Card Check Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them | thetruthaboutefca.com | The Truth About The Employee Free Choice Act & Card Check.

OK, that title was borrowed from the book by now-Senator Al Franken. But it’s a good title to kick off what is a sadly continuing discussion on just how far proponents of card check (in the form of the Employee Free Choice Act) will push the bounds of honesty. So far, it appears they will seek or surpass those bounds with vigor.

The latest salvo comes from the Service Employees International Union, which is demanding Nebraska television stations stop airing an anti-EFCA group’s educational advertisement. The union’s lawyers say claims that EFCA will effectively end secret ballots — which it effectively does — are ” demonstrably false.”

Hmm. That’s pretty strong language. That would require, we imagine, a pretty strong factual case and, most likely, a finding by a court. Funny thing, then, is that history shows us courts have specifically found these claims are not false.

So SEIU’s claims of “demonstrably false” claims are themselves “demonstrably false.”

Then there’s the AFL-CIO’s Stuart Acuff going on television and misleading viewers when he said EFCA’s effective destruction of the secret ballot is untrue and that “The Wall Street Journal has said that that is a lie.” Again, “demonstrably false” as the SEIU, which had again stretched the truth. In fact, the newspaper took the rather extraordinary step of writing another editorial just to correct the union and those following its misrepresentations:

These guys must really be desperate. As we’ve written many times, “card check” effectively ends secret-ballot elections because it would allow labor organizers to automatically organize a work site if more than 50% of workers sign an authorization card. Thus our words: “dead letter.”

Obviously, EFCA is crucial to a handful of top union officials, who see billions of dollars in potential revenue by denying employees a private ballot to vote on whether they want to join a union. But we’d think they’d be a little more careful when throwing around loaded terms — because like a grenade with the pin pulled, the explosion can hurt the one throwing the bomb.

We’d be happier if everyone stuck to the truth. Of course, that’s an advantage for opponents of EFCA since the truth about EFCA is pretty powerful.

New NMB Proposal to Make it Easier to Organize : EFCA & Labor Law Reform Blog.

“EFCA” is not just an abbreviation for the Employee Free Choice Act. In a larger sense, it stands for a dramatic shift in our nation’s labor relations policy that the Obama Administration has begun implementing.

The most recent example of this shift is the proposed change in the procedure for selecting union representation under the Railway Labor Act, the labor statute that covers airline and railroad workers. For more than 75 years this law has required that a majority of eligible workers vote affirmatively for union representation before a union is entitled to bargaining rights. This process has worked well. In fact, union representation in the railroad and aviation industries far exceeds union representation in other private industry.

Under a rule proposed by the current, labor-dominated, National Mediation Board, however, the long-standing rule would be eliminated. A new rule allowing a minority of the eligible employees to decide the issue would replace it. Representation would be determined by a majority of those voting rather than by a majority of eligible voters.

So why change a system that is working? It’s simple. The unions are attacking long-standing policies and procedures to make their selection easier.  Even though the National Mediation Board repeatedly has rejected union efforts to change the way elections in these industries are conducted, it looks like the labor movement has found a pivotal new friend at the Mediation Board. If adopted, and if it withstands the substantial legal challenges that are anticipated, a small minority of eligible employees will be able to make the decision for the entire group. Mediation Board rules already make voting for unionization very simple — by allowing telephone and Internet voting. Under the proposed new rules, employees will no longer be able to vote “no” by “ripping up” their ballots and unions need worry less about appealing to the entire workforce. They will not have to prove an absolute majority of employees wants representation. As long as more employees vote yes than no, even if only a small percentage of the workforce may actually vote, that will do.

Michael Barone: Tuesday’s Biggest Loser: the Union Agenda – WSJ.com.

If you were watching television on Tuesday night as the election returns came in showing Republicans capturing the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, you probably missed seeing the biggest losers of the evening. You may have caught the concession speech of Creigh Deeds, who ran 12% behind Barack Obama’s winning percentage of the vote in Virginia, and that of Jon Corzine who, after spending over $100 million of his own money on three campaigns, ran 13% behind Obama’s winning percentage in New Jersey and got evicted from Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton.

