Thrown out in the Friday "trash" news cycle:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/business/17union.html?_r=1|Democrats Drop Key Part of Bill to Assist Unions>A half-dozen senators friendly to labor have decided to drop a central provision of a bill that would have made it easier to organize workers.
The so-called card-check provision — which senators decided to scrap to help secure a filibuster-proof 60 votes — would have required employers to recognize a union as soon as a majority of workers signed cards saying they wanted a union. Currently, employers can insist on a secret-ballot election, a higher hurdle for unions.
...
The card-check provision was so central to the legislation that it was known as “the card-check bill.” Labor had called the bill its No. 1 objective, and both labor and business deployed their largest, most expensive lobbying campaigns ever in the battle over it.
Strong labor is one of the keys to any sort of serious restoration of anything good in our political-economic system. Without so-called "card check," the bill is effectively useless. It doesn't even reflect its name, the "Employee
Free Choice Act" because work forces are still free to spend millions of dollars hiring anti-union busting "consultants" to intimidate workers and launch overwhelmingly powerful anti-union campaigns before and during, the time leading up to a "secret ballot."
The number one reason workers say they would not support a union in their workplace when asked is overwhelmingly: fear and intimidation. Now whatever legislation that will pass will do little to nothing to address that.
This must be clear to everyone:
employers, not employees have huge leverage and power in any discussion of unionization.That is why strong labor unions have withered and died on the vine over the past thirty years. And with their death, wages have decoupled from productivity and stagnated or declined for the majority of Americans - something that was unheard of for most of the 20th century.
Big Business just got everything they want, because the only provision of EFCA that they seriously cared about was "card check" - because it was the only provision that had the power to really change the way they do business. It was the only provision with the chance to seriously increase unionization. With that out of the way, everything else is less important. Oh, they'll oppose other provisions on principle, but they won't spend real money on it. Their real ultimate has already been won.
The abandonment of card check was another example of the power of moderate Democrats to constrain their party’s more liberal legislative efforts. Though the Democrats have a 60-40 vote advantage in the Senate, and President Obama supports the measure, several moderate Democrats opposed the card-check provision as undemocratic.
...
Several moderate Democrats, including Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, have voiced opposition to card check, convinced that elections were a fairer way for workers to unionize. They were swayed partly by business’s vigorous campaign, arguing that card check would remove confidentiality from unionization drives and enable union organizers to bully workers into signing union cards.
Allowing a simple majority vote is "undemocratic." Democrats elect to listen to anti-labor, anti-worker, exploitative business elite, and let them have the unmitigated gall to suggest that it is a simple majority vote that would be undemocratic and that unions would intimiated workers. When it is business that has the well-documented history of massive worker intimidation, harassment, even illegal firing, in its efforts to destroy unions.
That any Democrat would have the guts to call a provision finally throwing labor a small crumb of hope "undemocratic," while standing up for the total domination of the work force by corporate interests over the last thirty years, is sickening. It's really simple, folks. Countries with low poverty, smaller income disparities, high living standards, and better social programs (health care, paid leave, etc.) are countries with strong Labor.
http://practical-vision.blogspot.com/2009/03/we-are-losing-america-right-before-our.html">We are falling behind the rest of the industrialized world, losing any claim to our so-called "greatness." Meanwhile, corporate whoring shills within the Democratic Party ensure that real change continues to be elusive. What we have just seen in congress is what then-candidate Obama claimed to despise: politics-as-usual.
Democrats won the House in a veritable landslide. They control a huge majority in the Senate. They won the Presidency of the United States.
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/political-media/the-incredible-shrinking-gop-only-one-in-five-self-identify-as-republican/|The Washington post poll> shows that a mere 21% of all Americans even identify with the Republican Party.
GOP leadership is in shambles and disarray. The party itself is in the midst of an internal civil war and has never, in my lifetime, looked as ineffective and helpless as it does today.
And despite all of this, the American people continue not to get real change that they need. We should ask ourselves, what good is a Democratic majority if congressional democratic representatives are bought and paid for by the very same privileged elite that own the Republican Party? Do we really only have a pro-choice and anti-choice wings of one Corporate party?
As an answer to that question, I offer http://practical-vision.blogspot.com/2008/10/moving-to-center-of-elite-consensus.html">this response.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
