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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
One of the main premises of the Orwellian-named Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is the card check feature. This feature eliminates the right of potential union employees to have the benefit of a secret ballot when they vote for or against organizing under a union.
Recently, Rasmussen did a poll on the basic concept to see what the prevailing feelings were and it looks like the union position comes out heavily on the losing end of the stats with this one. What’s more, most people agree with the Republican position that opposes the union’s.
Thirty percent (30%) of Americans say it is fair to form a union without having a secret ballot vote if a majority of a company’s workers sign a card saying they want to unionize.But a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 52% of adults do not believe it is fair to form a union without a secret vote. Eighteen percent (18%) are not sure.
Sixty-five percent (65%) of Republicans believe it’s unfair to establish a union without a secret ballot. Democrats and adults not affiliated with either party are more closely divided, although pluralities of both groups agree with the majority of Republicans.
And that isn’t the only part of the EFCA that most people oppose.
Just 21% of all Americans believe the federal government should be allowed to mandate an agreement defining pay and benefits for a company’s employees if the company and their employees’ union cannot reach an agreement on a contract within 90 days. Fifty-six percent (56%) are opposed to giving the government this power which is another provision of the EFCA.
The more informed that American’s are about the provisions of the EFCA the more opposed they are to it.
Even Democrats find a near even split on these issues which isn’t good news for unions hoping for a lopsided, Democratic majority of opinion to come down on their side.
We are close to killing this bill. We must all keep the pressure on, though, because the battle is not over yet.
On that point, recently Senator John Thune (R, S.D.) spoke on the progress of the EFCA in the Senate. Thune said that it looks as if the bill will not pass in its present state.
“I want to be very clear on this point,” Thune said, “There cannot be a compromise when it comes to card check and mandatory arbitration. The stakes are simply too high for workers, for small businesses, and for our economic recovery. With or without Senator Franken in the Senate, Republicans in the Senate are committed to defending the rights of American workers by defeating this bill.”
Like I said, we need to keep the pressure on these guys in D.C. to kill this bill. If we don’t some night, in the dead of night, we will se it slipped through when the pols in D.C. think no one is watching.
Recently, the Smosska Corporation swooped into Florence, South Carolina promising to instantly create some 400 new jobs with an assurance of 3,000 before next year is out. For an area that needs jobs this seemed like welcome news.
Last week a job fair was held in Florence by the new company at which free health care was offered those that would be hired. At that time an aptitude test was taken by applicants if, that is, they had the $40 fee to pay to take the thing. The company claimed this “fee” would be used to pay for drug tests if they were hired. This fee, however, made some people curious.
The fee and several other curious characteristics of this company caused suspicions to be raised about its legitimacy. It turns out, there is not yet an actual building in which this Smosska Corporation is housed, there don’t seem to be too many current employees, and there doesn’t seem to have been any actual products created by Smosska in the past — though the corporation is supposed to have been formed in 2001. Even the original email address given out was a Yahoo account, not an official corporate web host address.
So, how does a company that doesn’t seem to have any employees, no place of business, and no actual product for sale find the ability to promise that it can create 3,000 employees practically overnight? It appears as if the answer to that is when ACORN is backing you amazing financial arrangements can be made.
The links between Smosska and the troubled community group weren’t openly admitted, to be sure. The Florence Better Business Bureau looked into the company after questions were raised about its odd characteristics. The BBB found that Smosska is being backed by a group called Organizers for America, which itself is a subsidiary of the National Organizers Alliance, which itself is affiliated with ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, the nationally troubled group associated with massive voter fraud, financial irregularities. Of course, all were heavy Obama campaign backers. NOA is also heavily engaged with unions via training their employees for “community activism.”
So, what does Smosska do? Its website claims that the company makes electronically readable ID cards with a patient’s medical history imprinted upon them. But there is no indication that a single card has ever been made since the company was incorporated in 2001.
Company president Michelle Adams told reporters that her company works in “eight different states across the area serving clients including hospitals, doctors and pharmacies.” But a look at the Smosska website lists no business contacts, no clients, no success stories, no testimonials. In fact, no history of any kind is mentioned there. It seems a bit odd for a corporation not to even list a single satisfied client.
A Google search of the company’s name reveals a lot of entries claiming that Smosska is some sort of insurance company or has insurance connections in the medical field, but there is no mention of these cards. A “Health Care Organizing Kickoff” announcement on my.barackobama.com can also be found mentioning that company will hire 3,000 new workers by 2010. (Screen capture of Obama website in case it goes down the memory hole because Barack Obama is good for making things disappear from the net.)
I don’t know about you but, a ” Health Care Organizing Kickoff ” doesn’t sound like the inauguration of a new company that intends to manufacture medical ID cards, does it? It sounds more like a community activist event aimed at “organizing” people to get the word out about Obama’s healthcare policies, doesn’t it?
In any case, with the shady or nearly non-existent business history, the many unannounced connections to ACORN, to Obama and various other community organizer groups, and the lack of a manufacturing plant, it is more likely that this company is just another shell corporation for ACORN or ACORN-like activities to hide behind.
So why all the mystery, why the refusal to really inform the Florence community as to what this corporation really intends to do? With the illegal activities connected to so many of these community organizing groups, it’s not a shock that such ties would be hidden from view.
Florence better be very careful about this one. Let’s hope the Better Business Bureau doesn’t just drop its investigation and Florencers can become fully informed about what this Smosska Corporation is really up to.
