We want to begin by reminding everyone that Denver Post reporter Michael Riley is, on the whole, an excellent reporter and an asset to the community in his thoughtful coverage of Colorado politics. Our readers will remember it was Riley who wrote a devastating series of articles last spring on GOP Senate candidate Bob Schaffer’s ties to the Mariana Islands, in evident collusion with the schemings of jailed ex-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. We’ve become accustomed to counting on Riley for unflinching, solid journalism–a commodity in short supply these days.
Our respect for Riley makes it much harder to explain, let alone understand, today’s spin-and-falsehood riddled article on Sen. Michael Bennet and the Employee Free Choice Act.
If you’re looking for an object lesson on the turbulent political waters swirling these days around Michael Bennet – Colorado’s newly minted senator and a major GOP target – take a look at a little- known piece of legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act.
On the day that EFCA was introduced last week, Bennet got a personal visit from one of the most powerful labor leaders in the country, Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern, who hammered home the importance of the senator’s vote.
A few weeks before, Bennet attended a packed meeting of Colorado Concern, a business group whose members will be critical in Bennet’s effort to win over the state’s business community.
“Our chairman came right out of the gate and said we are really imploring you to take a ‘no vote’ on EFCA,” Colorado Concern executive director Janice Sinden said of the bill, which would make unionization of businesses easier by effectively eliminating secret-ballot elections…
Full stop. One of the clearest indicators that a reporter is being coached/bullied/otherwise fed talking points by a particular side of an issue is to see said talking point repeated verbatim in a story. This is generally easier to recognize when said verbatim talking point is total cockamamie bullshit. The Employee Free Choice Act will not eliminate “secret ballot” elections. There is no language anywhere in the legislation that says anything like this. None. At all. Period.
In fact, if only 30% of employees agree that a secret ballot election is necessary, it’s mandated–far fewer than the majority needed to actually form a union.
The idea that you won’t be able to find 30% of employees sufficiently skeptical of unionization to ask for a “secret ballot” in any given workplace is far-fetched indeed, especially in traditionally nonunion states like Colorado–and if you accept that, you must admit Riley’s assertion that Employee Free Choice will “effectively eliminat[e] secret-ballot elections” is baseless.
So somebody explain please, why was it reported as fact?
But the most eye-popping spin in this story, the part that leaves you wondering what the hell you just read and what utterly shameless hack wrote it, regrettably, was yet to come.
If he’s looking for a history lesson on the challenges a “yes” vote on EFCA poses to a candidate, Bennet needs only to have a conversation with the state’s senior senator. Udall won easily over Republican Bob Schaffer in 2008, a strongly Democratic year, but his support for card-check legislation did not go unnoticed.
National anti-labor groups poured more than $1 million into television ads attacking Udall over EFCA, and have shown every willingness to do the same against Bennet…
Translation: Watch out, Michael Bennet, those “national anti-labor groups” might waste as much money attacking you as they did Mark Udall! Seriously, is this supposed to be a threat? We mean, yeah, obviously it is, but the results of last year’s big bad anti-Udall campaign by “national anti-labor groups” shouldn’t exactly leave Bennet shivering and quivering. And yet here it is, uncritically presented as something to be afraid of, with just an “oh by the way” mention that Udall buried his opponent. Yes, Sen. Bennet, far better to alienate your base, set a truly powerful interest group against you (unlike the Club for Growth goons who will never support you anyway), and energize a still-quellable primary challenge like nothing else could. What a ridiculous argument.
It’s not for us to assess the larger question of where an outlier screed like this fits in with an otherwise solid portfolio of objective reporting from Riley. But this was a shameful abortion of his responsibility to the public to report the news honestly. And whether you support or oppose Employee Free Choice, we should all be able to agree that dishonesty with the facts doesn’t help anybody–no matter how many atta-boys you get from Dean Singleton.
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Tell us how you really feel, Pols.
As expected.
A vote for card check and the elimination of secret ballots coupled with the authorization of arbitrators to settle contracts in favor of unions will be a gift to Republicans in Colorado and nationally next year.
