The Employee Free Choice Act

It’s only been a month since hundreds of thousands of union members and their families helped Barack Obama win key “battleground states.” Yet, already, some labor supporters of the president-elect fear he may be backing away from a key campaign promise to workers threatened by recession. While running for office, Obama said he strongly backed the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), a long overdue labor law reform measure that should be part of his promised economic stimulus plan. However, when Obama introduced his top economic advisors on Nov. 25 and talked about … steps to “jolt” the economy in January, EFCA was not part of the package. More disturbingly, his new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, declined to say whether the White House would support EFCA when he was questioned about it at a Wall Street Journal-sponsored “CEO Forum” earlier in November.

EFCA is vehemently opposed by big business because it would enable workers to unionize and negotiate first contracts more easily. The bill would amend the 73-year old National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) so that private sector employers have to bargain with their employees when a majority sign union authorization cards. Just as the NLRA did, as a centerpiece of the New Deal, EFCA would encourage collective bargaining to raise workers’ living standards and restore greater balance to labor-management relations. Beginning in the late 1930s, this federal labor policy helped create a vast new post-World War II American middle-class.

Now, facing the worst financial crisis since the Depression, the Democrats have an unparalleled opportunity to link labor law reform to their broader economic recovery efforts. As economist Dean Baker, from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, points out, “If workers are able to form unions and get their share of productivity gains, it could once again put the country on a wage-driven growth path, instead of growth driven by unsustainable borrowing.”

Tax cuts, home foreclosure protection, extended jobless benefits, and a public jobs program are all fine, EFCA supporters say. But expanded use of labor’s traditional tool for “self help” (i.e. collective bargaining) is needed just as much and doesn’t require new federal outlays like the recent $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. With newly-won bargaining rights, both hourly and salaried employees would gain a seat at the table, when management decisions are being made during the hard times ahead. Even amidst down-sizing, they would have more say about lay-offs, severance pay, and recall rights, not to mention pay, health care benefits, and the funding of troubled retirement plans.

EFCA’s potential (and not just because it might lead to a wave of successful organizing). Contrary to the opinion of most historians, employer propagandists claim that NLRA-assisted union growth during the late 1930s actually prolonged the Depression. In a recent op-ed piece, National Right To Work Committee president Mark Mix predicted that passage of EFCA “will likely have a similar effect on the economy as the original Wagner Act, transforming what could have been a recovery into a lengthy, deep recession, or worse.” To kill the bill, business groups spent an estimated $50 million on anti-EFCA advertising in Congressional races this fall.

Key Democratic challengers were elected anyway, giving labor law reformers a large majority in the House and 59 Democratic, Republican, and independent supporters in the Senate. Based on this latter head count, it will only take a single additional Republican vote for cloture (if not for EFCA itself) or another Democratic win (in the still-disputed contest for a Minnesota Senate seat) to thwart any GOP filibuster like the one in 1978 that doomed labor’s last bid to overhaul the Wagner Act.

Of course, some Senate Democrats counted as pro-EFCA by labor may now be waffling, on cue from Chief of Staff Emanuel. See, for example, Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln who told the Northwest Arkansas Times Dec. 4 that “focusing on this bill, this issue, isn’t paramount.” According to the Times, Lincoln professed to be “undecided” on EFCA and “believed the nation has more important issues to deal with.” Even a union supporter and key House committee chair like Rep. George Miller (D-Calif) seemed to be sending mixed signals in a Nov. 18 Chicago Tribune interview. Miller said EFCA was not going to be “the first bill out of the chute,” but was “not moving to the back of the train” either. [Never forget that the Taft-Hartley Act which consummated the postwar corporate onslaught was driven successfully through a Truman veto by Republicans crucially helped by Democrats both north and south of the Mason-Dixon line. Editors.]

