LaborPains.org

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.

This morning, i.e. the day that institutions bury news, the White House released the “Annual Report of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class“, which had some nice things to say about EFCA. Among the pro-labor policies touted in the report on the “Middle Class,” starting on page 23 is a page plus on the importance of EFCA and the values it embodies. The report calling for EFCA does not mean it’s less dead, it’s just that the Administration has a responsibility to stay positive on the party line.

What’s funny is whose cited in the report.  The EFCA section of the White House report cites the Economic Policies Institute, a union-founded and funded group. According to the New York Post, it is a “creature of the national AFL-CIO.” What’s even more ridiculous is that it cites a report from EPI by none other than Jared Berstein and friends, entitled “The State of Working America 2008/2009.”

So who is Jared Bernstein? Why today he’s the Chief Economist and Economist Policy Advisor for Vice President Biden, who just happened to release this enlightening report. He says elsewhere he is the Executive Director of the task force. Yes my friends….Bernstein quotes himself.

Hallmarks of the middle class that raised millions into the middle class over the last 50 years were basically ignored.  “Unions” or “unionization were mentioned 34 times, by my count. By contrast,”small business(es)” were mentioned just 8 times. The word “entrepreneur” is never even mentioned in the report. Heck, even the Great Depression got mentioned twice.

William Forbath, professor of law and history at the University of Texas and author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, used his most recent Politico piece to call for Craig Becker‘s appointment by President.  He doesn’t come right out and call the Administration (and the Hill, for that matter) cowards–but he gets pretty close.

His motivation for pushing the Democrats so hard to support labor? To quote the absent minded professor here: “Unions are on the verge of vanishing.” From Politico:

“The Becker nomination offers President Barack Obama a more important opportunity, what he likes to call a teachable moment. […]

But unions are on the verge of vanishing. If the Democrats won’t even go this far to halt the battering unions have been taking, then Democrats and the nation will be the losers. For soon, we won’t have any institutional player to do the heavy lifting, to provide the serious money the Democrats need to campaign for job creation, health care reform and financial regulation. McCain and company have demonized Becker simply because he’s a union lawyer. Obama should stand up to them.”

Did you catch that? Unions are the “institutional player” that do the “heavy lifting” and pays the bills in the house of card check.

Image courtesy of Veebl.