By Journal Times Editorial Board | Posted: Sunday, September 14, 2008 12:00 am
Putting lipstick on a pig.
Those are politically charged words in the presidential race these days, but they are apt ones to describe one of the great misnomers on a piece of legislation that stands to disrupt the nation's business-labor balance and tilt it fully toward unions.
It's called the "Employee Free Choice Act," but it is no such thing. What the act would effectively do is deprive workers of the right to decide by secret ballot whether they want to join a union or not. It would instead replace that vote with a card check system that would be binding if union organizers get more than 50 percent of workers to sign them. And, under the law, once a union is authorized through a card-check campaign, it would require binding arbitration to set the terms of the first two years of a contract if the business and the union do not reach agreement through collective bargaining within 90 days.
The act would effectively end the long practice of having elections under the watch of the federal government's National Labor Relations Board to determine whether a workplace is unionized or not. It would, at its heart, deprive businesses across the country from giving their side of the story on the implications of a unionized workplace. When they have that opportunity, businesses usually prevail in keeping their workplace union-free about 40 percent of the time.
Instead of a democratic process with a secret ballot, a worker would have to stand up to union organizers and workplace friends if they want to decline to sign a pro-union check card. It would give rise to an unprecedented level of workplace coercion.
There is reason behind the push of organized labor for the Employee Free Choice Act, of course. Unions are in decline. From their hey-day in the 1950s when unions represented about one in every three workers, they now represent 12.1 percent of the entire workforce and less than 7.5 percent of workers in the private sector. The number of representation elections held last year was down again, continuing a 10-year decline.
National labor unions have organized a major push - some call it a last gasp - to try to reverse those trends and the EFCA is at the heart of it.
EFCA passed the House on a vote of 241 to 185 in March, 2007, but it failed to overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate and President Bush had vowed to veto it.
But with tahe fall elections, that landscape could change. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is one of the Senate sponsors of EFCA, while GOP presidential candidate John McCain opposes it. As November nears this could well become a major issue in the presidential race. An Obama win coupled with the loss of a handful of GOP Senate seats could put EFCA over the top.
We agree with former Democratic presidential candidate and long-time labor supporter George McGovern who opposes EFCA and last month warned that it is a "disturbing and undemocratic overreach not in the interest of either management or labor."
McGovern, in a commentary published in the Wall Street Journal, praised the good done by unions, but warned Democrats, "we cannot be a party that strips working class Americans of the right to a secret-ballot election. We are the party that has always defended the rights of the working class. To fail to ensure the right to vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed."
There is not enough lipstick to pretty up this ill-considered piece of legislation.