American Workers Do Not Need Democracy

In early April, Senator Barack Obama spoke before a gathering of the AFL-CIO and made a promise to the labor union to ensure that the Employee Free Choice Act becomes “the law of the land”. This bill will strip the rights of employees to cast a private ballot either for or against forming a union. The bill enable union bosses to increase membership by simply having 51% of employees turning in signed cards stating their desire to form a union. This process will be steeped in fraud. It sets up the scenario of union thugs to intimidate employees into signing the cards. The private ballot is a proven effective method of determining each employee’s desire.

Union membership has declined at an astonishing rate over the past 50 years. In 1958, nearly 40% of the American workforce was a member of a union. Last year, the percentage was down to less than 7.5% with a significant number being government employees. The EFCA is a scheme designed to swell the membership rolls of the unions. The Democratic controlled House of Representatives passed the bill last year, but the Senate failed to pass it when the Republican minority blocked the efforts of Obama and the Democratic leadership. Now Obama promises to ensure it’s passage if he becomes President.

Obama claims that this bill will do nothing more than change the process of union forming, but his own past statements continue to haunt him. Obama has said that, the bill “will allow workers to form a union through majority sign-up and card checks”. Why would Obama favor a process that strips the private ballot right from the American worker? I thought that Obama claimed he was the candidate for the little guy? His co-sponsorship of this scheme is a clear indication that he stands with the union bosses and not with the workforce. The Coalition for a Democratic Workplace conducted a survey of union households and the results are clearly at odds with the union bosses and Obama. 80% of all union households surveyed support private ballot elections. When asked specifically about the EFCA, 70% are opposed to the bill.

What I find amazing is that private elections are widely seen as one of the essential elements of our Democratic system, but with this bill, Senator Obama is showing that he believes that private ballots are overrated. If he had simply voiced his support for the bill, it would be bad enough, but the fact that he has co-sponsored the legislation sheds a much brighter light on his ideals. Last week, he admits that he wants to “spread the wealth around”, and now we see that he is willing to throw away the private voting rights of American workers. I would call him a socialist, but we are now told that that term is a racist code word. Should I just call him a Marxist?

Baseball Bats for Big Labor Act

From Americans For Tax Reform

This week, the Senate is considering S. 1041, the Orwellian-named "Employee Free Choice Act." As a point of fact, this bill would strip workers of their right to a federally-supervised, private ballot election when deciding on the question of union representation.

S. 1041 would replace this privacy right with a risky "card check" scheme. Under this method, union thugs could intimidate workers into signing a kind of petition known as a "card check." They could do so by any means necessary. Once 50%-plus-one of the workers at a facility were coerced into signing this "card check," a union would be established right then and there.

Not surprisingly, most Americans think this is a bad idea. In a recent McLaughlin poll, 87 percent of voters agreed that "every worker should continue to have the right to a federally supervised secret ballot election when deciding whether or not to join a union."

Moreover, S.1041 contains a provision that mandates compulsory, binding arbitration on the employer and the employees as part the collective bargaining process if an agreement cannot be reached within the first 120 days of negotiations. This misguided language would have a third party, government official impose the terms of a labor contract that are binding upon both parties, even if one or both parties find those terms unacceptable. In fact, employees would not be provided with the opportunity to vote on whether or not they approve their new contract.

Unions are the biggest single supporters of larger government, and rigging the rules in their favor would be a crushing blow to taxpayers.

ATR URGES A VOTEAGAINST CLOTURE ON S. 1041