In Udall’s case, the act wasn’t well understood or imminent. He was up against a weak candidate.
If Bennet is lucky to face a weak candidate, this won’t matter. If the GOP imports a strong candidate from, say, Mississippi, he may be in trouble if he votes against Colorado employers and their workers.
Interesting to see how the union goons are spinning card check. Lies will get you nowhere.
yes, I agree. If anyone can win over CO voters, it’s someone with Mississippi roots and drawl. It’s so obvious!
So what is the business equivalent?
I don’t think anyone gets knee capped now a days, but it’s the businesses that hold all the power. Hiring expensive law firms to advise them, firing union activists, holding mandatory anti-union meetings, etc.
Maybe “assholes” is good enough.
because it is a violation of civil freedoms. The pendulum just isn’t going to swing that far left.
The rest is just yap, yap, yap….
a shameful abortion of your responsibility to not just make shit up, reefsaver.
I just don’t think it’s the government’s job to get into women’s reproductive systems. That’s best left to the private sector.
The potential-to-eliminate-the-secret-ballot-should-not-even-be-on-the-table. It-will-lead-to-coercion.
Do I have to give my John Stuart Mill speech all over again?
The point is, if the unions try to take too much, they will fail in the court of public opinion and the laws will get disassembled by the next “pro-business” administration. (And there will be one.) Although the management compensation issue was also a major factor, too many Americans were against the automaker bailout because of negative sentiment toward the UAW. Neither the UAW nor the management are responsible for the problems the US automakers are having. Rapid escalation of fuel prices to historic levels followed by the implosion of the housing bubble and subsequent collapse in durable goods demand happened too fast for any manufacturing organization to adapt to.
Therefore, the unions have to be doubly sensitive to the external perception that they are going after too much.
Write a bill that has some staying power. EFCA isn’t it. The strategists who drafted this bill missed the call. Bennet and Udall and Ritter are looking ahead and their weakness on EFCA shows that.
Your spin is already folding up, see that?
Management-controlled-process-leads-to-coercion-every-day-in-America. Far fewer employees are needed to choose a secret ballot than to form a union. The only people who gain power are workers–to choose to unionize, or not. That’s what Free Choice is about.
Have anybody told you how many millions of dollars are spent each year by management suppressing union organization? The truth of who is “coercing” who in reality would make John Stuart Mill very uncomfortable.
Yes, potential. It does not guarantee the open ballot, but it does create the potential for it, which in practice will most probably lead to coercion from the union side to try to votes for the open ballot, which will have to be done in the open (Barron said it better). This will hurt the union cause in the long run and it gives the opponents of EFCA a ready-made whip to beat you with.
And yes, I am aware that management tries to suppress unions. I am not pro-management, I am, within what I feel to be reasonable principles, pro-union. Frankly, most of those management fuckers aren’t that smart and are way overcompensated. But union attempts to create an environment that CREATES THE PERCEPTION OR EVEN POSSIBILITY that EFCA will impinge on civil liberties will be counter-productive to the worker’s cause. And I backed that up with the example of the recent automaker bailout. The secret ballot is perceived to be a right of the worker, is it not?
I am merely pointing out the mistake made on EFCA and how it is playing in the court of public opinion. The ability to form a union should be protected just as vigorously. That is the real issue, and you let the Card-check issue take over and that is why you will lose.
If Sen. Specter (R-D, PA) swithes to Dem and the Dems get MN, the Dems will have 60 votes, unless a couple of Dems come to their senses.
Some Dems may vote for workers and against card check, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
The brown shirts at Progressive Media will be on their cases to vote for card check or else.
I’d look it up (I am sitting at a computer with an online dictionary, after all) but I’d rather ask … what the hell does that mean?
Use your iPhone to figure it out. 🙂
No iPhone here, but I figured it out. I thought you were being clever and using the perfect word, one I’d never heard before.
You still think petitions ought to be secret, or is it OK sometimes when people list their names to call an election on some things?
and it’ll probably be bullshit again this time, so yeah, go ahead.