As Michael Mishak reported in the Las Vegas Sun Nov. 30, the new administration clearly fears that any debate about EFCA early in 2009 “would be divisive at a time when Obama has gone to great lengths to bridge the partisan rift in Washington that has grown deeper over the past eight years.” (Of course, outside the Beltway, there’s little evidence that strengthening workers’ rights is an unpopular cause anywhere in America.) The problem for labor is, if EFCA is not pushed early and hard as part of Obama’s overall economic recovery plan, the bill runs a high risk of getting pigeonholed as “special interest” legislation and post-election “pay-back” for labor. This narrow frame will seal its fate.

That’s why the same union-backed political apparatus that helped put Obama in the White House needs to be re-mobilized now to keep grassroots pressure on him and other Democrats. In many cities, a broad coalition of labor and community groups organized by Jobs With Justice is planning a week of activities, Dec. 7-13, calling for a “People’s Bailout” that would include passing EFCA. In January, unions need to bring their rank-and-file members to Washington in far greater numbers than the UAW has mustered on behalf of its foundering, management-driven agenda for the auto industry.

Backers of the bill have a strong case to make that EFCA is an economic fix that would work, while costing taxpayers almost nothing compared to massive handouts for bankers, insurers, credit card companies, investment firms and, perhaps next, auto makers as well. Workers about to be—or already—crippled financially by the recession will be watching closely to see whether their plight merits the same helping hand so quickly extended to corporate America.

Steve Early – Boston Globe
Obama Abandoning EFCA? Not yet

Longtime labor activist Steve Early wrote an op-ed in Sunday’s Boston Globe questioning President-Elect Obama’s commitment to the Employee Free Choice Act. Says Early: “Rahm Emanuel [Obama's soon-to-be chief of staff] has declined to say whether the White House will support the Employee Free Choice Act.”

[You may have read Early's article about EFCA in the Sept./Oct. 2008 issue of Dollars & Sense.]

Many union activists believe EFCA will make it easier for workers to organize and to engage in collective bargaining. Ever since the election, left-liberal bloggers have been questioning whether Obama will make EFCA a priority, as he pledged during the campaign.

Last week, the Huffington Post seemed to put those fears to rest. Sam Stein wrote:

An aide to Barack Obama reaffirmed the President-elect’s support for the labor movement’s chief legislative priority in a one-word statement issued to the Huffington Post on late Tuesday.

Asked if Obama’s support for the Employee Free Choice Act remained as strong as his public proclamations suggested on the campaign trail, transition spokesman Dan Pfeiffer responded, succinctly, “Yes.”
Some have wondered whether Emanuel, with his warm feelings for the corporate world, might try to push Obama away from the labor movement. But according to the Communication Workers of America, Emanuel voted for EFCA in the House last year.

So it looks like the Obama administration will support EFCA. But there’s nothing wrong with the labor movement keeping the pressure on.

by Dollars & Sense

Barack Obama and George W. Bush seem to have come away from their study of the Great Depression with similar conclusions. After the Crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve did not move fast enough to save the banks and inject cash into the economy. Second, the New Deal, far from being wastrel deficit spending, was not bold enough. So it was that America wallowed in depression for a decade until the unbridled spending and mammoth deficits of World War II pulled us out. Bush and Obama seem determined not to make the same mistake. We are all Keynesians now.

Thus, we have the $700 billion Bush bank bailout, the $700 billion “stimulus package” Obama wants by inauguration to “jolt this economy back into shape” and the $800 billion fund Hank Paulson created to get consumers borrowing and buying again.

These come on top of Bush $455 billion deficit, the $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns, the $105 billion in pork to grease the $700 billion bailout, the $100 billion to $200 billion to keep Fannie and Freddie afloat, the $140-billion-and-counting for AIG, the $25 billion for the greening of GM, Ford and Chrysler, the $25 billion more to save the Big Three and the $20 billion for CitiGroup.

Now much of this overlaps, and some will be retrieved. But we are still staring at a deficit that could approach $2 trillion.

