Mickey Kaus, Slate

Where’s my Wii? At a 7:30 AM (!) “card check” breakfast debate (podcast available here) I learned the following:

1) In the “card check” bill, if a newly unionized employer can’t reach an agreement with the new union, an arbitrator will step in and impose a two-year contract. I thought Jennifer Rubin must be wrong when she said that this arbitrator would be a government employee:

That’s what we are talking about here: a government official sent into a private workplace to order, in the absence of a voluntary agreement between labor and management, the employer to abide by a government-dictated contract. If this seems like an appalling intrusion into the operation of private businesses, it is.

This is far more extreme than the National Industrial Recovery Act of the New Deal, which at least allowed industries to devise their own “codes.” In the case of the EFCA, the government would be in the position to directly set wages, benefits, and work rules for any business with a union agreement.

That seems like a parody of liberal Washington meddling. It’s one thing for employer and union to have to abide by the decision of a mutually selected third party. It’s another to have a strange bureaucrat from D.C. come and tell everyone how to run things–not just setting a minimum wage but setting wages and job categories up and down the hierarchy. I figured Rubin was being alarmist.

But it turns out Rubin is right. Or at least she might be right. The arbitration parts of the card check bill are so vaguely drawn that nobody knows who the arbitrators will be. The job appears to be delegated entirely to the Federal Mediation Service. The FMS might decide to use its own employees. It might decide to use arbitrators from the private sector selected along more traditional lines. The two breakfast debaters (Prof. Richard Epstein and attorney Anthony Segall) did seem to agree that, since thousands of arbitrators might quickly be needed for the expected explosion of mandatory arbitration, it’s unlikely they would all be newly hired GS-12s. But they don’t know.

Go on over to read the rest of Mickey Kaus’ piece in Slate, it is pretty interesting.

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