Posted on 06/24/2007 5:50:26 AM PDT by tcrlaf
NEW YORK - "Count all the votes!" Democrats screamed during the 2000 Florida recount fiasco. "Don't count the votes!" Democrats now yell when workers decide whether to unionize.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee heard testimony Tuesday on the sarcastically titled Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).
Adopted March 1 by the House, 241-185, it would let unions capture workplaces without having to win secret-ballot elections. Instead, work sites could go union once representatives collect non-secret authorization cards from a majority of workers. Why spurn federally supervised labor elections?
As United Food and Commercial Workers President Joe Hansen admits: "We can't win that way anymore."
Beyond vote suppression, other union card-check tactics seem stolen from a Martin Scorsese picture.
Former United Steelworkers organizer Richard Torres wrote in a Feb. 8 account to the House Education and Labor Committee. "I ultimately quit," Torres continued, when a senior unionist "asked me to threaten migrant workers by telling them they would be reported to federal immigration officials if they refused to sign check-off cards."
SNIP---
In a 1996 decision, the NLRB held that a Service Employees International Union "card solicitor allegedly stated that the employee had better sign a card because if she did not, the Union would come and get her children and it would also slash her car tires."
"In 2004, approximately 83 percent of newly organized workers were herded into unions without secret ballots," says the National Right to Work Foundation's Stefan Gleason.
"Card-checks offer workers two basic choices: 'Union, yes' and 'Union, yes.' "
(Excerpt) Read more at shelbynews.com ...
Democrats are fast doing away with any pretention of protecting the idea of American Freedoms.
From Free Speech (fairness Doctrine), to the Secret Ballot and Institionalized Voter Fraud, to pushing illegal immigration.
This is an older piece, but I wanted to get in the archive.
What the hell happened to the Democrat Party of my father that actually believed in America?
It was a lot easier for the Dems back in the days when a large part of the workforce was unionized. It was their glory days.
Sounds like a lose-lose to me...the union thugs will be able to find out who voted against and intimidate them; the employer will be able to root out the troublemakers who voted pro-union and get rid of them.
I LOVE this line from the link
“It’s Time to Restore Workers’ Freedom to Form Unions”
But don’t you DARE give them a choice in the matter!
I was involved in that organization about 30 years ago.
Left shortly after the fellow above me in the hierarchy
informed me that unions were a 'necessary evil'.
http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion/voiceatwork/efca/majoritysignup.cfm
WHY MAJORITY SIGN-UP?
One of the most common lines of attack corporate special interests are using to stop the Employee Free Choice Act is the charge that we are trying to abandon sacred “secret ballot elections.” How do we respond?
The real issue is how we can restore the freedom of working people to make their own decision about joining together to bargain for better wages and working conditions. Until working people can exercise a free choice, they will continue to lose power in our country, living standards will continue to suffer and our middle class will continue to decline. Workers need a real choice. They don’t have it now.
Do so-called secret ballot elections allow employees a free and fair opportunity to make their own decisions about unions?
No. By the time employees get to vote, the environment has been so poisoned that free and fair choice isn’t an option. People call the current National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election system a secret ballot election—but in fact it’s not like any democratic election held anywhere else in our society. It’s really a management-controlled election process because corporations have all the power. They control the information workers can receive and routinely poison the process by intimidating, harassing, coercing and even firing people who try to organize unions. No employee has free choice after being browbeaten by a supervisor to oppose the union or being told they may lose their job and livelihood if workers
vote for the union.
RNC refused to support Randy Graf. He wasn't their Country Club Boy.
They similarly screwed PA's Pat Toomey. I think the suits running the GOP hate conservatives as much as the 'Rats do.
I think you are right. The "suits", or RINO's, were also VERY uncomfortable with their Congressional majority. I believe that the RINO's loved, and now relish, the minority position in that it provides cover for their own earmarks, pork, and special interest legislation. The majority position was too visible and open to daily attack by the Dems. RINO's have no problems with negotiating away rights, liberties and tax funds to the Democrat (communist) positions; after all, they can simply wail afterwards that their capitulation was all that was left them, being in the minority and all.
They’re aiming for a France-like government.
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