looking ahead 1: the legislative fight to watch

As the new congress takes shape, there is no doubt that there will be many disappointments and frustrations. Perhaps taking a page from the Bush Administration, Pelosi has been busy lowering expectations, even on the issue that contributed most clearly to her achieving the speakership: the disastrous war in Iraq.
There is one thing that Pelosi has promised to move through the House, even if it will take quite a bit of muscle to pass in the Senate. The Employee Free Choice Act, a measure which would roll back some of the worst provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act, the 1947 bill which has done so much to curtail workers’ ability to form unions. According to the AFL-CIO, the EFCA would require “employers to recognize a union after a majority of workers sign cards authorizing union representation.” The bill also strengthens the currently squishy legal consequences for illegal union-busting activities by employers.
The process of using cards rather than elections to establish collective bargaining has been good for workers and the labor movement. A majority of growth by the most aggressive organizing unions has been won by using political and public pressure on employees to promise to abide by the results of card drives. In some parts of the public sector, this is the law of the land. EFCA would make that process mandatory, and extend it into the private sector.
I don’t believe in magic bullets in politics, but there is no doubt that passing labor law reform would have a tremendously widespread effect on American politics. There are millions of workers (by some estimates almost sixty) who want to be in a union, but aren’t in large part because of the authoritarian power that employers wield over the process of establishing collective bargaining. A labor movement so invigorated, in addition to helping to democratize the increasingly oligarchal American economy, would be a crucial influx of power for the broad progressive movement. I don’t need to explain how helpful it would be to a Democratic Party still struggling to speak meaningfully to a majority of working-class voters.
For Santa Barbara locals, you need only look at the drama over at the SB News Press to see how brutal current conditions are for workers seeking union representation. Even when workers vote in overwhelming numbers for a union, the bosses are still able to tie the process up in expensive red tape for years. They are able to threaten, even fire active employees without the threat of meaningful sanctions. Busting a union is cheap in America. Ignoring a union organizing drive is just too damn easy.
So, for the next year, or as long as it takes, hoverbike will be following the progress of the Employee Free Choice Act. Expect hysteria from the anti-union industry, even some hand-wringing from labor’s fair weather friends in the Democratic Party, and, perhaps, excuses from Dem leadership about their inability to turn the rhetoric of every Democratic Presidential Candidate since 1947 into a reality.

Current status (Senate Version) SS. 842: Awaiting re-introduction
Current status (House Version) H.R. 1696: Awaiting re-introduction