In a winners-and-losers story this morning, the Politico reports that unions have been the winners in the new Congress (guess what that means for actual working Americans):
The Employee Free Choice Act, nicknamed the card-check bill, passed the House and was blocked in the Senate.
Unions didn’t expect the legislation to pass but wanted a vote to help them better target their election work.
Lawmakers who voted against the bill, requiring companies to recognize unions if a majority of employees sign cards, can expect their vote to haunt them next year.
UPDATE: And this, from Rep. Buck McKeon:
Adding insult to injury, Democrats have unleashed an all-out assault on democracy in the workplace with their deceptively named “Employee Free Choice Act.” The reality of this union power-grab is a system in which workers are stripped of the right to a secret-ballot unionizing election, instead subjected to strong-arm tactics and possible union intimidation.Another cleverly titled bill, the so-called “RESPECT Act,” redefines the classification of a supervisor under the National Labor Relations Act in a transparent attempt to inflate the number of dues-paying union members.
The icing on the bureaucratic cake, however, is the Democrats’ aggressive expansion of the Depression-era Davis-Bacon wage mandates. In one bill after another, Democrats have imposed or expanded the reach of Davis-Bacon “prevailing wage” mandates, which use flawed calculations to impose a bureaucratic wage system on federal contracts. By inflating labor rates, Davis-Bacon wages increase the costs of federal projects by as much as 15 percent – costs which get passed on to the taxpayers – and force private companies to do hundreds of millions of dollars of excess administrative work each year.