Cheney Assault on Employee Free Choice: A Family Affair
As we noted last week, Dick Cheney did workers everywhere a favor by lending his massive unpopularity to the campaign against the freedom to form unions. You couldn’t pick a better symbol of the enemies of the Employee Free Choice Act than a discredited multimillionaire Bush administration villain.
As we’ve noted, even Republican insiders realize the widely loathed former vice president isn’t doing them any favors by keeping a high public profile of late.
But Cheney isn’t the only Cheney getting involved in the fight against workers’ freedom to bargain: His daughter, Mary Cheney, works for “Navigators Global,” a high-priced consulting firm whose clients include “Workplace,” one of the many deceptively named, well-funded corporate front groups behind the disinformation campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act. The work of the misnamed coalition is paid for by such champions of the health and safety workers as Wal-Mart and the Associated Builders and Contractors. (Check out how the consulting firm’s website brags about using “branding” to counteract their corporate funders’ weakness at the grassroots level.)
Cheney, Rove Attack Employee Free Choice. Thanks!
Workers who want to pass the Employee Free Choice Act don’t just have a broad coalition of allies in support of them—they’re also very, very lucky in their enemies. Opposing the legislation has become a cottage industry for out-of-work, right-wing hacks, and the fight has attracted the attention of one of the most widely loathed out-of-work, right-wing hacks: Dick Cheney.
The broadly unpopular former vice president attacked the Employee Free Choice Act as a “huge mistake” on a Fox News appearance yesterday, reports Sam Stein of the Huffington Post. And naturally—does it even need to be said—Cheney’s claims about what the bill would do are flatly false and repeatedly debunked.
As advocates of the Employee Free Choice Act, we enthusiastically welcome Dick Cheney as an opponent. What better symbol of the anti-worker campaign than an angry multimillionaire who’s already been broadly repudiated for his disastrous effects on the country? (Even some Republicans are wishing he’d “go back to his undisclosed location.”)
