Cross posted at Turn Maine Blue
The Hill is reporting that Sen. Dianne Feinstein will meet with opponents of the EFCA. In it is yet another example that the media still does not understand what the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 14) does, nor even the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which the EFCA amends:
EFCA is often called "card-check" because one of its provisions would allow workers to form unions not by secret ballot elections called for by management but by a majority of employees signing petition cards stating their intention to organize.
Feinstein’s compromise would replace that provision with a requirement that union elections be decided by mail-in ballots with the design that workers, not employers, would have a choice on when to form a union while their privacy would be protected from labor organizers.
There's more:
As has been made plain here on more than one occasion, card check was ruled constitutional in 1969, and is one method that workers can currently form a union. Workers can, and sometimes do, use another existing method to organize - the secret-ballot vote.
The EFCA eliminates that right of management to demand a vote.
This really isn't a difficult concept to grasp, and yet the mainstream media continues to struggle with it. Of course, workers that wish to decertify an existing union can also sign cards to do so - card check in reverse - and no one seems to be bothered by the lack of privacy with that process.
And I'll again remind our readers that any talk about a worker's right to privacy is bullshit - what management and owners really oppose are two other provisions of the EFCA: one that forces management to bargain in good faith on the first contract with the new union, and the other that dramatically increases penalties to those found guilty of violating the NLRA.