Labor unions find themselves card-checkmated

[BigD_95]

Source: LA Times

Business groups have outmaneuvered workers groups, jeopardizing key components of a congressional proposal that has been unions' top priority. Labor supporters say their side has gotten disorganized.

Reporting from Washington -- In the Ozark Mountain town of Rogers, Ark., more than 250 business owners gathered for lunch at a construction company last month to focus on what they saw as a major threat -- a proposal in Congress to make it easier to form labor unions.

At each place setting, attendees found pre-stamped postcards and pre-written letters to be sent to Arkansas' U.S. senators, Democrats Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln, who had supported the labor bill in the past. After lunch, the business owners were ushered to computers to send e-mail messages as well.


'Card-check' opponents
Five days later came the good news: Two Senate votes had been stripped from the pro-union bill. Lincoln said she would oppose it outright, while Pryor declared the current version "dead" and said he would look for compromises.

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-unions19-2009may19,0,2676804.story

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I wonder if all of us cotact Arkansas' U.S. senators, Democrats Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln we can change their minds back.

[billyoc]

1. I'll decide when I'm checkmated.

[ChoralScholar]

2. Blanche Lincoln has become about worthless to the state.

a DINO for sure, these days.

[IndianaGreen]

3. In another morphing into Bush, Obama pronounces Card Check "Dead"

Don't forget that Obama has kept Single Payer off the health care reform table, while letting all the greedy corporations sell us another bottle of snake oil.

Card Check Is Dead

Thu May 21, 2009 10:08am EDT

By liza.featherstone - The Big Money

Last Thursday, President Obama pronounced "card check" dead, saying that the current Employee Free Choice Act didn't have the votes to pass but that a "compromise" could work. By compromise, the president meant a version of the bill without card check, the provision obliging employers to recognize unions after a majority of workers have signed cards, rather than after an election. On the same day, Sen. Arlen Specter, newly "D"-Pa., a key swing vote, said that he, too, would support a "compromise" on EFCA: card-check-free, of course.

These twin announcements sealed what most observers had understood for a while: Card check isn't happening. The provision has always been imperfect, but its death is a sure sign that the labor movement needs a more effective approach to politics.

Card check was devised as a solution to a simple yet intractable problem: Workers who want to join unions do not get a fair shake. Elections take too long, giving employers plenty of time to hire high-priced union-busting law firms, fire union sympathizers, intimidate and spy upon workers, and do whatever they can do, legally or illegally, to keep the union out. Many people now work for companies like Home Depot (HD), Rite Aid (RAD), or Wal-Mart (WMT) that have plenty of resources to wear unions down and every incentive to do so since their business models depend on underpaid, short-term labor. Specter opposes card check but does support speeding up elections, allowing workers to campaign at their work sites without retaliation, and imposing stiffer penalties for violations of organizing rights.

http://www.reuters.com/article/bigMoney/idUS144379123120090521

[Thothmes]

4. Last time I checked

The Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency. How does the "Bush" Regime have anything to do with it. If it fails, it is because the the democratic party did not have the spine to make it happen. Bush has nothing to do with it.

[mbperrin]

5. Do they? Sure can't tell with the inability to pass anything other than

corporate bailouts or toothless Potemkin bills, like the Credit Card Holder Bill of Rights to be Charged Whatever, Just More Slowly.

[Thothmes]

7. We always accused the Repubs for being stupid and incompentent

[rocktivity]

6. HIT PIECE ALERT!

Another attempt to demoralize labor by the Moonie Times...

:boring:
rocktivity