FDL: What Happened to the Employee Free Choice Act?

[Omaha Steve]

http://workinprogress.firedoglake.com/2010/04/13/what-happened-to-the-employee-free-choice-act/

By: Jane Hamsher Tuesday April 13, 2010 3:16 pm

The fate of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) over the course of the past year and a half has been largely determined by the White House. Rahm Emanuel would not let it come up for a vote until after health care was passed, and by that time the Democrats no longer had 60 votes in the Senate. But its evolution is also intimately tied to the electoral prospects of Harry Reid and Arlen Specter, and unless you understand one, you can’t understand the other.

The SS Reid 2010 Heads For the Iceberg

Harry Reid is up for reelection in 2010, and his prospects have sucked for a long time. Reid’s been struggling against “generic GOP opponent” ever since Barack Obama was inaugurated. The biggest union in Nevada is the Culinary Workers, with 60,000 members. They were key to his reelection in 1998, when their “get out the vote” operation helped him barely eek out at 500 vote victory. He needs their support badly. The Culinary workers are part of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), headed by John Wilhelm. HERE had merged with the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (Unite) in 2004, which was headed by Bruce Raynor.

The merger between Unite and HERE seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was an uncomfortable marriage from the start. Things came to a head in early 2009 when Wilhelm tried to push Raynor out. Harry Reid intervened and tried to settle the dispute between the two, because the last thing he wanted was an internal dispute hurting the ability of the Culinary Workers to turn out for him.

At the time, Unite-HERE was under the Change to Win umbrella with SEIU. But when Raynor took Unite-HERE and most of its workers to become an affiliate of SEIU, Wilhelm took Unite-HERE back to the AFL-CIO. Which, as you might imagine, gives newly installed AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka quite a bit of leverage over Reid. But labor was very much united in their determination to force Reid to bring EFCA to a vote, no matter where Unite-HERE called home.

The Great Specter Switch

Since Obama won the election in 2008, the unions had worked together to whip that magical “60th vote” in the Senate for the Employee Free Choice Act. Arlen Specter had been the one Republican to vote for cloture on the bill when it came to the floor in 2007, which made him the prime candidate. It also put him in the sights of all of the anti-EFCA money that was flowing at the time from the Chamber of Commerce and other business outfits, filling the coffers of his primary challenger Pat Toomey. On March 24, Specter announced out of nowhere that he’d vote against the Employee Free Choice Act. But the next day, a Quinnipiac poll showed that Specter was already trailing Toomey by 14 points. The opposition had done its job too well.

On April 28, Specter switched parties. But his support among Pennsylvania Democrats was sketchy, and unless he changed his tune on EFCA, the unions threatened to support Joe Sestak in a primary challenge. So Specter joined the negotiations with Senate Democrats trying to reach an accord on EFCA. Blanche Lincoln had come out in public opposition to the bill, along with a half-dozen other Democrats, but privately was telling Senate Democrats that if it ever came to it, she’d go along.

FULL story at link.