EFCA

If you were to believe the commercials in television these days, corporations care about working people and want to ensure that they have the right to vote. This is a relatively sophisticated approach crafted by the pretty boys and girls in the corporate PR departments who discovered that they could graduate from college with a communications degree by packaging their bullshit for pay.

While American jobs vaporize by the hundreds of thousands each week, Americans are bombarded with the message that if the Employee Free Choice Act were to be passed by Congress and enacted into law by the President, workers would be denied the right to choose unionization.

Here is a different perspective on this question put out by American Rights at Work:

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A noontime roundup of business and politics.

Lincoln of Arkansas Supports Hometown Boys

Sen. Blanche Lincoln has indeed been a direct beneficiary of Wal-Mart’s political largess, with donors associated with the company giving Lincoln over $35,800 in her career.OpenSecrets.org In addition, she has received $44,000 from Tyson Foods, the poultry giant with its own checkered record of worker abuses and hostility to union.  OpenSecrets.org

Pentagon Nominee May Make $500,000 on Raytheon Stock

The man nominated to be the Pentagon’s second-in-command could make at least a half-million dollars next month with vested stock he earned as a lobbyist for military contractor Raytheon. Common Dreams

Big Pharma Has a Prescription for Congress

Big Pharma continues to give heavily to Congress with Pfizer leading with contributions of $$1,601,425 in 2008. Wyeth, its soon-to-be-swallowed competitor, gave an impressive $583,371 during that same period.  OpenSecrets.org

BofA Cashes Out Working People

Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America Corp. hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business officials to organize opposition to the U.S. labor community’s top legislative priority.   Huffington Post

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This is the second installment in a three-part series on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). The third and final installment will be published next Wednesday on Global Investment Watch.

A Dress Rehearsal for the Big Day

In March of 2007, organized labor forced a dry-run on its top legislative agenda – comprehensive labor law reform. The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) handily 241 to 185 (bill H.R. 800). The House voted pretty much along party lines with only two southern democrats “dissenting” (Dan Boren of Oklahoma and Gene Taylor of Mississippi). In the Senate, the bill met more opposition as it was filibustered successfully after only 51 Senators voted for cloture, nine less than the required 60 (note: one Democrat, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, was absent so they were really only eight away). Truth be told, the legislation had little chance of making it through Senate then. Plus, President Bush would have vetoed it anyway.

What that 2007 vote did, however, was to shape labor’s money spending strategy for the 2008 election cycle. Namely, that dress rehearsal helped the AFL-CIO’s political affairs department pinpoint precisely who could be counted on to back EFCA, who opposes it outright, and who is still on the fence. Now that Democrats are coming off successful election victories at virtually all levels of state and federal government, the playing field is very different. Both the Senate and the House have many more Democrats than they did in 2007 and the battle lines look far more favorable for passage of EFCA than they did just a few months ago. Most importantly, labor now has an apparent ally for working people in the Office of the President.

At present, organized labor seems within tortuous reach of having the required votes in the Senate to pass EFCA (the bill is safe in the House). In November, the Democratic party picked up eight seats in the Senate (Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Virginia, and – for now – Minnesota). That gets them to the 60 necessary to avoid a filibuster. So passage is a done deal, right? Not so fast.

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The daily update of human rights events around the world.

COLOMBIA: FARC killed more than 300 hostages

Colombia’s largest rebel group FARC killed more than 300 of its hostages, Ervin Hoyos of Caracol Radio’s Las voces del secuestro (voices of abduction) said Tuesday.  Colombia Reports

DRC: Conflict Risk Alert

The Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda have struck a deal for military cooperation that risks a new escalation of combat in the eastern Congo and an even greater humanitarian crisis without assurances that it will solve the region’s political and security problems.  International Crisis Group

GAZA: U.S. Envoy Urges Cease-Fire After Gaza Violence

Israeli warplanes bombed what the military described as smuggling tunnels on Egypt’s border with Gaza early Wednesday in reprisal for the death of an Israeli soldier as a senior American envoy pursued President Obama’s first foray into Middle East peace diplomacy.  NY Times

U.S.: The Employee Free Choice Act & Human Rights

The briefing paper details some of the glaring deficiencies in current US labor law that significantly impair the right of workers to freely choose whether to form a union.  Human Rights Watch

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This is the first installment in a three-part series on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). The second installment will be published next Wednesday on Global Investment Watch.

Progressives, Be Prepared!

