ORLANDO, Fla. (PAI) –The Obama Administration is giving only verbal support, and nothing more, to the Employee Free Choice Act, a top legislative priority of organized labor – the movement that played a big part in propelling the president into the Oval Office in 2008.

That conclusion comes from the response on March 3 to a press conference question to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who addressed the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in Orlando, Fla., that day.  She barely mentioned EFCA in her speech.

Solis, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden all have said they support the law, and Obama promises to sign it once it reaches his desk.  But EFCA hasn’t even come up in the Senate, where the majority Democrats can’t muster the 60 votes needed to stop a planned GOP filibuster – a talkathon which needs just 41 supporting senators and which is backed by a multimillion-dollar big business campaign.

Asked bluntly what she, Biden and Obama would do to pass the law, former Los Angeles congresswoman Solis replied: “I’m not going to tell you I have any ability to persuade members of the House and Senate” to approve it.

And Solis told the council that “I’m frustrated, too” by the slow overall pace of change.  “It’s like moving a battleship.”

The Employee Free Choice Act would help level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing drives and in negotiating first contracts.  It would do so by writing majority sign-up, also called card-check recognition, into labor law.

Majority sign-up, part of original labor law, has been recognized by NLRB rulings since 1962.  EFCA’s version says that when the union gets an NLRB-verified majority of election authorization cards at a worksite, the workers, not the bosses, get to choose between immediate mandated recognition or a board-run election.

EFCA would also sharply increase penalties for labor law-breaking, make it easier to get court orders against violators, and mandate binding arbitration between the union and management over a first contract if the two sides can’t reach agreement on their own within 120 days.

Solis’ response to the Employee Free Choice Act question did not surprise Communications Workers President Larry Cohen, chair of the federation’s Organizing Committee and an outspokenly vehement backer of the bill.

“There is no current path to passage” for it in the Senate, Cohen told Press Associates Union News Service.  House approval of EFCA is taken for granted.