How would this stack up historically?

A deficit of $1.4 trillion would be 10 percent of gross domestic product, dwarfing the postwar record 6 percent run by Ronald Reagan in the Jimmy Carter recession.

Bewailing the “Reagan deficits” has been a staple of Democratic oratory. This will stop. But the politics of this is not the point, the policy is.

Consider what we are about to do. Bush in 2008 spent 21 percent of GDP. States, counties and cities spent another 12 percent. Thus, one third of GDP is spent by government at all levels. Obama and Co. propose to raise that by another 10 percent of GDP. We may soon be north of 40 percent of gross domestic product controlled and spent by government.

That is Eurosocialism.

And where, exactly, are we going to get the money?

Americans save nothing. We spend more than we earn. Thus the levels of consumer debt, credit card debt, auto debt and mortgage debt. U.S. foreign-exchange reserves amount to a piddling $73 billion.

The only nation with the kind of cash on hand we need now—if we don’t print the money and invite another gigantic bubble—is China, with its $2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves.

Will Beijing lend back the dollars it has piled up by selling to us?

China certainly has an incentive to keep Americans spending. For our purchases of Chinese-made goods have often been responsible for 100 percent of China’s growth. China does not want to kill the American goose that lays those golden eggs—until the goose can’t lay any more eggs. Then they won’t need the goose.

But should China decide to lend us the money, what will Beijing demand in interest rates and assurances that we will not default. After all, the U.S. debt is 70 percent of GDP, our savings rate is near zero, and our merchandise trade deficit is still running at 5 percent to 6 percent of GDP.

Unlike the 1950s, we are today dependent on foreigners for two-thirds of our oil and for much of our manufactured goods—toys, TVs, radios, cameras, cars, shoes, clothes, bikes, motorcycles—and for the $700 billion to $800 billion we borrow each year to pay for these imports.

With U.S. homeowners, consumers, companies and banks now going bust, why must the nation borrow trillions more to bail them out? So we can maintain our status and standard of living as the last superpower.

Bush and Obama are competing to shovel out trillions of dollars, so we can return to the good times of yesterday.

But wasn’t yesterday the root cause of today? Didn’t saving nothing and spending more than we earn, purchasing what we cannot afford in cars, consumer goods and houses, buying far more from abroad than we sell abroad—didn’t that cause this crisis and crash?

A family man in America’s condition, awash in debt, spending more than he makes, would cut back consumption, find a second job and get out of debt. Or declare bankruptcy, accept the shame and humiliation, change his wastrel ways and start anew.

Is it different for a nation?

Yet we seem to believe we can borrow and spend our way out of a swamp of unpayable debt into which borrowing and spending have plunged us.

We are headed either for default on our debts and bankruptcy as a nation, or something less honorable: a quiet cheapening of the debts we have incurred by inflating and destroying the dollar, robbing our creditors of what we owe them and robbing our own people of the value of what they have earned. And so it has come to this.

What would the Founding Fathers think of us now?

Patrick J. Buchanan

http://www.vdare.com

Stern not keen on Labor job. Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern took himself out of the running for labor secretary Thursday, telling reporters that he didn’t want the job: “No, I’m not interested,” Stern said, joking, “but don’t tell my mother that.” Stern, one of labor’s most prominent leaders, said the SEIU had several staffers working closely with the transition teams for the Health and Human Services, Treasury and Labor departments. “I hear you get shot on site if you say these things,” said Stern, refusing to get any more specific about the work the unnamed SEIU …  employees were doing.

Stern would have faced an uphill battle to be labor secretary, given the likely opposition of AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. In 2005, Stern led the SEIU in a bitter spilt from the larger labor coalition, and Sweeney’s opinion still carries significant weight among Democrats.

Still, it’s no surprise that the SEIU is involved with the transition. The 2-million member union endorsed Barack Obama last February in the midst of his tough fight with New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, and spent millions on ads and other outreach to mobilize voters.

