Rep. Miller and Sen. Harkin completely get it regarding EFCA. Via email:
U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) today said that a proposal unveiled by three companies this weekend as an alternative to the Employee Free Choice Act would further undermine workers' rights on the job. Miller and Harkin, leaders in the House and Senate on the Employee Free Choice Act, issued the following statement opposing this approach:
“This proposal is unacceptable. It was written by CEOs for CEOs. It is not a serious attempt at labor law reform because it fails to fundamentally address key problems that currently prevent workers from being able to join together and bargain for a better life.
“This proposal maintains the status quo by denying workers a real say in the workplace. It denies workers the ability to choose majority sign-up, the one method for organizing proven to reduce coercion and pressure from all sides on workers. It rejects a tried and proven method for ensuring good faith bargaining, denying workers a fair chance to gain the same kind of enforceable contracts that CEOs always take for themselves.
“It even increases the power of CEOs to dominate workers’ choices by allowing CEOs to initiate drives to get rid of a union – a choice that should belong to workers, not CEOs. It is nothing more than a classic Washington lobbying campaign intended to confuse the issues and disguise the real agenda of maintaining the status quo.
Following up on my previous post in re: Limbaugh as Fearless Leader, He Who Must Be Obeyed, we see this from a predictable Republican operative. Either he's too stupid to actually read, or, more likely, he has gotten the Limbaugh Daily Brief and memorized the lies:
"Since when is the secret ballot a basic tenet of democracy?" Teamsters President James Hoffa recently demanded. He callously dismissed this cornerstone of American self-government that helped emancipated slaves vote after the Civil War and has decided presidential elections since Grover Cleveland beat Benjamin Harrison in 1892.
Hoffa and other union bosses, egged on by Democrats from Capitol Hill to the White House, display world-class hypocrisy, violate international labor standards, and contradict their own sales pitch as they desperately promote "card-check" legislation to drive secret ballots from union-authorization elections.
Once a majority of workers at a labor-targeted institution signs cards showing interest in unionization, rather than trigger a secret-ballot election (as happens today), those cards automatically would impose union-monopoly representation on every worker, including those who never signed cards.
Imagine a candidate with a majority of voters' signatures on his qualifying petition. Suddenly, November's secret-ballot election is cancelled, and he instantly becomes congressman.
As one blogger says, the stupid, it burns. From the SEIU blog:
Corporate front groups' one-line attack on the Employee Free Choice Act is the false claim that it somehow eliminates the secret ballot option for workers to join unions. Although it's blatantly false and dishonest, desperate corporate interests continue to hammer that argument without shame.
But it seems one of their closest allies is finally willing to acknowledge the truth. In this morning's Wall Street Journal, the corporate-friendly editorial board admits:
"The bill doesn't remove the secret-ballot option from the National Labor Relations Act," wrote the WSJ.
There you have it. The Employee Free Choice Act "doesn't remove the secret ballot."
CONSERVATIVE CANARD: To generate opposition to the EFCA, conservatives have been spouting the canard that the legislation will strip workers of their right to a secret ballot. Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), who opposes EFCA, argued, "This act takes away the right to a secret ballot." In a similar vein, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao writes today in the Wall Street Journal, "It is incredible that interest groups who say they are advocates for workers are striving to end workers' opportunity to have private union elections." In reality, the EFCA does not abolish elections. It merely shifts the balance of the playing field -- from one that is currently tilted overwhelmingly in favor of employers who dictate whether employees can organize, to a process that is instead employee-driven. "Under the proposed legislation, workers get to choose the union formation process -- elections or majority sign-up. What the Employee Free Choice Act does prevent is an employer manipulating the flawed system to influence the election outcome." The myths propagated by the right have prompted some Democrats, including Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), to withhold their support for the bill.
