Maybe this should have gone on the political thread since it spells out the obvious for "how to win" for the dems.
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EFCA promises to take what is now a nasty, bruising, and hopelessly lawyer-dominated organizing process and turn it into a simple and equitable matter of getting a majority of employees to sign union cards. In addition to simple “card check” or majority verification, EFCA provides mechanisms to prevent employers from starting a war of attrition against workers once they have selected a union by sending the issue to mediation if 90 days pass without a contract. It also contains several protections for workers including treble back pay for the discriminatory discharge of union organizers.
Most advocates of labor law reform argue from a position of simple fairness, and that case is easy to make. There has been a war on organized labor in the last two decades, and private sector union density is now down to a paltry 8%. Labor law, originally designed to “encourage” collective bargaining, has been reduced to little more than a management tool. The national labor relations machinery allows employers to be militantly, aggressively, hostile to the decisions of their employees even though three-fourths of all Americans think employers should be neutral.
All that labor wonk stuff is important, but it overlooks the economic and political potential of meaningful labor law reform. Everyone is lamenting the outsourcing of those “high-paying” manufacturing jobs, but we tend to forget that those jobs used to be crappy low-paying jobs before the CIO turned them into coveted good-paying jobs.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0427-32.htm