Voters Will Oppose Labor's Scheme
According to the Politico:
Few interest groups have more clout in Washington than organized labor. The eventual Democratic presidential nominee and congressional candidates in top races will depend heavily on Big Labor for money and grass-roots muscle in 2008. To lock in the active support of powerful unions, Democratic candidates across the nation have signed on to support the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that could become a major liability in the upcoming elections.
EFCA is designed to stem the decline in union membership by making it much easier for Big Labor to organize nonunion workplaces. But to do so, EFCA opens up workers to the threat of intimidation and coercion by union organizers and management. Under EFCA, workers would lose their right to a private ballot when deciding whether to join a union. The private ballot would be replaced with a card-check scheme, in which a union is organized if a majority of workers simply sign a card. The workers’ signatures would be made public to their employer, their co-workers and the union organizers.
The problem for any candidate who has signed on to Big Labor’s organizing agenda is that EFCA is very unpopular with voters, including rank and file union members. In polling conducted for the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace March 6-9 in three battleground states with Senate races, voters expressed strong reservations with replacing private ballot elections with the union-backed card-check scheme.
At least 80 percent of voters in Colorado, Maine and Minnesota believe that secret ballot elections are the cornerstone of democracy and should be used for union elections. More than seven in 10 voters in Colorado (72 percent), Maine (77 percent) and Minnesota (72 percent) say having a federally supervised secret and private ballot election is the best way to protect workers’ rights when organizing a union, with support on this question running equally as strong in union households as in nonunion households...click to continue.