But you missed seeing the guy who may have been the biggest loser of all—a man who according to recently released White House logs has been a guest in the White House 22 times since Barack Obama became president, more than any other single individual.

That man is Andy Stern, who has boasted that the Service Employees International Union, which he heads, ponied up something like $60 million for Barack Obama and other Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle. Altogether, Mr. Stern and other labor union leaders reportedly gave Democrats some $400 million last year.

This was, to borrow a word from Mr. Obama, an audacious gamble. Unions these days represent only 8% of private-sector employees (and that’s counting General Motors and Chrysler as private sector) and some unions went into debt to make these contributions. Public employee unions of course are financed by taxpayers, who pay the salaries from which dues are extracted, but even so their resources are ultimately limited.

What have the unions gotten in return? Some not insignificant things. The Obama administration bludgeoned General Motors and Chrysler bondholders, in what I called an episode of “gangster government,” and effectively turned over the two auto companies to the United Auto Workers. The building trades got project labor agreements—i.e., plenty of dues money flowing to their coffers—in the $787 billion stimulus package.

A lot of that stimulus money went as well to state and local governments. The goal was to spare public employee union members from the vicissitudes of the recession to which the rest of us are subject—and to keep that dues money flowing in.

But the union leaders have been frustrated on their No. 1 goal, the card check bill that would effectively abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections. A couple of bulky guys in varsity jackets visit your home and, um, persuade you to sign a card, and later the union—with the help of a mandatory arbitration clause—impose contracts on employees and rake in the dues money.

Instead, support evaporated as Democrats from places as dissimilar as Arkansas and California thought hard about what life would be like with card check. Today the bill looks dead no matter how many Democrats are elected to Congress.

And after Tuesday’s elections, it looks like fewer Democrats will be elected to Congress in 2010 than in 2008. In the election results and the exit polls there are clear signs that the Obama majority coalition has splintered.

Mr. Obama benefited last year from a big turnout of young voters, who backed him by a 66% to 32% margin. This year young voters formed only about half as large a percentage of the electorate in Virginia and New Jersey as they did in 2008, and in Virginia they voted about as Republican as their elders.

The big-government programs of Obama Democrats evidently have less appeal than those trendy posters and inspiring rallies and cries of “We are the change we are seeking.” I have yet to see survey research showing that young Americans want to work under union contracts, with their 5,000 pages of work rules and rigid seniority systems. That doesn’t sound like a tune that appeals to the iPod generation.

Economically, the Obama majority was a top-and-bottom coalition. The Democratic ticket carried voters with incomes under $50,000 and over $200,000, and lost those in between. As the shrewd liberal analyst Thomas Edsall has noted, there’s a tension between what these groups want. High earners in non-Southern suburbs have been voting Democratic since the mid-1990s largely because of their liberal views on cultural issues; low earners vote Democratic because they want more government money shoveled their way.

Tuesday’s elections suggest those whose money gets shoveled are having second thoughts about this odd-couple coalition. In Virginia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell carried affluent and immigrant-heavy Fairfax County, which Barack Obama carried by 21%. In New Jersey, Republican Christopher Christie cut Democrat Jon Corzine’s margin in demographically similar Bergen County from 16% in 2005 to 1%. A Republican was elected county executive in Westchester County, New York, and the Republican candidate for state Supreme Court in Pennsylvania carried the four-county suburban Philadelphia area—turf that voted 57% for Barack Obama in 2008.

A health-care bill financed by either higher taxes on high earners or on those with generous, employer-provided health insurance, looks like a hard sell in high-earner constituencies. It looks politically risky especially for newly elected Democrats.

Mr. McDonnell carried nine of Virginia’s 11 congressional districts, and the three districts that Democrats captured from Republicans last year voted 62%, 61% and 55% for the Republican this time. No wonder Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is talking about postponing health-care votes until next year.

The unions’ unprecedented political push in 2008 has not been unnoticed by the voters. Mr. Corzine’s cozy relationship with public employee union heads proved a liability in New Jersey, and in Virginia Mr. McDonnell campaigned hard against card check and the Obama agenda. The Gallup organization reports that Americans are less pro-union than they have been at any time since it first started asking the question in 1936. Maybe around the country union members will start asking their leaders what they have gotten for all the money they’ve spent on politics.

