Monday, April 5, 2010: EFCA Round-Up
The Hill declares "Sen. Specter viewed as a model Democrat one year after switch":
“He’s a very effective negotiator,” said Bill Samuel, legislative director of the AFL-CIO. “He played a very helpful role, as I understand it, in the internal conversations of the Democratic caucus on the Employee Free Choice Act and helped move it forward with a number of moderates.”
Specter’s work earned him the endorsement of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, a valuable imprimatur in Democratic primaries. He won the endorsement with 79 percent of the union’s vote, which aides points to as a sign that he is winning acceptance among the Democratic rank and file. The union was a key backer for Specter during his 2004 reelection campaign, when he was still a Republican.
DailyKos is firing up its 2010 Orange to Blue political fundraising effort, selecting candidates, in part, on the basis of their response to a questionnaire. The second question (of seven):
Do you support the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 1409/S. 560), including the provision known as "card check"?
Marquette Law School student Jeffrey Dill will argue in the Tennessee Journal of Business Law that EFCA is an inadequate cure to the decline in unionization, and that access to employer property is necessary:
Unions have lost the once strong position they held in the American workplace. Academics have long debated how to restore the National Labor Relations Act’s relevance in today’s global marketplace. Congress’s preferred solution seems to be the Employee Free Choice Act, which would reform the unionization voting process, but this proposal does not strike at the heart of the matter. Labor is losing the debate on the benefits of unionization for the average worker because it is operating on an uneven playing field where employers can exert undue influence on employees to prevent them from organizing with no real opportunity for nonemployee union representatives to respond. True reform must focus on the ability of union representatives to access employer property, which is currently governed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Lechmere v. NLRB.
And the TruthAboutEFCA blog has a reading round-up of its own.
