencer said, adding that if it is approved in the first 100 days, it is “going to look like a special-interest payback.

“This is probably not the first bill you’d want to put your weight behind,” Spencer said.

(latimesblogs.latimes.com)

Unions place collect call to Prez Bam

Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act"
More EFCA stories: here • card-check: here

Labor bigs call in the chits

"I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away. I don't consider this corrupting in any way; I don't mind feeling obligated." - Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, 2006

When he was on the road promoting his 2006 book A Country That Works, US trade union leader Andy Stern liked to spice up his stump speech with catchy, thought-provoking anecdotes about change in the global economy.

Stern would speak of a world that produced more transistors each year than it grew grains of rice; of a US jobs market where just eight of the 30 fastest growing jobs required a college education; how the Furby, a US-made children's toy, had four times the computing power of the Apollo spaceship that landed on the moon; how there were more companies than countries on the list of the world's 100 biggest economies. As head of the two million-strong Service Employees International Union, Stern wrote the book to chart a new direction for Big Labour. He argued that in revolutionary economic times unions were losing membership, and their political clout, because their leaders were captive to an outdated class-warfare ideology.

But Stern did more than just theorise. In 2005, when the world was watching the disaster of New Orleans unfold in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Stern's SEIU and six other unions broke away from the AFL-CIO, the nation's dominant trade union federation, and set up a new organisation called Change To Win. Now, 2 1/2 years later and after a presidential election where the banner of change flew higher than any other, Stern is being touted as a possible labour secretary in what is expected to be the most pro-union White House in decades.

After years of declining relevance and a membership that has dwindled to just 12 percent of US workers, organised labour has, in Barack Obama, a president-elect with a 98 per cent pro-labour voting record who has promised to pass the most radical changes in US labour relations law since Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

Obama has promised to sign the Employee Free Choice Act, also known as "card check", legislation that would make it easier for unions to organise by doing away with secret ballot elections to determine whether workplaces become unionised.

Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act"


The legislation also would impose on US business the toughest unfair dismissal laws the country has seen, including a $US20,000 fine for each violation and recompense to wrongly sacked workers at three times the value of lost wages and entitlements.

On election eve, Teamsters boss James P. Hoffa could hardly contain himself when he predicted card check would help unions recruit hundreds of thousands of new members and force employers to pay better wages. "This is going to be the law of the land when Barack Obama wins," Hoffa gloated.

At a conference this year Stern predicted the effect of card check on union membership would be even greater. Unions, he said, would grow by 1.5 million members annually for 10 to15 years, increases that would fortify unionfinances.

Despite the prospect of card check making old-style union heavies such as Hoffa more powerful, Republicans barely uttered a word in the election campaign. Asked by CNBC's business journalist Maria Bartiromo why he wasn't making it a key issue, John McCain moaned about campaign constraints allowing just three or four messages to be pushed at any one time.

The truth was that McCain's only hope of victory rested with white, blue-collar voters in rust-belt states such as Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio. Because this demographic is also a union demographic, McCain stayed silent.

But more significant was the fact Obama also was silent on card check. Now, with the stardust of election night finally settling and the daunting economic challenges facing the president-elect clearly in focus, doubts about Obama's once rock-solid commitment to the union agenda are starting to emerge.

Many believe card check was one of the issues in Obama's mind on election night when, in his victory speech, he warned: "we may not get there in one year, or even in one term". Obama's problem is that unions spent upwards of $US400 million on his campaign and those of Democrats in key Senate races. In addition, thousands of unionists door-knocked and staffed phone banks in swing states in the crucial final weeks of the campaign.

With victory achieved, the unions expect Obama to deliver on his card check promise. "The Employee Free Choice Act is our No1 legislative priority for next year," AFL-CIO chief economist Thea Lee said immediately after the election. "It was the centrepiece of our electoral efforts. We are very confident that it will happen."

The same message was heard in Puerto Rico this year when Stern's SEIU resolved to mobilise the union's resources during the first 100 days of the new Congress to ensure that worker priorities such as card check and health care for all are immediately actioned. The campaign is to include a staggering 10million phone calls to members of Congress. But with the economic outlook worse than at any time since the Depression, the AFL-CIO's New York president Denis Hughes admits that card check is a big ask.

