There's a great George Will column today on HR 800, the so-called "Employee Free Choice Act". It is a rather blatant payback to organized labor for its support in the recent elections. Will notes:
The evidence is pretty clear, in other words, that unionization is increasingly irrelevant to ever-larger numbers of the private-sector workforce. So HR800 is a panicked response to put some very large thumbs on the unions' side of the scales as they hope to "persuade" people to join up.
Most outrageously:
You might think that a bill labeled "Employee Free Choice" would demand secret balloting rather than a non-secret checkoff system where mob pressure would be effective. You would be wrong.
Will's article is well worth checking out. Another good recent article on HR800 is Bryan O'Keefe's, who points to something even more ominous:
If union and management still have not reached an agreement in another 30 days, a government-appointed arbitrator would set the final binding contract terms.
O'Keefe points out how dreadful an idea this is; arbitrators are wholly unlikely to impose contracts based on marketplace realities. The result is forseeable:
Well, frankly, it's not a mystery. If you follow the money and power, and ask "cui bono?," it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.
I'd like to suggest that you write your Congresscritter and ask them to vote against HR800, but in fact it has about 230 co-sponsors in the House. (And one of the co-sponsors is my own representative, Carol Shea-Porter. I guess it's a pretty safe bet she's not looking for my input on the matter.)
(O'Keefe link via Unconstrained Katie's Mom.)