If you're a fan of seeing corporate mendacity revealed before Congress, I can't recommend strongly enough that you watch the webcast of today's hearing on the Employee Free Choice Act before the House Education & Labor Committee!
Four witnesses testified before the committee. Three of them were real, no-kidding working people. And the fourth? Well, not so much -- unless you consider being a union-busting consultant paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to be "working".
More info and the big "reveal" after the jump...
Of course, the consultant -- Jennifer Jason -- didn't identify herself as such at first. She identified herself as a disillusioned former union organizer for UNITE (now UNITE HERE), and told a dramatic tale of a world where union organizers force their way into members' houses to browbeat them into signing union cards. (Here's her full testimony in PDF format, if you want to see the Dickensian picture she painted of organizing.)
Other committee members had tentatively raised the issue of whether Jason had other motivations for her testimony, but some pointed questions from Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY-4) brought the whole truth out: Jason had left organizing to start a consulting company specializing in "union avoidance" (the modern euphemism for what used to be called union-busting), and had received $225,000 from the notoriously anti-union Cintas Corporation in her first year consulting.
But hey, what's a few hundred thousand dollars between friends, right?
The big "reveal" went down like this:
REP. MCCARTHY: Let me ask you, why did you join the union in the first place?
MS. JASON: I'm sorry?
REP. MCCARTHY: Why were you involved in the union?
MS. JASON: Well, I grew up in a family that valued social justice issues. And I really strongly believed --
REP. MCCARTHY: When you were in the union, did you see why you should stay in the union, as far as the workplace conditions?
MS. JASON: Well, what I found in my experience was that, while the need may have always been present for change in the workplace, or while there was certainly a call for people to advocate for change, or discuss change, or how they're going to solve problems in the workplace --
REP. MCCARTHY: OK, with that being said, though, I'm just asking you why you were in the union, why were you in the workplace, why were you trying to organize, because obviously you saw a reason for it.
MS. JASON: Well, if I could answer more fully, I started off with a strong belief in these things. I ended my career with UNITE with a strong belief in these things. In the middle, I took a look at the reality of what was going on, and --
REP. MCCARTHY: When you quit your job as an organizer, how soon after you quit did you start your own business?
MS. JASON: As I said, it was a couple months.
REP. MCCARTHY: A couple of months. And who was your first client?
MS. JASON: Cintas.
REP. MCCARTHY: And what are they paying you a year, that first year?
MS. JASON: We had a consulting agreement, they weren't personally paying me, it was a consulting agreement between my company and Cintas --
REP. MCCARTHY: And that was about how much?
MS. JASON: $225,000.
REP. MCCARTHY: Correct.
(Laughter in committee room.)
REP. MCCARTHY: It seems like you have a conflict of interest on a number of those issues. We have testimony from a number of members --
At this point, Republican committee member Rep. John Kline (MN-02), who had been sticking up for Ms. Jason, interrupted:
REP. KLINE: Excuse me, would the gentlelady yield for just a second?
(Rep. McCarthy nods 'yes'.)
REP. KLINE: Are you suggesting by that conflict that her testimony is inaccurate, or misrepresenting, or...?
REP. MCCARTHY: I think it's a little biased.
At which point the entire room burst into laughter! Too awesome.
You should definitely watch the whole webcast -- the testimony from the actual workers is quite moving, and illustrates nicely why EFCA is so needed today -- but if you just want to see this little drama, jump ahead to about 1:24:00.
And if you want to do something -- and you should -- e-mail your Members of Congress and tell them to support the Employee Free Choice Act. The other side is obviously willing to spend the big bucks to keep EFCA from passing. The only antidote to that is people power.