Stern said that the union suggested several labor secretary candidates to the Obama team, but most of their picks have taken themselves out of the running.

Former Rep. David Bonior (D-Mich.) and Rep. George Miller, (D-Calif.), have both said they’re not interested in the job, though Bonior is serving on Obama’s transition economic advisory board. Other possible candidates include former AFL-CIO official Linda Chavez-Thompson and former House Majority Leader Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.).

Lisa Lerer – November 14, 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC

The Fox and the Grapes is a fable attributed to Aesop. The protagonist, a fox, upon failing to find a way to reach grapes hanging high up on a vine, retreated and said: “The grapes are sour anyway!” The moral is stated at the end of the fable as: It is easy to despise what you cannot get.

The English idiom “sour grapes” – derived from this fable – refers to the denial of one’s desire for something that one fails to acquire or to the person who holds such denial. Similar expressions exist in other languages. In psychology, this behavior is known as rationalization. It may also be called reduction of cognitive dissonance.

“I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away. I don’t consider this corrupting in any way; I don’t mind feeling obligated” (Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope, 2006). WHEN he was on the road promoting his 2006 book A Country That Works, US trade union leader Andy Stern liked to spice up his stump speech with catchy, thought provoking anecdotes about change in the global economy. Stern would speak of a world that produced more transistors each year than it grew grains of rice; of a US jobs market where just eight of the 30 fastest growing jobs required a college education; how the Furby, a US-made children’s toy, had four times the computing power of the Apollo spaceship that landed on the moon; how there were more companies than countries on the list of the world’s 100 biggest economies.

As head of the two million-strong Service Employees International Union, Stern wrote the book to chart a new direction for Big Labour. He argued that in revolutionary economic times unions were losing membership, and their political clout, because their leaders were captive to an outdated class-warfare ideology.

But Stern did more than just theorise. In 2005, when the world was watching the disaster of New Orleans unfold in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Stern’s SEIU and six other unions broke away from the AFL-CIO, the nation’s dominant trade union federation, and set up a new organisation called Change To Win. Now, 2 1/2 years later and after a presidential election where the banner of change flew higher than any other, Stern is being touted as a possible labour secretary in what is expected to be the most pro-union White House in decades.

After years of declining relevance and a membership that has dwindled to just 12per cent of US workers, organised labour has, in Barack Obama, a president-elect with a 98 per cent pro-labour voting record who has promised to pass the most radical changes in US labour relations law since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Obama has promised to sign the Employee Free Choice Act, also known as “card check”, legislation that would make it easier for unions to organise by doing away with secret ballot elections to determine whether workplaces become unionised.

The legislation also would impose on US business the toughest unfair dismissal laws the country has seen, including a $US20,000 fine for each violation and recompense to wrongly sacked workers at three times the value of lost wages and entitlements.

On election eve, Teamsters boss James P. Hoffa could hardly contain himself when he predicted card check would help unions recruit hundreds of thousands of new members and force employers to pay better wages. “This is going to be the law of the land when Barack Obama wins,” Hoffa gloated.

At a conference this year Stern predicted the effect of card check on union membership would be even greater. Unions, he said, would grow by 1.5 million members annually for 10 to15 years, increases that would fortify unionfinances.

Despite the prospect of card check making old-style union heavies such as Hoffa more powerful, Republicans barely uttered a word in the election campaign. Asked by CNBC’s business journalist Maria Bartiromo why he wasn’t making it a key issue, John McCain moaned about campaign constraints allowing just three or four messages to be pushed at any one time.

The truth was that McCain’s only hope of victory rested with white, blue-collar voters in rust-belt states such as Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio. Because this demographic is also a union demographic, McCain stayed silent.

But more significant was the fact Obama also was silent on card check. Now, with the stardust of election night finally settling and the daunting economic challenges facing the president-elect clearly in focus, doubts about Obama’s once rock-solid commitment to the union agenda are starting to emerge.