Labor Gains Obama Policies Cooper Tire-to-Walmart Companies Rue – Bloomberg.com.

Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) — Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. is paying tariffs on imported tires. Free-trade agreements sought by Caterpillar Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are on hold. Delta Air Lines Inc. flight attendants may join a union.

There’s a common thread running through these developments. Organized labor is gaining momentum under the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama.

Though reaching their most-publicized goals — legislation making it easier to organize and a government-run health insurance program — remains in doubt, unions are making other gains through executive orders, rule changes and appointments. More advances may be ahead as regulatory nominees are confirmed.

“You absolutely know something is going to happen to you, you just don’t know when,” said Michael Lotito, a San Francisco attorney at Jackson Lewis LLP who handles labor issues for companies. “There is going to be a flurry of labor action down the pike.”

Their status is a change for labor officials, who say the Republican administration of George W. Bush was hostile to their agenda. “Welcome back to the White House!” Vice President Joe Biden said to union leaders who met with the president at the White House 10 days after his inauguration.

John Sweeney, 75, who headed the AFL-CIO for 14 years before stepping aside last month, says he was invited to the White House once during Bush’s eight years in office. That was at the request of visiting Pope Benedict XVI, he says. The AFL- CIO is the nation’s largest union group.

‘Wandering in Wilderness’

Richard Trumka, 60, Sweeney’s successor, says he meets monthly with Obama, and that union representatives have “daily contacts throughout the administration.” Obama officials visit with labor leaders “frequently,” White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said.

“After eight years wandering in the wilderness, unions have unprecedented access to the White House, and early directives and appointments have been encouraging for them,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor relations professor at the University of California at Berkley.

Unions were among Obama’s biggest supporters in the 2008 election, with 68 percent of AFL-CIO members voting for him in so-called battleground states, according to an election night poll by Peter Hart Research Associates. Labor unions and their political action committees spent a record $450 million during the campaign to help Democrats win the White House and gain control of Congress.

Obama sided with the United Steelworkers last month against tire makers such as Cooper Tire and imposed 35 percent tariffs on tires imported from China. Bush rejected putting tariffs on Chinese products all four times the issue came before him.

Cooper Tire

Cooper, the second-biggest U.S. tire maker after Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., produces low-cost tires in China and opposed the tariffs. The Steelworkers argued that a surge in Chinese tires threatened U.S. jobs.

“It’s certainly been more difficult,” said Michelle Zeisloft, a spokeswoman for Findlay, Ohio-based Cooper. She declined to elaborate. Because of the tariffs, Cooper went from breaking even on imported tires to losing $14.50 on each one, according to a Sept. 21 report by JPMorgan Chase & Co.

“This was done to support a fairly small pool of union workers,” Bill Trimarco, chief executive officer of closely held Hercules Tire & Rubber Co., also based in Findlay, said in an interview. “They won at the expense of companies like ours.”

Complaints from business about union gains are an affront to workers, said Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers.

‘That’s Pablum’

“All those ‘victories’ they are talking about — that’s pablum from those bastards,” Gerard, 62, said in an interview. “All we’re doing is standing up for jobs.”

The Steelworkers also pressed for the “Buy American” provision included in Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus program adopted in February. Obama’s bailout of General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC saved jobs of United Auto Workers members, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters claimed victory when Congress scrapped in March a pilot program allowing Mexican trucks to deliver products in the U.S.

“Unions have accomplished a lot with the administration in less than a year,” said Clayton Boyce, a spokesman for the American Trucking Associations in Arlington, Virginia. The trade group’s members include United Parcel Service Inc., FedEx Corp. and YRC Worldwide, Inc., the biggest U.S. trucking company by sales.

Trade Deals Stalled

The AFL-CIO and the Teamsters also led union opposition to a pending free-trade agreement with Panama. The U.S. Trade Representative’s office dropped plans for a vote on the measure in May, saying Obama wanted first to offer a new “framework” for how trade fits into other administration programs.

He has yet to do that. Behind the Panama deal in the trade queue are tentative agreements with Colombia and South Korea, supported by companies including Caterpillar and Walmart.

