Modern News

As the president and Congress considers passing the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) in which the “card check” feature is still a major provision, a federal agency is trying to prevent its own employees from using the card check practice to organize.

The Legal Services Corp., a congressionally chartered, taxpayer-funded entity has hired legal counsel to try and prevent its employees in its oversight office from using the card check procedure to become unionized.

Employees in LSC oversight offices, with the help of the IFPTE, appealed to LSC President Helaine Barnett in a July 20 letter, asking her to accept authorization cards signed by “an overwhelming majority” of workers signaling their intent to unionize. Ms. Barnett dismissed the request in a July 28 letter, saying that “authorization cards are often an unreliable indicator of support for a union,” according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by The Times.

Of course, it is a bit of amusing hypocrisy that a federally created agency is trying to stop employees using card check even as Congress is trying to pass a law that forces card check on the private sector. As they say on TV hucksterism, though, “But wait, there’s more.”

The preference of the LSC, which is legally structured as a nonprofit corporation, for using the secret-ballot election process complies with federal organizing requirements. Federal agency employees, unlike their counterparts in the private sector, aren’t permitted to unionize voluntarily using authorization cards.

So, even if Congress does pass the card check bill forcing the private sector to eliminate the secret ballot it seems that it won’t affect federal employees anyway because they have different rules!

So once again we are seeing Congress making rules for the great unwashed that Congress — and by extension the federal government — don’t have to suffer under.

Utter hypocrisy.