Unions Waging Semantic Battle to Rename "Card Check"?
Theories abound on the motivation of the sources behind Steven Greenhouse's piece in last Friday's New York Times announcing that Senate Dems might be ready to give up on EFCA's "card check" provisions. The timing was strange enough, but we also reported (via Twitter) early that morning that Senate staffers were denying the report. Was the "leak" regarding card check a trial balloon? Was it some other strategic effort by labor and some of their legislative allies?
The other day, the TruthAboutEFCA.com ran a piece, paying literary allusion to "The Usual Suspects," analogizing "the greatest trick [EFCA proponents] ever pulled was convincing the world [card-check] didn't exist":
But now it seems that rumors of card check’s death have been greatly exaggerated for a specific purpose (or several). Our friends at Shopfloor.org have been tracking the mysteriously timed pronouncement of card check’s death, even while Beltway insiders say it’s not so. So herein the latest analysis from Shopfloor:
The flogging of the “Senate Dems drop card check” story to the New York Times certainly brought renewed attention to the Employee Free Choice Act’s political prospects, which was probably the goal of the labor lobbyist(s) who were pushing the news. At least people are talking about the bill now instead of just assuming the whole thing is dead. Smart.
Plus they have a roundup of more analysis.
All this makes sense: have a bad product that people don’t like? Just tell them the big lie. Tell them it doesn’t exist. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
Card check is not dead and EFCA still contains binding arbitration — a method that would allow government bureaucrats to effectively run employment decisions for small business. No,EFCA is not dead, and neither is the fight against it.
The response to the Times story was immediate and forceful. Business interests and EFCA opponents quickly condemned the possible development and began to focus more intense criticism on EFCA's mandatory interest arbitration provisions.
Lest it be lost in the shuffle, however, there appears to have been a simultaneous increased effort on the part of labor to re-brand the mechanism proposed by Section 2 of EFCA as "majority sign-up." While that has been terminology used by supporters for some time, and increasingly as labor realized how politically toxic the term "card-check" had likely become. But in the wake of Friday's developments, there appears to be a stronger and more concerted effort to change the vocabulary of the discussion on this particular issue -- perhaps to soften it politically while we await the ultimate announcement of what comes next. We shall see as the conversation continues.
