LA Times now lying about EFCA. [View All]

[ColbertWatcher]

From the Los Angeles Times
Editorial
The flaw in 'card check'
The Employee Free Choice Act contains worthy reforms, but it needs to preserve the secret ballot.
March 29, 2009

One part of the proposed Employee Free Choice Act of 2009 ought to be a no-brainer: adding teeth to today's penalties against employers who improperly intimidate workers or engage in other unfair labor practices. If anything, that portion of the bill ought to be enhanced.

A second part, calling for an arbitrator to impose a two-year initial contract when negotiations and mediation fail, has drawn strong protest from business, which currently can drag out contract talks forever and thus negate employees' decision to organize. Filibustering against a properly elected union is an abuse of the collective bargaining process, and binding arbitration is an appropriate way to stop it. Regulations would fine-tune the arbitrator's role; rule makers ought to consider imposing either side's last, best offer as a way to encourage both sides to be more realistic in their offers and make negotiations more productive.

(...)

The third part of the bill is the one that troubles us. It would eliminate the secret-ballot elections that are used in most organizing campaigns and replace them with a method variously known as majority sign-up, petitioning or "card check." This change would correctly take away from management the power to pick employees' method of voting on whether to organize. But instead of returning that decision to the people who ought to have it -- the employees -- it would award it to a labor union, an outside third party that has the potential to become the employees' representative in bargaining but isn't yet, and shouldn't be before the vote.

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I guess the GOP-controlled media has a tag-team propaganda machine going--as one cell stops lying about EFCA, a sleeper cell wakes up and picks up the slack.