“We’re beyond being befuddled; we’re frustrated,” said Bill Lane, director of government affairs for Peoria, Illinois- based Caterpillar, the world’s biggest maker of construction equipment. “There is way too much focus on protectionist schemes that are intended to close the U.S. market.”

Daphne Moore, a Walmart spokeswoman, declined to comment.

The trade office “is actively working” on the agreements, spokeswoman Carol Guthrie said in an e-mailed statement. “A common misconception” is that the accords “were presented to this administration ‘sitting there with a bow tied around them ready to go,’ when in fact there is more work to be done,” she said.

Delta Elections

Delta Air Lines, the world’s largest carrier, would be more likely to lose union elections sought by flight attendants and machinists if a proposal by the AFL-CIO is approved.

The workers asked the National Mediation Board in July and August to clear the way for an election. Last month, the AFL-CIO petitioned the board to revise procedures and allow a union if most of those voting approve, instead of a majority of all workers in the class.

The board plans to announce a proposal in coming days to advance the union request on voting rules, people familiar with the matter said. Seven Republican senators said in a Sept. 30 letter that the board was delaying a decision on the union election while it considers the new vote-counting method.

The AFL-CIO request is “unbelievable,” said Robert Corker, a Tennessee senator who signed the letter. “I think big labor is going to unfortunately be given an unlevel playing field” in the Obama administration, he said in an interview.

The mediation board declined to comment.

Former Union Leader

The Obama administration in May added a former flight- attendants’ union leader to the three-person board, replacing a former lobbyist for Northwest Airlines, which is now part of Atlanta-based Delta. Another board member is a former pilot- union official.

“You have two former heads of AFL-CIO unions at the NMB and they really are politicizing the process,” Delta CEO Richard Anderson said on a conference call with investors last week.

“Our employees deserve to have union representation resolved promptly, using a process that is fair and consistent” by following existing rules, said Gina Laughlin, a Delta spokeswoman, in an e-mail. Delta is the least-unionized major U.S. airline.

First Bill

The first bill Obama signed into law as president, nine days after taking office, was a pro-labor measure. The so-called Lilly Ledbetter legislation, named for the woman who won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, makes it easier to fight pay discrimination.

More bills supported by labor, stalled in past years because of White House opposition, have Obama’s support and may get the votes to pass once they get on the legislative calendar. These include measures barring workers from getting fired because of their sexual orientation, stiffening penalties for violations of Occupational Health and Safety Administration regulations, and requiring companies to provide workers with a week of paid sick leave.

Obama also has scrapped a number of Bush rulings opposed by unions. One required federal contractors to post notices telling workers they can limit their financial support of unions. Another let contractors be reimbursed for expenses that could be used to dissuade workers from forming a union.

New Pictures

Business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are fighting two labor-related Obama nominees still awaiting confirmation: National Labor Relations Board member Craig Becker, an attorney for the Service Employees International Union, and OSHA director nominee David Michaels, who has written a book criticizing industry opposition to regulations.

“The failure to get some of the nominees in quickly has kept some of the agencies from moving, but once they’re in, the business community’s only recourse is litigation,” said Randy Johnson, who handles labor policy at the chamber, the nation’s largest business lobbying group.

OSHA’s acting director, Jordan Barab, signaled a new tone at the agency in a speech to the Wisconsin AFL-CIO last month. One of the first things he did when he arrived, Barab said, was to replace pictures of OSHA managers displayed in a conference room with photos of workers who had been killed on the job.

Labor Board Proposes Changes at Big Labor’s Request

The misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), or card check, has been introduced in both the House and Senate, and this legislation poses drastic consequences for manufacturers. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is urging Congress to oppose the card check legislation in any form.

A small group of Senators continue efforts to develop a variation of card check. Some of the alternatives being discussed include:

· Ambush elections

· Binding interest arbitration

· Postcard check

· Increased access for union organizers

The NAM continues to educate Congress on the negative impact that card check and other misguided schemes will have on the economy and manufacturers ability to create jobs.

via National Association of Manufacturers – EFCA Information.

The Signal – Santa Clarita Valley News – Unions are rising like a phoenix.

Take a minute and read this recent article in The Signal