If I remember correctly, you lost this argument last time you tried to make it, when you failed to notice that your core belief is counterfactual.
and I’m not in the spin business, I have no skin in the game. My core belief is counterfactual? What a crock of shit. I believe any provate citizens vote should be private. Period. There is no counterfactual element to that.
And, no, I didn’t lose the JS Mill argument last time. His works support the opposition of EFCA in a straightforward manner.
also support a body of economic thought that was discredited over half a century ago. So, yeah, don’t really know what you’re doing quoting him in an labor/econ debate. Utilitarianism, sure, but I don’t think we’re really on moral philosophy here…
On Liberty, by JS Mill. Read it. Live it.
JS Mill opposed both legal coercion and social pressure as methods to influence or control people’s opinions and behavior. (Unless a person’s behavior harms other people). To Mill, majority opinion does not imply ‘correctness’, therefore Society should treat diversity with respect. It is my belief that loss of the right to the secret ballot would result in sufficient social pressure (be it from management or the union) to force a ‘correct’ vote that arises from perceived majority opinion rather than individual liberty. In this scenario, the most powerful interest may influence the individual voter to cast a ballot that is inconsistent with the voter’s actual wishes. Which is why the unions originally fought so hard for the secret ballot. Now, the perception of EFCA is that they want to get rid of it.
Oddly enough, even though Mill is regarded as a father of the modern Liberal and Labour movements, the principles laid out in On Liberty are a cornerstone of the mid-20th century American Conservative philosophy, up to Barry Goldwater at least. But it is the labour people, represented in the US by the Democrats, that should also be most adamantly defending these philosophies. EFCA is in contradiction with the ideology because it creates the potential for coercion/pressure of the individual voter. A politician cannot escape this fact just because the union is contributing to his/her election campaign.
The basic underlying theme in Mill’s work is the lack of trust that can be placed in the government (you can substitute ‘labor union’). He cannot condone any measures that would give the government the power of prevention or undue influence over individual lives. He believes that adding any power to the structure of the government is a dangerous act and most of his ideas can be seen as extensions of his desire to make the government more of an advisory and organizational body. For Mill, the ideal government would be a central body that while respected, simply gives strong advisories to local officials who are committed to upholding the interests of their constituency and hearing all opinions expressed. Mill firmly believes that the strength and capability of a citizenry is linked to the success of a state and instead of exterminating the desires and abilities of its citizens, the government should not be afraid to cultivate a strong state with intelligent individuals who can make their own decisions.
EFCA as it stands, would not allow a minority group nor individual who wants a secret ballot to be allowed their privacy and liberty. Therefore it must be rejected.
It is also a P/R nightmare and they are beating the hell out of you with the Card-Check issue.
except instead of beating you over the head in eight paragraphs with his vast knowledge and analytical ability, he beats you over the head in eight paragraphs with the fact that he read one book once.
I’m not beating anyone over the head. I’m illustrating, by using one of the founding intellectual fathers of the liberal & labour movements to illustrate how a current liberal & labour proposal creates the potential to impinge upon civil liberties.
EFCA is damaged goods. That’s the fact. You can insult people with whom you can’t compete intellectually all you want. Doing it on an anonymous blog is cowardly and it won’t change anything.
which I find lacking. You have never, at any time as far as I can remember, responded to the main fact in this debate. Despite the fact that many people have, sometimes gently, sometimes harshly, pointed it out to you.
And that is that EFCA does not eliminate a secret ballot.
Instead you post a long diatribe about a 150-year-old book. Great, but I think if you posted a long excerpt from Das Kapital it wouldn’t be substantially more relevant to this debate.
Let me ask this respectfully but firmly, so that you may understand the main point of this discussion, why people aren’t responding seriously to your argument. If you knew that EFCA didn’t eliminate the secret ballot, would you still oppose it?
P.S. I think there was a labor movement long before John Stuart Mill. Just sayin’.
He’s like John Galt, except he writes a lot instead of being imaginary.
Do you never read this site except when EFCA is mentioned? Do you have some kind of program set up to alert you whenever that keyword appears in a post here?
and keep the noise down!
