Bret Jacobson sent along a link to his latest in the DSC Examiner about the doings on the Hill sponsored by Big Labor. Let’s hope Congress isn’t fooled.

About today’s million-union member march for Employee ‘Free’ Choice Act

By Bret Jacobson, OpEd Contributor, DC Examiner

You can imagine your mother shaking her head, asking, “If your friends wanted to push the economy off the bridge, would you do that, too?”

That is, figuratively speaking, the issue at hand today. Union officials and allies are scheduled to appear today on Capitol to announce that they have collected about a million signed petitions supporting the comically misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

The aim of this publicity stunt is to engender a Leming-like instinct in our nation’s lawmakers — a drive that would push our economy right off a cliff. This bill is problematic on several fronts.

EFCA is bad for workers. The legislation would strip American employees of their right privacy with a secret ballot when deciding on a union. In its place, they’d get a “card check” procedure — a dubious process open to intimidation, confusion, and coercion.
EFCA is also bad for U.S. companies, which would experience an unprecedented push by the government to impose expansive, binding arbitration on private business practices.

Frankly, EFCA is bad for the whole economy, which wouldn’t likely rebound under a return to 1970′s-style unionization.

In spite of these consequences, Big Labor is touting today’s announcement as justification for EFCA. But the million signatures aren’t quite as impressive as they may seem.

Consider the larger picture. One million would represent only about one-sixteenth of the unions’ current total membership. Should Congress overhaul an entire labor legal system and remove workplace rights, when only one out of every 16 union members can be bothered to send in propaganda that labor officials have made their highest priority?

Moreover, policymakers would be well advised to take into account the staggering number of working Americans who stand to lose workplace rights under EFCA’s card-check language.

The Heritage Foundation’s James Sherk has estimated that EFCA threatens the right to a secret ballot for 105 million Americans. That sum is well beyond the 69 million Americans who proudly exercised their sacred democratic right to vote—via secret ballot—for President Barack Obama.

The unions’ grass-tops groundswell is just the latest blip in a multi-million dollar PR campaign. They recently released a strategically worded poll, suggesting the vast majority of Americans are clamoring for EFCA.

Meanwhile, business groups have conducted other surveys, and those results suggesting that the vast majority of Americans support secret-ballot elections. What can the public take away from all of this?

The simplest answer is also the most likely: Americans support commonsense laws that protect all workers, and stealing the secret ballot fails to meet that standard.

Union officials and a handful of politicians will suggest that today’s parade of petition signatures is the equivalent of a million-member march for crucial legislation. In reality, they’re little more than postcards from the edge.

Bret Jacobson is founder and president of Maverick Strategies LLC, a research and communications firm serving business and free-market think tanks.

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