Many believe card check was one of the issues in Obama’s mind on election night when, in his victory speech, he warned: “we may not get there in one year, or even in one term”. Obama’s problem is that unions spent upwards of $US400 million on his campaign and those of Democrats in key Senate races. In addition, thousands of unionists door-knocked and staffed phone banks in swing states in the crucial final weeks of the campaign.

With victory achieved, the unions expect Obama to deliver on his card check promise. “The Employee Free Choice Act is our No1 legislative priority for next year,” AFL-CIO chief economist Thea Lee said immediately after the election. “It was the centrepiece of our electoral efforts. We are very confident that it will happen.”

The same message was heard in Puerto Rico this year when Stern’s SEIU resolved to mobilise the union’s resources during the first 100 days of the new Congress to ensure that worker priorities such as card check and health care for all are immediately actioned. The campaign is to include a staggering 10million phone calls to members of Congress. But with the economic outlook worse than at any time since the Depression, the AFL-CIO’s New York president Denis Hughes admits that card check is a big ask.

“We expect a real battle on card check,” Hughes says. “Despite last year’s congressional vote in favour, we don’t have unilateral support in the Democratic Party for it and there’s a view that the economic downturn demands a more conservative approach to labour issues.”

If Obama is intent on delaying or even abandoning card check, giving the labour secretary post to Stern, a darling of the educated, well-heeled Democrat Left, could be his best strategy. For one thing, Stern is known as a close follower of the zeitgeist, a pragmatist happy to bend his principles to fit changing circumstances. This is best and most controversially seen in the business-friendly trade unionism that has helped him nearly double the SEIU membership since he took over the union in 1996.

In A Country That Works, Stern argues that capital and labour benefit from teamwork and they need organisations that solve problems, not create them. To this end the SEIU has done deals whereby companies allow partial unionisation in exchange for political support and work practice concessions that increase company profits.

Stern champions this as unions “adding value”. His critics call it selling out. They point to a deal in California where a nursing home chain was unionised on the basis that workers would not speak out publicly against abuse of patients or health code violations. In return the union lobbied for limiting the right of patients to sue.

Stern also has unsettled the labour movement by suggesting that social security might be acceptable, and for supporting the Chinese state union that has been accused of helping Beijing suppress workers’ rights. The flipside is Stern’s internationalism helped ensure Wal-Mart’s China operations were unionised.

Last year card check passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 241-185, with only two of 230 Democrats opposing it. In the Senate the vote was 51-48, well short of the 60 votes needed to trump a filibuster. Every Democrat, including Obama, voted in favour.

The vote was academic in the sense that George W. Bush had promised to use his veto if card check got through, but with Obama to take over in January, it’s a different story. As senator Edward Kennedy told the Senate last year, Democrats would bring back card check “again and again until we prevail”.

“I guarantee this,” he said. “We get a Democrat in the White House and the Employee Free Choice Act will be the law of the land.”

Opponents of card check argue that removing the secret ballot will lead to industrial anarchy, with workers and employers intimidated by strong-arm unions. “This is a blatant attempt to use undemocratic means to revive trade union membership,” says Justin Hakes, of the US Chamber of Commerce. “Without the privacy of the secret ballot, workers will be pressured to do whatever the union wants.”

Proponents of card check say it will remove the clear bias against unions that exists in the present law. In many cases, employers bar union recruiters from the workplace education while hiring outside consultants to run anti-union sessions that workers are compelled to attend. Unions also accuse employers of using the lead-up to an election to threaten and intimidate workers.

If Obama wants card check badly enough, the Congress will likely deliver him the numbers. If he doesn’t, the new year holds the tantalising prospect of Obama at war with the unions and with the likes of Kennedy, who would love nothing more than to see card check passed into law before his brain cancer can take its final toll.

David Nason

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au