Employee Free Choice Web Roundup
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One way to celebrate May Day is to catch up on recent coverage of the Employee Free Choice Act, so here’s a roundup of news, resources and blog posts from the week about the fight to ensure workers have the freedom to form unions without harassment and intimidation from managers.
* In the Huffington Post, the AFL-CIO’s Stewart Acuff looks at Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter’s decision to leave the Republican Party and says the union movement will be “watching closely” to see how Specter votes on issues critical to working people. Acuff says the Specter switch is a step in the right direction for the Employee Free Choice Act:
Arlen Specter’s decision to become a Democrat makes the fight for the Employee Free Choice Act much more fluid and passage much more likely.
The labor movement will re-double our already overwhelming efforts in Pennsylvania to convince the Senator to once again support the bill that he was a co-sponsor of.
Beware of the Big Lie Bill
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Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act in Congress made their Big Lie into a bill Wednesday, when Republican Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Mike Enzi (Wyo.) introduced the so-called Secret Ballot Protection Act.
Before we go further, let’s clear up the bill’s false implication right now:
The Employee Free Choice Act would not—repeat after me—would not, take away the secret ballot National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process if workers seeking to form a union wanted to use it. The Employee Free Choice would ensure workers made the decision of whether to select a union via majority sign-up (card-check) or via ballot process. Choice is good. That’s one reason why we called it Employee Free Choice—because it would enable employees, not management, to make the decision of how to form a union.
The alleged goal of S. 478 is to:
amend the National Labor Relations Act to ensure the right of employees to a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board.
Barnacles of Class War Around Our Necks
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For more proof that the Republican opposition to the auto bridge loan is ideologically based class war against workers and their unions, look no further than yesterday’s comments by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who wants to force the American auto industry—at the cost of 3 million to 5 million U.S. jobs—to its knees:
I’m not trying to get rid of the unions but I am saying that they appear to be an antiquated concept in today’s economy and if a company cannot be competitive with the union structure that they have then we need to recognize that.
…Most of this is being done to protect unions. It’s not to protect the workers. What I want to do is make sure we have jobs for these workers and we have first-class American auto companies and we’re not going to do that with the barnacles of unionism wrapped around their necks.