A good one from TheTruthAbouttheEFCA.com:
OK, that title was borrowed from the book by now-Senator Al Franken. But it’s a good title to kick off what is a sadly continuing discussion on just how far proponents of card check (in the form of the Employee Free Choice Act) will push the bounds of honesty. So far, it appears they will seek or surpass those bounds with vigor.
The latest salvo comes from the Service Employees International Union, which is demanding Nebraska television stations stop airing an anti-EFCA group’s educational advertisement. The union’s lawyers say claims that EFCA will effectively end secret ballots — which it effectively does — are ” demonstrably false.”
Hmm. That’s pretty strong language. That would require, we imagine, a pretty strong factual case and, most likely, a finding by a court. Funny thing, then, is that history shows us courts have specifically found these claims are not false.
So SEIU’s claims of “demonstrably false” claims are themselves “demonstrably false.”
Then there’s the AFL-CIO’s Stuart Acuff going on television and misleading viewers when he said EFCA’s effective destruction of the secret ballot is untrue and that “The Wall Street Journal has said that that is a lie.” Again, “demonstrably false” as the SEIU, which had again stretched the truth. In fact, the newspaper took the rather extraordinary step of writing another editorial just to correct the union and those following its misrepresentations:
These guys must really be desperate. As we’ve written many times, “card check” effectively ends secret-ballot elections because it would allow labor organizers to automatically organize a work site if more than 50% of workers sign an authorization card. Thus our words: “dead letter.”
Obviously, EFCA is crucial to a handful of top union officials, who see billions of dollars in potential revenue by denying employees a private ballot to vote on whether they want to join a union. But we’d think they’d be a little more careful when throwing around loaded terms — because like a grenade with the pin pulled, the explosion can hurt the one throwing the bomb.
We’d be happier if everyone stuck to the truth. Of course, that’s an advantage for opponents of EFCA since the truth about EFCA is pretty powerful.
Senator Specter sent Stan Caldwell, one of his staffers, to a luncheon to encourage them to push the Employee Free Choice Act.
You can hear Caldwell urging the union members in attendance to continue pushing the EFCA so that it can come before the Senate before the August recess and you can hear him thanking the union folks for their efforts thus far to push the EFCA.
But, forgive me if I am wrong, but didn’t Specter say he was against the EFCA? Oh, wait. That was before he suddenly became a Democrat again.
Sorry. Forgot.
Card check is still alive, though barely. We need to keep the drumbeat to destroy this economic killing law.
Video below the fold…
During its late conference held during the Independence Day holiday weekend, the National Education Association took up a series of new resolutions that targeted charter schools. The union was looking for ways to reign in the success of charter schools to make their own woeful attempts at education in the public schools look better. The union was also looking for ways to cash in on charter school’s success as well as for a way to get more union oversight into them.
But, here is the thing: when they work, charter schools work because they have less union meddling involved in their operations.
In their adopted resolutions, the NEA paid lip service to the “potential” reforms and “creative teaching methods” that can more easily be adopted at charter schools. Yet the following resolutions seemed determined to undermine and eliminate the very freedom and flexibility it paid lip service to at the outset. One is struck by the logical disconnect. Why, exactly, do the unions imagine that the freedom realized at charter schools lends itself to that innovation in the first place? Conversely, why is innovation not seen in public schools?
There are several troublesome resolutions that, if widely adopted, would spell the end of the effectiveness of charter schools, turning them into just another public school outlet ruled by union bigwigs and uninterested in the children’s education, not to mention the end of all that innovation the NEA initially praised.
Take this resolution, for instance:
Charter schools should be subject to the same public sector labor relations statutes as traditional public schools, and charter school employees should have the same collective bargaining rights as their counterparts in traditional public schools.
In other words, the union expects all charter school employees to be placed inexorably under the same union contract that the other public school employees are governed by. Of course, one of the chief successes of charter schools is that school administrators have more power to hire and fire teachers to get just the right balance to fit their program. Being forced under regular union restrictions would eliminate this flexibility outright.
Another resolution seems to lay the groundwork for making it tougher to even create a charter school.
A charter should be granted only if the proposed school intends to offer an educational experience that is qualitatively different from what is available in traditional public schools.
This one almost sounds reasonable until you begin to wonder exactly who it is that will determine when the charter plan would be a “qualitatively different” educational experience? If left to the union, one might expect that never would be the answer to the question of when a charter school might be authorized if they were the ones to set the criteria.
One other statement from the NEA is suspect:
NEA shall oppose any initiative to greatly expand the growth of charter schools and assist its state affiliates in identifying any effective practices incubated therein that could subsequently be implemented in our traditional public schools. By no means should this effort conflict with the ongoing and necessary work of organizing charter school teachers, nor should it conflict with charter schools that meet NEA guidelines.
That is a sly piece of rhetoric, isn’t it? On one hand this statement pretends at supporting charter schools right to organize, yet also sternly opposes them and announces the intent to try and steal what does work there and copy it in their own schools.
But, as I said, one of the chief reasons that charter schools work, when they work, is that they’ve gotten out from under union domination. So, as the NEA tries to impose its rules anyway, it claims that even if a charter school is lucky enough to survive and find success despite the union’s best efforts, then the union will copy the successful bit and further marginalize the charter school.
The kindly folks at the NEA cannot brooke with success of charter schools. Do they care if it helps the kids? Not really. They only care if they are in control of it all.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston