Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) on Employee Free Choice Act
With the overnight announcement that Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) will be Senator Barack Obama's (D-IL) running mate, we took a look back at Senator Biden's past support for the Employee Free Choice Act.
Senator Biden was a co-sponsor of the bill in the 110th Congress and 109th Congress, and voted in favor of cloture in 2007.
At the AFL-CIO Forum held in Chicago last year, he made no mention of the EFCA specifically, but did take numerous sharp swipes at Senator Obama suggesting inexperience and lack of foreign policy awareness -- once, embarassingly in response to a mine safety question by a Sago mine widow:
While campaigning for the nomination himself last year, Senator Biden attempted to speak in favor of the bill, but ironically made the argument against it:“‘If the most cherished right a country can give a citizen is the
ability to vote … all you got to do is walk in and sign your name and be
registered to vote … Why should it be any different to organize a
union?”
Of course, it isn't any different -- under current law. Right now, only thirty percent of the employees in a
workplace simply need to "sign [their] name[s]" on authorization cards for
presentation to the National Labor Relations Board. Then they get a secret
ballot election, run by the government, where everyone affected -- not just those who "registered" -- get "the
cherished...ability to vote" to determine the issue. That, of course, is the very right that EFCA seeks to take away from up to 50% of the workforce.
During the cloture debate in June 2007, Biden spoke enthusiastically in favor of the Act and more:
The Employee Free Choice Act will make the will of the majority of workers
clearer. It will punish employers who break the law, and it will guarantee that
new unions will get their first contract, not just another runaround.
It is time to bring the strength of the union movement back within the
reach of the American people. It is time to rebuild the middle class by giving
organized labor the strength to fight for decent pay and benefits.
My colleagues, it is time for a new social compact, a new social compact
because of white-collar workers who never thought they needed a union, and who
all of a sudden are finding out their companies are not so generous with them
when they walk in and shut down a division and shut them out. I say to my
colleagues, I believe American white-collar workers who never thought about the
union movement are prepared to think about it now.
I don't want to just reverse the slide of organized labor in America, I
want to energize a new compact between white-collar workers and blue-collar
workers to give back power to the middle class so this graph you see here from
the year 2008 through 2020 looks more like this graph that existed from to 1973. It is the only way to keep the middle class in the game. They are
getting crushed now. They are getting crushed.
So, the ticket seems to be in agreement...
workplacehorizons.com
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