By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

WASHINGTON (PAI) - The stark partisan differences that accompanied House passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) earlier this year followed into a hearing in the Senate Labor Committee on March 27.

The EFCA - organized labor's No. 1 priority - is designed to help level the playing field between workers and bosses in both organizing and bargaining. The act would guarantee recognition of a union when a majority of workers sign union cards. It also provides for mediation and then arbitration if management and the union can't agree on a contract, and it greatly strengthens penalties for unfair labor practices.

Management and their Republican allies say that workers should be required to go the further step of participating in secret ballot elections during union organizing drives. Organized labor maintains that management often takes the time before those elections to hold closed-door meetings and intimidate and threaten workers into voting against union representation.

Democrats, including panel chairman and chief Senate sponsor, Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) either asked witnesses about what workers go through in organizing and bargaining, or connected the decline of the middle class and the decline of unions to the rabid anti-worker tactics by firms and union busters.

"This connection's too often missed," said panel member Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) "Too often we get into this pro-union, pro-employer conflict and the question of 'Whose side are you on?' We're all on the American side here," she said. Clinton is one of its 46 Senate co-sponsors of the bill.

The bill passed the House, 241-185.

The sole GOP witness, former Clinton and Bush NLRB member Peter Hurtgen, a management-side labor lawyer, acknowledged that card check voting "has always been lawful" under present labor law. But the employer needs to agree to the card check, and few do. "It's always been a secondary method" of union recognition, Hurtgen said.

Hurtgen argued that legalizing card-check recognition of unions, as HR 800 proposes, would only lead to longer and more drawn-out litigation. No senator asked him who would be prolonging the lawsuits. Present labor law, Kennedy pointed out, is pro-employer and encourages legal delays.

Witness Earl Hohrein, of Greeley, Colo., a longtime Boilermaker and middle-aged Vietnam veteran, told Kennedy he was fired immediately after the Steel Workers won an election at the plant he helped organize there, Front Range Energy.

Hohrein said that "it could be years before I get my job back" due to the company's appeal of the NLRB ruling that it fired him illegally for organizing.

And when Hohrein does get his job back, he'll get back pay: $3,800. "That minimal penalty is not a real deterrent" to Front Line and other labor law-breakers, he added. Present labor law calls for giving an illegally fired worker his or her job back, plus back pay minus whatever other wages he or she earned while awaiting reinstitution.

"The employer is a potentate," Hohrein reminded senators, noting that even if the union wins a recognition vote, the employer still has the power of the paycheck to wield over the workers. "They hold all the controls." And when GOPers complained about unions, under card check, coercing workers to sign cards, Hohrein shot back: "I'm an example of union 'coercion.' "

Rep. Robert Andrews (D-N.J.) said that there have only been 42 cases of union coercion, fraud or misrepresentation in the signing of union authorization forms since the NLRB was formed. In contrast, in 2005 alone, he said the NLRB awarded back pay to 30,000 workers because of illegal employer discrimination.

The partisan wrangling foreshadows future fights over HR 800. That's what happened when the House approved it. Only 15 Republicans voted for it in that March 1 tally.

Kennedy said afterwards the Senate committee will hold a work session, called a markup, on the bill "very soon," but did not set a date. Sen. Bernie Sanders (Ind.-Vt.) welcomed a fight. "If our friends on the other side want to filibuster" - try to talk it to death - "let 'em. It's still time to stand up for working people in this country," he declared.