Look Around HR

Yesterday, the AFL-CIO voted to officially endorse Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. I say official because the union supports Democrats more than 99 percent of the time. But, now that the union made the official endorsement, their campaigning will begin en masse.

The union has pledged to spend more than $50 million on behalf of the Illinois Senator. Other labor groups will add millions more.

And the issue they are most concerned with is the Employee Free Choice Act. Read more about the legislation if you haven’t heard about it yet.

I usually don’t republish entire articles on my blog, but think this essay from the Heritage Foundation about the Employee Free Choice Act is spot on.

Written by James Sherk:

Giving Employees Free Choice in the Workplace

Workplace relations and the economy have changed substantially since the 1930s, but federal labor law has not evolved with these changes. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) still reflects a top-down, adversarial view of management–labor relations that is foreign to many workers today.

Private-sector union membership has fallen over the past generation as many workers have concluded that traditional unions do not meet their needs. In response, the labor movement is pushing the Employee Free Choice Act. Instead of taking away workers’ right to vote on joining a union by secret ballot, Congress should restore employers’ and employees’ right to explore innovative labor–management relations. Most workers want a voice in their workplace even if they do not want a traditional union.

Employee involvement (EI) programs enable workers to participate cooperatively in workplace decisions, but the NLRA prohibition on creating “company unions” is so broad that it bans any EI programs that give workers a real voice. The Act forces workers to choose between a traditional union and no formal representation at all.

Read the entire essay here.

When campaigning last year, Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee (or whatever the word is for the person who is probably going to win the nomination but it’s not offical yet) made this statement about the Employee Free Choice Act:

“We will pass the Employee Free Choice Act. It’s not a matter of ‘if’; it’s a matter of ‘when.’ We may have to wait for the next president to sign it, but we will get this thing done.”

So far Republicans have been able to block passage of the card check legislation, and currently have one key tool- the presidential veto. However, uccess or failure of this bill in the future will ultimately be dependant upon the Senate.

The Democratic House has already passed the bill, and with expected gains in the lower chamber in November, they should have no problem passing it next year. Assuming (and this is a big assumption), the Dems win the White House, the fate of this bill will lie in the Senate. The current split is 51D and 49R. It requires 60 votes to break a filibuster. During the 2007 vote on this bill, one Republican (Arlen Specter) supported it and no Democrats opposed it. This means Dems would have to pick up 8 seats to break a Republican filibuster. That may not be impossible, but is very unlikely even in today’s political climate.

The fact that Obama supports this should not be too surprising. The Democrats allegiance to labor is greater than any other tie to special interest groups (for either Rs or Ds).

John Lott, a senior research scientist at Univ. of Maryland, has a good column at FoxNews online breaking down Obama’s views on labor and the EFCA:

Obama claims that strengthening unions is good because unions will “lift up the middle-class in this country once more.” But protecting teachers unions from competition comes at the expense of students. Protecting workers from trade competition comes at the expense of customers and even other workers (e.g., if you protect steel workers from competition, the prices of American-made cars rise relative to foreign-made ones).

Unionization virtually always raises some workers’ salaries at the expense of other workers. If unions insist on increasing worker pay by threatening strikes that shut down companies, firms reduce the number of workers they hire. Some workers gain higher wages, but only at the expense of causing other workers to lose their jobs. Possibly this last point explains why unions want to scrape secret ballots.

It is hard to believe that Obama and Democrats really think that eliminating secret ballots is a good idea. Surely, they are not going to start proposing we start getting rid of secret ballots all together and let voters simply sign cards? But their desire to impose unionization, whether workers really want it, is overriding their common sense. Their proposal will make the country and most workers poorer.

Read the entire column here. It is a good one.

The Las Vegas Sun has an excellent article detailing the Employee Free Choice Act. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but what caught my attention was some of the scary statistics from localities that already have card-check legislation.

From the Las Vegas Sun:

To illustrate card check’s cascading effect, Sonneborn pointed to Illinois.

The state passed mandatory card check in 2003. As a result, union density soared, she said. The International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150, for instance, doubled its number of bargaining units in four years, Sonneborn said.

In Las Vegas, the Culinary Union has tripled its membership over the past 20 years primarily through negotiating voluntary card check agreements with casino companies. The union added 10,000 members from 2002 to 2005 alone- and will add another 6,000 when MGM Mirage’s CityCenter opens in 2009.

In Canada, the effect also has been striking. Thirty-two percent of the country’s workers belong to a union, a density not seen in the United States since the American labor movement’s pinnacle in 1955. Only 12 percent of American workers today belong to a union. Labor benefits from mandatory card check laws in some Canadian provinces. Alberta sports the lowest union density of those places- a whopping 24 percent.

If Congress enacts similar legislation, expect to see Canada like unionization throughout the U.S.

I have reported on the attempt by national Democrats and labor unions to pass the so-called “Employee Free Choice Act.” The Senate killed it last week, and it is dead for the remainder of this Congress.

Similar attempts to pass the card-check bill have been going on at the state level as well. The most notable legislation occurred in Hawaii. The state House and Senate passed a bill, but the governor recently vetoed it.

From the Pacific Business News:

Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle (a Republican) vetoed a bill Monday that would replace secret ballot elections for union representation with a simple petition.

The so-called “card-check” bill would replace a current law that requires an election by secret ballot when workers attempt to organize.

House Bill 2974 requires that union organizers only need to gather signatures from a majority of employees that favor forming a union.

The legislation is modeled after the Employee Free Choice Act, currently under consideration by the U.S. Congress.

I have read that the Democrats have a veto-proof majority in Hawaii, and every Democrat supported this measure so it may become law after all. We might want to remind Hawaiians of this poll showing overwhelming opposition to the card-check legislation.