A funny thing about the supporters of the Employee Free Choice Act, the finest piece of legislative misnaming in recent memory: They almost never say what the bill actually does.

Labor and their allies promise the bill will achieve social justice, increased wages, better health care, generous pensions and everything short of a picnic atop the Big Rock Candy Mountain, but they never get around to explaining the mechanism for achieving these wonders.

Typical is this passage from a recent Center for American Progress piece on combating poverty:

“Another way we can reduce poverty for workers is to help them get better jobs and working conditions by making it easier for workers to create unions. Passing the Employee Free Choice Act, which establishes stronger penalties for violations of employee rights and puts in place another method of creating unions, would achieve this goal.”

Another method of creating unions? And that would be?

The method is “card check,� which really means the elimination of the federally supervised employee elections, conducted via a confidentiality-protecting secret ballot. The method is the collection of signature cards until 50 percent plus 1 of a workplace says they want to be represented by the union. And experience tells us the method is coercion, intimidation and constant harassment by union organizers until the requisite number of employees sign on. (Imagine being the “one� in that 50 percent plus 1.)

The method is a process geared toward imposing binding arbitration on employer and employee alike if a contract is not quickly reached, depriving the employees of the ability to protect their individual rights against the union or their employer. As Senator Orrin Hatch, (R-Utah), said in a recent speech at the Heritage Foundation, “Added to current law, the effect would be to deny employees the opportunity to approve, or ratify, the terms of the contact. And, they would be prevented by the National Labor Relations Board’s contract bar from initiating a private ballot decertification election challenging the union’s continuing majority status for the two year term of the contract.”

It’s no surprise that supporters do not want to talk about the specifics of the Employee Free Choice Act because the bill is a bold and direct assault on workers’ rights. And if the public learns about the bill’s aggressive attack on democratic rights, they reject the legislation with visceral distaste.

National polling confirms it, as seen in this news release from the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace.

• 87 percent of voters agree that every worker should continue to have the right to a federally supervised secret ballot election when deciding whether to organize a union;

• 89 percent of voters believe organizing votes should remain confidential and not be made public; and

• 90 percent of union households oppose the so-called “Employee Free Choice Act.”
No wonder supporters of H.R. 800 and S. 1041 seek to deflect attention from the bill’s specifics, starting with the decision to call it the misleading Employee Free Choice Act. In attacking the secret ballot and the ability of individual employees to guide their own fate, basic American principles also come under attack. Not talking about it doesn’t make it any less true.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Labor, Politics .