The Employee Free Choice Act fight is happening backwards. The argument is over the particular characteristics and implications of card check -- the proposed solution. But you hear very little about the underlying the problem. This is the opposite of how most reform battles go, where there's a focus on the problem -- 47 million uninsured, or climatological catastrophe around the corner -- and the solutions are left vague. The better to build support and consensus on the need for reform rather than splitting your coalition on details. If you can win the argument for reform, you get some sort of solution. If Labor loses the argument over EFCA, do they get anything? It's hard to see what they'd get. The discussion is almost entirely around the effects card check would have workplace democracy. Most of the union efforts are on defending card check's procedures and provisions. But the problem is getting lost: "Employers routinely harass, intimidate, coerce and even fire workers struggling to gain a union so they can bargain for better lives. And U.S. labor law is powerless to stop them." That comes from the AFL-CIO's new web page on card check, which also reports the findings of Cornell scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner, who surveyed hundreds of organizing campaigns and found:
• Ninety-two percent of private-sector employers, when faced with employees who want to join together in a union, force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda; 80 percent require supervisors to attend training sessions on attacking unions; and 78 percent require that supervisors deliver anti-union messages to workers they oversee.• Seventy-five percent hire outside consultants to run anti-union campaigns, often based on mass psychology and distorting the law.• Half of employers threaten to shut down partially or totally if employees join together in a union.• In 25 percent of organizing campaigns, private-sector employers illegally fire workers because they want to form a union.
This is the problem. It's possible there are other solutions than EFCA. But it needs to be solved, one way or the other. EFCA has its problems, but pretending that it's somehow a perversion of workplace democracy as compared to a world in which 25 percent of organizing campaigns see a worker fired is absurd. It's as if political candidates had the power to revoke your citizenship and take away your Social Security if you voted the wrong way. Would that really be a form of democracy worth preserving?
