WASHINGTON, D.C./EWORLDWIRE/Jan. 18, 2007 --- The top priority for the new Democratic Congress: End secret ballot elections to decide union representation and force unfair contract terms on employers, according to the National Alliance for Worker and Employer Rights.In the last Congress, unions and their legislative allies, pushed a brazenly misnamed bill, "The Employee Free Choice Act" (EFCA), whose perverse goal is to deprive employees of free choice about union representation and to intimidate employers. New House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has promised to place a newly introduced EFCA bill on the floor this spring calling it a "High priority" for Democrats.
There are three main components of EFCA:
- The central feature of the bill would outlaw secret ballot elections by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) among employees to decide whether to be represented by a union. Instead, the EFCA would permit unions to inveigle employees to sign "authorization cards" agreeing to labor representation in front of union agents.
- Second, the bill would give unions the power to invoke outside arbitration to gain a first contract, abandoning the American tradition of letting the parties settle their differences through good faith collective-bargaining. In other words, business owners would suddenly have no one to negotiate on "first contracts" they would be removed from the Bargaining process and forced to accept due to EFCA an outside arbitration process without their input and the one sided and unfair employment contracts with the unions that this would imply.
- Third, the bill would increase penalties against employers for certain labor law violations, requiring reimbursement three times the amount of wages lost by an employee and imposing civil fines of as much as $20,000 per incident yet would not levy harsher sanctions for union misconduct.
- Authorization cards are inherently far less reliable because they require employees to make a public rather than a confidential decision about unionization, thus subjecting them to peer pressure, harassment, coercion, and misrepresentation. One study showed 18 percent of employees who sign cards don't want the union.
- Unions can obtain commitments from employees without the employer's knowledge and thus gain representative status before the employer is able to make a case as to why unionization is not in the workers' best interest.
False Union Arguments for EFCA:
NLRB election processes are too slow. According to NLRB statistics, in FY 2005, the median time between a union’s petition for a representation election and the holding of the election was only 38 days, and 94.2 percent of all elections were conducted within 56 days of a petition.
It is too hard for unions to get initial contracts with employers. Employers are already required, under penalty of law, to bargain with unions in good faith. Employers should not be forced to submit to onerous terms imposed by a third party that may jeopardize jobs and profitability.
Learn more at 'http://www.freeworkplace.org'.
(Top)