Employee Free Choice Act-- Why It Matters

Republican front groups-- the virulently anti-working families ones which demand open borders and a flood of cheap labor-- have gone on a jihad against Democratic candidates for Congress. They are the real soul of the Republican Party and they are spending millions of dollars blanketing television and radio with misleading advertisements about the Employee Free Choice Act and why unions and Democrats support it. The shady lobbyists behind these groups remind me of a pride of ravenous lions voicing concern over the well-being of gazelles learning to run faster-- I mean, after all, it could be too much stress on the poor gazelles' hearts.

Two of the worst of these groups are the deceptively misnamed Employee Freedom Action Committee, run by radical right union-bashing GOP lobbyist Rick Berman, and the Wal-Mart funded Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, both frantic to stop a law that will make it easier for employees to form and/or join unions. They are running their TV spots to benefit shameless anti-working families Republicans like anti-labor scumbags Norm Coleman (R-MN), John Sununu (R-NH), Gordon Smith (R-OR, an arch hypocrite and a real bucket of puke, whose shady frozen food company, Smith Frozen Food, was just exposed as an exploiter of illegal immigrants), Roger Wicker (R-MS), and Susan Collins (R-ME).

Today Meg White at BuzzFlash continued their expose on how the Republican Party wages a vicious class war against working people. "For Republicans," she writes, "waging war on the working class is not hard. The tricky part is making said war invisible. In order to keep on top economically, Republicans still have to win elections (or at least appear to do so). Now that the economy is at the top of most voters' issue lists, that is becoming harder and harder for them to pull off."

Only lies and deceptions can distract working Americans from the fact that the GOP is pickpocketing them, so the GOP runs elections by using personality politics, image, wedge issues, and brazen lies.

Because Republicans know they can't win elections on the economy, so they turn to appealing to socially conservative values-voters, as one example. Up until the recent economic downturn, abortion, gun rights, school prayer, gay marriage and other socio-religious pseudo-political issues were a bigger deal than economic problems. They set up liberals as the enemy responsible for all the problems facing working class voters, when it is the GOP oligarchy that disdains America's embattled middle class; and it is the Republicans who have caused the redistribution of wealth from the middle and bottom classes to the upper, upper class. It's quite a shell game.

...The highest profile and most applicable example of this is the battle raging over the Employee Free Choice Act. The act makes it possible for unions to more easily organize, free of intimidating and often illegal employer pressure. The act also requires arbitration in disputed cases, making collective bargaining agreements easier to accomplish and strikes less frequent.  The Employee Free Choice Act is the number one goal of virtually every union, regardless of the current split in the union movement based on other issues.

The law is far from perfect in advancing the right of collective bargaining, but with union membership at its lowest in recent history, it's better than nothing. The only way Republicans have been able to successfully oppose the act is to twist the facts to try to make it look like they are on the workers' sides. They say (falsely) that the act will get rid of the secret ballot.