LaborPains.org

The chances of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA aka “card check”) advancing in this session of Congress are virtually nonexistent. At least that’s what one of labor’s staunchest supporters in the U.S. Senate is telling the media:

“It’s not going to happen now,” [Democrat Sen. Sherrod] Brown said on WVIZ radio in Ohio.

The Hill reports that the Republican landslide last November swept away any hope “supporters of EFCA”  had for rewriting pro-labor union legislation that “might make it more palatable and allow it to be passed in a modified form.”

Where will the National Labor Relations Board extend its tendrils next? Here’s your answer:

The National Labor Relations Board has threatened to sue the states of Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah over recently passed state constitutional amendments that require secret-ballot elections before a company can be unionized.

The board says the states can’t override federal law that gives workers the option of the so-called card-check method of organizing, which unions favor but many employers oppose. …

The amendments to the four states’ constitutions were approved Nov. 2 by voters in those states. The amendments have already taken effect in South Dakota and Utah and are expected to become effective soon in Arizona and South Carolina.

These amendments were never expected to hold up since they run smack into federal law. But they serve as a good bellwether for how strongly the public opposes mandatory card check. South Carolina’s amendment passed with 86 percent of the vote. South Dakota’s garnered 79 percent support. Likewise, the NLRB’s threat should serve as an indication of just how obsequious the board has become.

Image courtesy of jezarnold.

That’s not a typo. Not only did she call it the “Employer Freed Choice Act,” which is embarrassing enough, but she told the Communications Workers of America that EFCA ought soon be the “law of the land.”  They applauded.

From the CWA:

Brad Peck from ChamberPost reports that the AFL-CIO is finally tearing down their “Faces of EFCA” campaign.

I wonder if this is in response to a union grievance citing the AFL-CIO’s employees right to offices with windows. I wouldn’t put it past them.

At the same, only a few minutes ago the AFL-CIO’s Trumka told ABC’s TopLine Webcast that they were working on getting EFCA passed before the election. Of course, it is more likely that we’ll see some semblance of EFCA “passed” by the National Labor Relations Board.

You put your support for card check in, you pull your support of card check out, you put your support for card check in and you get the union endorsement.

From the AP:

Cal Cunningham said in an interview with The Associated Press that he supports elections as the sole way for there to be unions created, but opposed so-called “card check” organizing. He clarified in a later interview that he would be open to hearing arguments about “card check” but felt it could not pass. The labor-backed idea would allow workers to form a union by signing cards instead of by secret ballot.

The Teamsters recently endorsed Cunningham.

Just when I thought “card check” was a dead letter, I’m reminded that states across the country have passed card check mandates for public sector workers. Now it appears that the Illinois Teachers union has taken it a step further, forcing card check on Chicago charter schools. I wonder how that works with respect to the National Labor Relations Act’s federal preemption of state collective bargaining laws

Steven Melendez from Northwestern University’s Midill School of Journalism reports:

The majority of the teachers at the four Aspira schools signed union membership cards, said Gail Purkey, spokeswoman for the Illinois Federation of Teachers. Thanks to the change in Illinois law, they were able to support unionization by simply filling out cards rather than voting in a secret ballot.

Photo courtesy of ΛK.

1. It’s Arlen Specter, so I am not surprised, but it is interesting to note that on the heals of receiving a major labor endorsement from the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, he announced a 5 points “Worker’s Bill of Rights”. Is it some sort of bizarre consolation prize for EFCA? In the process, he manages to rile people up by accusing China of “international banditry”. I am sure they appreciate his preaching to the choir. According to The Hill, those 5 points include:

Forcing China to end its practice of pegging its currency to the U.S. dollar, more aggressively enforcing U.S. trade laws, rescinding the president’s authority to overrule the International Trade Commission’s recommendations, offering speedier remedies for illegal trade claims, and strengthening “Buy American” requirements under the stimulus. Specter has not introduced legislation encompassing all these issues, and a spokeswoman said such legislation is unlikely. But several individual bills have been introduced by Specter or other senators on all of these points.

2. Teamsters Local 282 has been a “candy store for the mob”, but the candy thieves just got arrested.

On Tuesday morning, March 9, prosecutors inside Brooklyn federal court announced the results of an unsealed indictment against eight persons who are suspected Colombo members or associates. The eight-count indictment alleges the defendants variously engaged in racketeering, wire fraud, extortion and embezzlement.[...] There also was a labor union angle to the indictment. Prosecutors charge that Colombo associate Edward Garofalo, Jr. and his wife, Alicia DiMichele, embezzled from pension and welfare benefit plans established on behalf of members of International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 282.[...] This “candy store for the mob,” as it often has been called, once served as home base to feared John Gotti-era Gambino underboss Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, now in federal prison, whose testimony proved crucial to convicting Gotti.

3. Seattle’s fine citizens will get their garbage picked up, thanks to a slightly confusing week of “will they or won’t they” negotiations between Waste Management and Teamsters Local 147.

4. The NUHW claims that the SEIU will lose the trial in CA. The Huffington Post continues to run Erica Boddie’s day by day account of the trial, which came out of the gate shrieking at the NUHW and now is just getting old.

I hope you are not surprised. While you were sleeping (or relaxing) over the weekend, President Obama made 15 recess appointments, adding Craig Becker and Mark Pearce, to the National Labor Relations Board.

Thanks to CSPAN’s archive, I am going to let McCain et al. have their say. Watch the video here.

Now I will let the White House have the final word on this one. At the height of the controversy, Craig Becker’s bio read like this on the White House’s website:

“Craig Becker, of Illinois, to be a Member of the National Labor Relations Board for the term of five years expiring December 16, 2014, vice Dennis P. Walsh.”

In the announcement on Saturday, the White House re-released a statement which rehashed his bio from last spring when he was first nominated:

Craig Becker currently serves as Associate General Counsel to both the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale College in 1978 and received his J.D. in 1981 from Yale Law School where he was an Editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school he clerked for the Honorable Donald P. Lay, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.  For the past 27 years, he has practiced and taught labor law. He was a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law between 1989 and 1994 and has also taught at the University of Chicago and Georgetown Law Schools.  He has published numerous articles on labor and employment law in scholarly journals, including the Harvard Law Review and Chicago Law Review, and has argued labor and employment cases in virtually every federal court of appeals and before the United States Supreme Court.

You can put out that kind of bio when you know you’ve already won, and you have nothing to lose.