As the Senate votes to close debate on the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (literally as I type), today’s Congressional Quarterly quotes Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden saying that although he’ll miss more and more votes in his bid to become president, he wouldn’t dare miss the vote on EFCA:
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has put up a new video that begins with Ted Kennedy’s “endorsement” of Union Facts and continues on to list the money handed over by Big Labor to the leading politicians supporting the anti-democratic Employee Free Choice Act. Check it out!
Someone out there, labeled a pro-business Democrat, has followed up on our ads likening proponents of the Employee Free Choice Act to dictators who want to get rid of secret ballot elections. And a good job that someone has done, too!
It’s always good to poke fun at the absurdity in this debate — even if the underlying issue is dreadfully serious.
(Hat tip: EmployerReport.com)
The Senate is finally expected to try a procedural vote on the whimsically misnamed “Employee Free Choice Act” today. Yippee, say the senators, we’re trying to deny workplace democracy! The vote should fail and the bill should be filibustered, but that’s not enough reason to make one happy. This is an unabashed power grab by the Beltway’s biggest special interest — Big Labor.
A new group has weighed in against EFCA. A bi-partisan coalition of former National Labor Relations Board members — the top guys at the government’s top agency overseeing the ways in which employees join unions — have signed a letter calling EFCA “fundamentally flawed.” The group includes Democrats appointed by President Reagan and appointees from President Clinton. (I have the letter floating around — I’ll try to post it later.)
Of course, the Center for Union Facts is continuing its campaign to educate the public about the issue. We ran another full-page ad today, this time in The Washington Post (where there’s been a back and forth between some powerful Georges).
It’s not often you get a voice-over from a U.S. Senator. But last week our ad — using an exact quote from one of his supporters — provoked Sen. Ted Kennedy into reading our ad aloud to a crowd of union activists (which, by the looks of it, consisted mainly of staff). Then, he tore our ad up and drove the rally wild. Here’s the video of the good senator’s “gentlemanly” discourse. Make sure to savor the fact that Kennedy tells people to go to UnionFacts.com to learn more about the intimidation that would run rampant under his own bill:
In a battle of wills Georges today, Congressman George Miller took to task Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will for his journalistic broadside against Miller’s ridiculously named “Employee Free Choice Act”. As we’ve pointed out in full-page ads (and as Will mentioned in his column), Miller has previously extolled the use of secret ballots for recognizing unions — but his bill would practically end these secret ballot elections for working Americans who are deciding whether to join a union.
In 2001, Miller coauthored a letter to Mexican labor authorities praising the role of secret ballot elections. His current bill would all but end them. His old spin justifying the flip-flop: those elections were in Mexico. New spin: he says he’s remaining consistent because his bill would “retain the requirement of secret-ballot elections when workers in the United States are voting to replace one union with another union.”
What?! So the only people who get the protections of a secret ballot election are people who are already having dues deducted from their paycheck? With each new spin, Miller and company look more and more like apologists for Big Labor’s agenda and less and less like protectors of working Americans.
The Center for Union Facts today continued its assault on Big Labor’s scheme to deny working Americans a personal, private vote when they’re deciding whether to join a union. Today we ran full-page ads in The New York Times and USA TODAY telling the world that the public doesn’t support this union scheme. This brings our total advertising to $750,000 in just the last week (click here to help us run more ads to educate the public).
A brief recap of recent events:
LaborPains is a joint blog of the Center for Union Facts and EFAC.
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