One of the looming political battles facing the 111th Congress and the 44th President will pivot around the Employee Free Choice Act, or EFCA. The proposed bill, as currently crafted, would amend the National Labor Relations Act in three main ways:

1. Strengthen penalties for companies that illegally coerce or intimidate employees in an effort to prevent them from forming a union;
2. Bring in a neutral third party to settle a contract when a company and a newly certified union cannot agree on a contract after three months;
3. Establish majority sign-up, meaning that if a majority of the employees sign union authorization cards, validated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a company must recognize the union.

Anti-EFCA forces are now hard at work throwing millions of dollars in opposition of the legislation. These groups include: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Save Our Secret Ballot, Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, Americans for Job Security, the National Right to Work Committee, The Business Roundtable, Employee Freedom Action Committee, Freedom Watch, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Workforce Fairness Institute, and Center for Union Facts. Their goal is simple: intimidate moderate red state Democrats and blue state Republicans into voting against EFCA. Tons of money is being spent by unions to make sure this does not happen.

A number of politicians on both sides of the aisle have already lined up for and against the legislation. Many others are still undecided. It will be those “swing” votes in both the House and Senate which will likely determine the fate of EFCA (note: we’ll break down the possible votes next week). Elected officials in both chambers, but especially those newly elected Congressmen and Senators who have yet to cast previous EFCA-votes, will be taking the temperature of their constituency base over the next few weeks, as they should do with any major vote. The only problem with doing this in the case of EFCA is that many Americans have fallen prey to the incredible amount of anti-union rhetoric and misinformation about the proposed legislation.

Progressives need to know where they stand on this issue and be prepared to make the case for a more democratic workplace. So which side are you on?

Here are six points to counter the big business propaganda and intimidation machine:

• The business community is spending hundreds of millions dollars of their shareholder money to perpetuate misleading and false statements about EFCA. This is being done while the financial crisis – in large part created by corporate mismanagement and greed – has eroded trillions of dollars of wealth from pension funds and individual 401k plans.

• One of biggest myths pushed by the Chamber of Commerce and other corporate interests is that it would “do away with secret ballot elections.” The fact is that the EFCA does nothing to take away the right to a secret ballot election. If workers want to hold an election, they would still have that right to do so. EFCA would simply put that decision in the hands of workers and not the employer.

• Corporate interests repeatedly claim that allowing workers to sign cards when choosing to form a union will lead to union intimidation. Yet several academic studies have looked into this and there is simply no evidence to support this claim.

• The real reason Corporate America is fighting this legislation is because the bill toughens penalties against employers who violate their workers’ rights.

• Most CEOs don’t want to give workers the freedom to decide for themselves whether to join together for a voice at work. This is not surprising when you consider that CEOs are now paying themselves over 300 times more than the average worker. It’s plain and simple that corporate CEOs don’t want workers to share in the prosperity they helped create.

• Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott summed up the position of Corporate America best when he remarked on October 28, 2008: “We like driving the car and we’re not going to give the steering wheel to anyone but us.” Corporate CEOs like Lee Scott are driving this “car” (the economy) off a cliff.

Here are six points to persuade people why they should be telling their elected officials to support EFCA:

• Many reporters, lawmakers, and pundits continue to call the legislation “card check”- missing the fundamental democratic principles behind the legislation.

• EFCA provides a non-governmental solution to help create an economy that works for everyone. It simply says that when a majority of workers in a workplace choose to form a union, they are free to do so.

• Under current NLRB law, even after a majority of workers in a workplace sign cards saying they want to form a union, their employer can legally refuse to honor workers’ majority decision, demand an election and then hire high priced law firms and consultants to delay the election process for several months and even years.

• In the current company-dominated system, workers who ask for a union election don’t get a chance to vote in 4 out of 10 cases. If given a free and fair chance, surveys consistently show that many more employees would choose union representation.

• Economic success occurs when rising wages spur consumer spending. New research makes a solid case that passage of EFCA would deliver a “stimulus” package by raising wages that would help get our economy back on track and grow the middle class.

• The Employee Free Choice Act would help employees secure a contract with their employer in a reasonable period of time, providing both sides with access to mediation and arbitration when an agreement cannot be reached.

So that the next time you stare down a skeptical colleague at the water cooler on this issue be ready with the “6 & 6″ above so you can convert one more believer to the ranks of the politically enlightened.

Good luck out there!

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