"We expect a real battle on card check," Hughes says. "Despite last year's congressional vote in favour, we don't have unilateral support in the Democratic Party for it and there's a view that the economic downturn demands a more conservative approach to labour issues."

If Obama is intent on delaying or even abandoning card check, giving the labour secretary post to Stern, a darling of the educated, well-heeled Democrat Left, could be his best strategy. For one thing, Stern is known as a close follower of the zeitgeist, a pragmatist happy to bend his principles to fit changing circumstances. This is best and most controversially seen in the business-friendly trade unionism that has helped him nearly double the SEIU membership since he took over the union in 1996.

In A Country That Works, Stern argues that capital and labour benefit from teamwork and they need organisations that solve problems, not create them. To this end the SEIU has done deals whereby companies allow partial unionisation in exchange for political support and work practice concessions that increase company profits.

Stern champions this as unions "adding value". His critics call it selling out. They point to a deal in California where a nursing home chain was unionised on the basis that workers would not speak out publicly against abuse of patients or health code violations. In return the union lobbied for limiting the right of patients to sue.

Stern also has unsettled the labour movement by suggesting that social security might be acceptable, and for supporting the Chinese state union that has been accused of helping Beijing suppress workers' rights. The flipside is Stern's internationalism helped ensure Wal-Mart's China operations were unionised.

Last year card check passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 241-185, with only two of 230 Democrats opposing it. In the Senate the vote was 51-48, well short of the 60 votes needed to trump a filibuster. Every Democrat, including Obama, voted in favour.

The vote was academic in the sense that George W. Bush had promised to use his veto if card check got through, but with Obama to take over in January, it's a different story. As senator Edward Kennedy told the Senate last year, Democrats would bring back card check "again and again until we prevail".

"I guarantee this," he said. "We get a Democrat in the White House and the Employee Free Choice Act will be the law of the land."

Opponents of card check argue that removing the secret ballot will lead to industrial anarchy, with workers and employers intimidated by strong-arm unions. "This is a blatant attempt to use undemocratic means to revive trade union membership," says Justin Hakes, of the US Chamber of Commerce. "Without the privacy of the secret ballot, workers will be pressured to do whatever the union wants."

Proponents of card check say it will remove the clear bias against unions that exists in the present law. In many cases, employers bar union recruiters from the workplace education while hiring outside consultants to run anti-union sessions that workers are compelled to attend. Unions also accuse employers of using the lead-up to an election to threaten and intimidate workers.

If Obama wants card check badly enough, the Congress will likely deliver him the numbers. If he doesn't, the new year holds the tantalising prospect of Obama at war with the unions and with the likes of Kennedy, who would love nothing more than to see card check passed into law before his brain cancer can take its final toll.

(theaustralian.news.com.au)

Payback for Organized Labor

Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act"
More EFCA stories: here • card-check: here

Fascistic union bigs lean on Prez Bam

President-elect Barack Obama won't have to wait long before his mettle is tested. Big Labor has made it clear it will not postpone its attack to deny workers the right of a secret ballot.

If Mr. Obama allows the union-backed and deceptively titled Employee Free Choice Act to become law, union organizers would be more likely to hound any worker until he signed a card authorizing his support to form a union. Employees no longer would have the right to close the curtain and vote their conscience regarding unionizing.

Related video: "Employee Forced Choice Act"


By stripping workers of their right to vote privately, the balance of power between employers and unions would heavily favor organized labor. Even voters in banana republics have the right to vote in secret.

Obama claims his first priority is to create jobs and revive the economy. If he's a man of his word, he will stand up to this shameless pressure group. If he does not, the unions' job-killer bill will make a bad economy that much worse.

Will it be business as usual whenever a Democrat president is browbeaten by unions that want to cash in for helping to elect him, no matter what the cost to the nation's economy?

(pittsburghlive.com)

ACORN subdues Minnesota voters

More ACORN stories: here • Voter-fraud stories: here

Shutting down York University

More strike stories: here