By AMY HARDER
The fate of the Employee Free Choice Act under a Barack Obama administration and a Democratic Congress is the hot-button issue among advocacy groups on both sides of the debate.
American Rights At Work, a coalition of labor advocates and progressive organizations like the Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO, started running an ad Sunday that urges Congress to pass the bill, which is designed to make it easier for workers to unionize. Critics contend that the bill's provision eliminating mandatory secret elections for unionization in the workplace would leave employees vulnerable to intimidation and coercion.
Josh Goldstein, a spokesman for American Rights At Work, maintains that the proposal doesn't eliminate the secret ballot option, it simply gives employees the option to recognize a union after a majority of the workers sign a petition, rather than automatically going into a secret ballot election at that point -- which is how the current law stands.
Tim Miller, a spokesman for the Employee Freedom Action Committee, which opposes the law, countered that, in practice, there aren't really two options. Every union organizer would choose not to hold an election, Miller argued, since the employer would have to recognize the union at the 51 percent mark anyway. He compared a union organizer opting for a secret ballot election (under the proposed law) to a politician calling for a revote after he has already won.
Where this will fall on the incoming Congress' and president's agenda is unclear, considering the bigger-picture problems surrounding the financial crisis. Major labor groups, including the AFL-CIO and AFSCME, supported Obama throughout his campaign. This, Miller said, would be the only reason Obama would approve the law soon after taking office. "It would essentially be a payback to the special interest labor unions that funded his campaign down the line," he said.
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