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EFCA: Pros and Cons

Today I'll point to some recent eloquent writing from both sides of the Employee Free Choice Act debate.

From Stephen Crocket, co-host of DemocraticTalkRadio.com and provider of free content for anyone willing to publish him:

Even Republican partisans cannot miss the overpowering rank smell of corruption that seems to be coming from the Bush White House and the upper ranks of the national Republican leadership. It is little wonder that fewer and fewer Americans are identifying themselves as supporters of the Republican Party.
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Making unionization of workers difficult or impossible is part of the Republican culture of corruption. It is little wonder that this corrupt White House is threatening to veto the Employee Free Choice Act. The right to unionize has been stripped from huge number of American workers including many nurses, graduate students and government employees.

Corruption has weakened worker safety and anti-pollution efforts. Ineffective enforcement of mine safety regulations may have been directly responsible for many recent deaths of American miners.

On the other side, John Engler, former three-term governer of heavily-unionized Michigan and current President of the National Association of Manufacturers writes in The Hill:

Using the time-tested strategy of naming legislation with a clever euphemism, union advocates are pushing legislation that would restructure radically the process of organizing a workplace under the pleasant-sounding, even stirring title, “The Employee Free Choice Act.” Warming to the public-relations challenge, they talk about the bill “leveling the playing field,” “empowering workers” and “ensuring workers’ rights.”
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The reason the unions speak in broad, pleasant-sounding phrases is because they know Americans regard secret ballots as a basic, democratic right. According to a January poll of union and non-union households conducted by the business-backed Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, 87 percent support the continued use of secret ballots. Of union households, 79 percent support secret ballots. No wonder the advocates of the misleadingly named Employee Free Choice Act do not want to talk about the bill’s substance. To speak openly and honestly about its provisions would mean its quick death.

My friend Carter Wood, who's day job is to write speeches for Governer Engler, sums it up thusly:

The strategies of both sides on the bill are clear: Organized labor wants to distract people from examining what the legislation actually does, while the bill's opponents want to focus on its substance. If members of Congress and the public ackowledge the bill's anti-democratic essence, then its defeat is certain.

Posted on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 10:19PM by

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