I have no doubt that Mill would oppose EFCA, that wasn’t my point. You can take Mill’s moral philosophy (strict utilitarianism) or his economic policy (classicalism) and hold onto it like you just jumped off the Titanic, but that doesn’t make either of them right. Mill was also an extreme individualist (hence the “duh” on his distrust of government), which is great if you’re a privileged white man in 19th century England, not so great for blue collar workers trying to eke out a living wage from their employers.
At any rate, if you want to stake out a defense of Mill, fine, go for it, but don’t use him as some godly appeal to authority, it just undercuts your argument (or emphasizes your lack thereof).
and keep the noise down!
I have no doubt that Mill would oppose EFCA, that wasn’t my point. You can take Mill’s moral philosophy (strict utilitarianism) or his economic policy (classicalism) and hold onto it like you just jumped off the Titanic, but that doesn’t make either of them right. Mill was also an extreme individualist (hence the “duh” on his distrust of government), which is great if you’re a privileged white man in 19th century England, not so great for blue collar workers trying to eke out a living wage from their employers.
At any rate, if you want to stake out a defense of Mill, fine, go for it, but don’t use him as some godly appeal to authority, it just undercuts your argument (or emphasizes your lack thereof).
shortage of people who have argued for liberty. I could have used thousands of people, even some of the EFCA’s co-sponsors. I know that EFCA does not automatically eliminate the secret ballot. But it allows for the possibility. And Mill undercuts your argument for a bill that provides for the potential to eliminate the secret ballot. You can’t change the fact that he is one of Labour’s godfathers. He was just a good way to illustrate how the EFCA is not really based on labour’s founding principles.
Morte importantly, I believe the blue collar worker is EXACTLY the demographic whose individual liberty should be protected. Plus I was the one arguing for more pay for Toyota’s workers, not less for Detroits. So your criticisms are aimed at someone who is anti-union, which I am not.
I have no skin in this game, just in case you think I’m a Bilderberger or a Birkenstocker or something. This is the intellectual equivalent of reading comic books to me.
But it’s clear you aren’t reading or understanding my posts. It is also clear, as evidenced by some of the responses on this post, how the leftist mind, with it’s self-righteousness, can lead to totalitarianist instinct, attacking all who disagree.
Bilderberger? Seriously? No, I mean, seriously?
We just disagree with you, yet we’re increasingly frustrated by your inability to get the point.
You keep arguing in vague generalities, and we keep talking about this specific bill and what it does.
I already know specifically what this bill does, and it does not preclude the secret ballot. It’s clearly documented. It is a good idea to make it easy to form unions, and the anti-union stance of the Bush admin has everybody chomping at the bit to gain some ground back. I get it. But you must protect absolutely the ability of the individual to express free choice, even if that choice is unpopular, without fear of coercion or social pressure, and EFCA does not do that. It is a fine point of the bill that they are attacking, but in practice EFCA will make it very hard to make your vote in private. I feel the secret ballot must be protected, and I think it was a strategic mistake in drafting the bill.
And I am framing the argument under the philosophical foundations of the Labour Movement, not spouting vague generalities.
this EFCA argument has been redundant for a while now…..
= vague generalities, to my understanding. That’s kind of the definition of them, in some sense.
And once again, P.S., the labor movement seriously predates Mill.
people on this site are arguing with people they disagree with? What totalitarian bastards!
Oh, wait, I forgot leftist, socialist, neo-nazi totalitarians. Yeah, that’s way better.
I think you may be confused on the line of argumentation here attacking you mainly because, you don’t really have a real argument to be attacking so (as you noticed) we’re all just reduced to ridiculing you. Ha ha.
Seriously though, let me lay out how your “argument” would look in conventional form, so maybe you can agree how ridiculous it is.
1. Mill is all about liberty (woot!)
2. Mill is one of the “fathers” (whatever that means) of Labour
3. EFCA is not liberty (while admitting that it doesn’t eliminate the secret ballot, hmmm…)
4. Therefore, one of the fathers of Labour would be opposed to EFCA.
Hooray!
