Battle right-wing spin on pro-labor law

As Karl Rove and his cronies have shown us, right-wingers are very good at spinning against mainstream liberal initiatives with rhetoric that gives liberals pause. Here’s a good corrective on the current Republican spin on the Employee Free Choice Act. This is the provision that Democrats support in Congress, and have actually passed, allowing a bargaining unit to be formed and certified simply with a majority of workers signing a card. Obama, of course, supports it. Right now, employers can then demand a secret ballot, and proceed with all the goonish and quasi-legal tactics some employ – firings, threats, interrogations, moles, spies and forced attendance at job-threatening diatribes -- to put massive pressure on employees and prevent unionization at any cost. A whole dirty industry of consultants, organizations of “scab” (replacement) workers, and pro-management labor groups within major law firms and has been built up to help destroy unions wherever possible.

Liberals, of course, like most Americans, believe in a secret ballot. Cleverly, the so-called “Right-to-Work” P.R. industry has developed the argument that giving legal recognition to the card check process would interfere with the right to a secret ballot. Their theory, of course, is the thoroughly elitist notion that only workers have “goons” who would force workers to sign the cards. But despite its surface appeal, the argument is completely bogus: the workers themselves still have the right to demand a secret ballot. It would only take away the employer’s right – and why on earth should it be any business of the employer whether workers want to let their signed cards speak for themselves or be able to vote in secret?

Remember that: it doesn’t take away the right to a secret ballot, only the right of employers to demand one as a delaying tactic for gearing up the anti-labor machinery that has worked very well in many cases in a time of job scarcity.