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House panel approves Employee Free Choice act; Cheney issues Bush veto threat

Date Posted: March 2 2007

By Mark Gruenberg
PAI Staff Writer

(PAI) - By a 26-19 party-line vote, the House Education and Labor Committee voted Feb. 14 for the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill designed to level the playing field between workers and bosses in labor-management relations.

And, the same day, Vice President Dick Cheney told the National Association of Manufacturers that his boss, President George W. Bush, would veto it.

Union leaders hailed the vote on their top legislative priority in the new Democratic-run 110th Congress. But EFCA faces a rocky road in the narrowly Democratic Senate, and House Republican leaders, though their party is outnumbered there, have made a vote against EFCA a test of party loyalty.

If it's ever approved, the EFCA would establishing stronger penalties for violation of employee rights when workers seek to form a union and during first-contract negotiations, provide mediation and arbitration for first-contract disputes, and allow employees to form unions by simply signing cards authorizing union representation.

Right now, "card check" is one method the National Labor Relations Board has approved for union recognition, but only if the employer agrees.

Otherwise, unions and workers usually go through the long, business-tilted torturous NLRB elections "process," featuring rampant employer labor law-breaking, one-on-one meetings where supervisors can threaten pro-union workers, "captive audience" company-run anti-union meetings where unionists are silenced and workers must attend or be disciplined, and threats, harassment, intimidation and plant closure rumblings - all of that before the vote.

In a typical comment from the committee Democrats, Rep. Phil Hare (D-Ill.) said "Bush and some Republicans in Congress see labor unions as a threat to the bottom line of their corporate friends.

"Opponents of this legislation have every right to express their disdain for unions and the service they provide to working families. However, they do not have the right to silence the will of the majority through scare tactics and intimidation during a National Labor Relations Board election," added Hare, a former union organizer. "This bill, which permits workers to organize via a majority sign-up and increases penalties for the violation of workers' rights, restores fairness to a clearly broken process."
Speaking for the Bush Administration, Cheney took the position that the EFCA would give unions too much influence over the organizing process. The major problem with the card check process, he argued, is that it sidesteps the secret ballot process.

Cheney told a National Association of Manufacturers audience that "our administration rejects any attempt to short-circuit the rights of workers. We will defend their right to vote yes or no by secret ballot, and their right to fair bargaining. H.R. 800 (EFCA) violates these principles, and if it is sent to the president, he will veto the bill."

Countered University of Oregon political scientist Gordon Lafer: The fact that NLRB elections "end in secret ballots would in no way change the coercion of the voters" by the companies," he said.

And House Education and Labor Subcommittee Chairman Robert Andrews told the Construction Labor Report that "its important to put this into context." There have only been 42 cases of union coercion, fraud or misrepresentation in the signing of union authorization forms since the NLRB was formed. "The other side of the coin is rather different," he said. The NLRB awarded back pay to about 30,000 workers in 2005 along because of illegal employer discrimination.