The Wall Street Journal has an interesting point of view on card check today.

Why Card Check Is Unconstitutional

Only secret ballots are consistent with the First Amendment.

The Employee Free Choice Act of 2009 — otherwise known as “card check” — is organized labor’s dream. As a practical matter, this legislation, pursued by both the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress, would do away with the secret ballot in the unionization process. Although card check’s advocates and critics have spilled much ink arguing about the bill’s fundamental fairness to labor and management, so far the debate has not focused on the other compelling interest at stake: the constitutionally protected right of employees to keep their opinions on controversial issues like unionization to themselves. This is card check’s Achilles’ heel.

The Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech, along with the Fifth and 14th Amendment due process clauses, to protect a variety of expressive and associational rights. The right to speak and associate anonymously is among those rights. Indeed, anonymous speech has a long and honored tradition in American politics. Much of the political agitation leading up to the American Revolution was necessarily anonymous in order to avoid British sedition charges. And three of the Constitution’s Framers — James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay — wrote the Federalist Papers supporting its ratification under the anonymous pen name “Publius.”

The Supreme Court has consistently recognized the importance of this type of political discourse. The reason is obvious: Public speech on contentious issues often inflames passions, prompting intimidation and retaliation. Outing speakers who prefer anonymity chills speech, and has the potential to suppress it entirely.

Read the full piece

The flaw in ‘card check’

The Employee Free Choice Act contains worthy reforms, but it needs to preserve the secret ballot.

Congress fought back against the Depression and unemployment in the 1930s with the National Labor Relations Act, protecting employees who wanted to organize unions but who feared management retaliation. The pendulum swung away from labor in 1947 when Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Truman’s veto. It has never swung back, and in fact, labor organizers have been stymied by a succession of regulatory restrictions and hostile National Labor Relations Board decisions that have helped undermine the 1935 act’s stated policy of encouraging collective bargaining to negotiate terms and conditions of employment.

Now Congress is considering a bill aimed at correcting the balance and affording employees real power to organize and participate in meaningful contract negotiations. One part of the proposed Employee Free Choice Act of 2009 ought to be a no-brainer: adding teeth to today’s penalties against employers who improperly intimidate workers or engage in other unfair labor practices. If anything, that portion of the bill ought to be enhanced.

A second part, calling for an arbitrator to impose a two-year initial contract when negotiations and mediation fail, has drawn strong protest from business, which currently can drag out contract talks forever and thus negate employees’ decision to organize. Filibustering against a properly elected union is an abuse of the collective bargaining process, and binding arbitration is an appropriate way to stop it. Regulations would fine-tune the arbitrator’s role; rule makers ought to consider imposing either side’s last, best offer as a way to encourage both sides to be more realistic in their offers and make negotiations more productive.

These two reforms are too often dismissed as lesser components of this three-part bill. But they should not be overlooked. They’re crucial proposals that would swing the pendulum back and return some power to employees.

The third part of the bill is the one that troubles us. It would eliminate the secret-ballot elections that are used in most organizing campaigns and replace them with a method variously known as majority sign-up, petitioning or “card check.” This change would correctly take away from management the power to pick employees’ method of voting on whether to organize. But instead of returning that decision to the people who ought to have it — the employees — it would award it to a labor union, an outside third party that has the potential to become the employees’ representative in bargaining but isn’t yet, and shouldn’t be before the vote.

Read the rest at The L.A. Times.

The L.A. Times reports that card check may be losing enough support to be in danger of not passing…

‘Card check’ bill loses key supporters

Reporting from Washington — Whether you label it the “card check” bill or the Employee Free Choice Act, you can also call it something else — in deep trouble.

Key senators this week appeared to cripple prospects for passing the highly polarizing measure, the labor movement’s top priority in Congress, which is aimed at making it easier for workers to join unions.

The latest hurdle came Friday, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she would seek alternative legislation that was less divisive. Feinstein, a past sponsor of the act, cited the flailing economy as a reason; other critics of the bill have said it would drive up operating costs for businesses at a perilous time.

See the full L.A.Times article

Wisconsin’s Eau Claire County lost 800 full-time jobs and a $50 million investment that was to be rolled out over the next five years because of the Democrat’s Card Check bill. And it wasn’t just a single county in Wisconsin that lost this multi-million dollar development. It was the whole U.S.A. that lost this project.

Thank you Barack Obama. Some help with economic “stimulus” and jobs you are.

Announcing this loss, Brian Doudna, executive director of the Eau Claire Area Economic Development Corp., said that the project was abandoned because the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would make the project unprofitable and unmanageable. Because the legislation would force binding arbitration on the corporation, eliminate the secret ballot and strangle the right of business owners to speak to employees about unions, as well as potentially forcing costs to skyrocket without control, it was determined that conditions would be too costly and unstable to go ahead.

Doudna also said that because of the EFCA, the project would not be built anywhere in the U.S.

“While debating topics and issues are an important part of the U.S. political process, our ability to grow, retain and recruit jobs to our marketplace is now being impacted,” he said.

“Proposed federal and state legislation, as shown by this company’s decision, can impact location decisions and limit the private sector’s ability to create quality jobs for Eau Claire area residents. This is especially disappointing given the condition of our current national, regional and local economies.”

This is a perfect example of the negative effect that the EFCA will have on the entire U.S. economy. Companies won’t be able to plan without expecting the government to swoop in at any given time to force all parties into a union, employees won’t be free to make an informed choice about organizing, employers will be forbidden to even have an open discussion with employees over their options and costs will soar as the exorbitant costs of unions is forced upon businesses everywhere.

In such an atmosphere, why would any company put themselves at such risk to develop new projects in the U.S.? It is so much easier to just go to some foreign country where business and economic development is welcomed with open arms than to lose money, find an inability to partnership with workers and face a government hostile to economic opportunities.

This is the atmosphere that Barack Obama wants to foster in the U.S. with his support of the EFCA. He wants a hostile climate, one where business is not viewed as a partner in the American economy, but as an enemy to the people and the state.

Americans need to urge representatives in Congress to oppose the Employee Free Choice Act so that innovation, expansion, and opportunity can remain a key aspect of a strong America.