Do you see the problem here? Disregarding the issues in premise 3, you fail to have any meaning to your argument. Ok, so Mill might be opposed to EFCA, so what? In debate terms, you lack what we call a “terminal impact” to your story.
Try again and the engagement can continue. Otherwise, you’re just an empty shirt (or in this case IP address) saying “I support Liberty because Liberty is good.” Whoop-di-fucking doo. Maybe try living up to your tag and start saving that reefer and not just smoking it before you type.
Do you mean the liberty to associate with your peers and democratically form a group that looks out for your common interests? You know, like a union?
Strange how the powerful get to form unions of capital and effect laws to their advantage but when labor wants to do similar, they are “government” (which I happen to trust a lot more than most large businesses, but that’s just my opinion) or against “liberty.”
You are probably receiving benefits in your daily life from what the labor movement has done over the years.
Now, from your above posts, I’m assuming that it’s okay to insult people if you can either compete with them intellectually, or are not posting anonymously. I’m going to claim two-for-two, and take it from there.
John Stuart Mill and your fascinating (and, sorry, generally known) history of the reversal of the meaning of “liberal” in America aside, you might be wise to consult a few more thinkers and a century or two of intervening academic endeavors. Jeremy Bentham, and the entire discipline of economics, went beyond making a fetish out of liberty, and proceeded to the more subtle and complex task of addressing the challenge of how best to order our lives in order to maximize our “utility,” which, basically, is a catch-all phrase for “whatever the hell it is that we really want.” Money, sex, love, power, health, pleasure, intellectual stimulation, aesthetic gratification, the joy of giving, and, above all, the pleasure of tearing AS a new ASS, all are subsumed under the rubric of “utility,” each determining for him or herself what qualifies, and to what degree.
“Liberty” may contribute to utility. It may even be a very high and valuable form of utility. But, clearly, it’s not the whole kabbash. Despite Patrick Henry’s brave words, not only have few people chosen death over loss of liberty, even fewer have chosen destitution and the suffering that accompanies it over a loss of liberty. The Jews were imprisoned in Egypt not by force, but by the harsh conditions awaiting them elsewhere. They were enslaved by the fact that something worse than the loss of liberty they experienced in Egypt faced them as the alternative.
So, focusing instead on “utility,” we ask, when would rational people choose to sacrifice liberty, in pursuit of utility, if it is not merely to avoid harsh conditions that are the alternative to their loss of liberty? And the answer forcefully in evidence, in nature as well as throughout human history, is that people agree to submit to coercion in order to reap the benefits of collective action that would not have occurred in the absence of such coercion.
Here’s a famous example used by an economist named Kenneth Arrow: A guild of 18th century barge pullers in China, all of whom were equal co-owners in their enterprise, collectively decided to hire overseers to lash them, because without a meachanism to discourage slacking, each barge puller was tempted surreptitiously to let up and leave the work to the others. Rhe fact that all were doing so was slowing them down to the point that it diminished their profits such that they agreed to take this extraordinary action to remain economically viable.
Actually, most social institutions are products of precisely this dynamic. Property rights are defined and enforced, a military provided, and so on, because we would not produce these necessary public goods on our own in the absence of a coercive agent able to collect the necessary revenues to fund them.
Okay, I didn’t insult you after all. Give me time. 🙂
compared to the rather simple and comfortable guarantee of being able to vote in private without the fear of reprisal or coercion.
You just repeated your position.
The fact is that government is all about coercion, either democratically agreed to or dictatorially/oligarchically imposed. In this case, it is the democratic approach to self governance. Respond to that, oh intellectually superior one (referring to a post of yours above, in which you made that claim).
after all of your selective name dropping (failing to mention that Milton Friedman is an anomoly in the discipline of economics, and that almost the entire discipline has come to recognize the salience of “transaction cost economics,” which includes the complexities and subtleties that render markets sometimes NOT the optimal mode of social organization), and your claim to intellectual superiority, and your assertions that leftists are totalitarians for opposing those they disagree with (leaving one to wonder what exactly you believe you yourself were doing), it’s rather remarkable that you respond to a detailed, clear, and compelling analysis such as the one I provided above, with such a transparently lame repetition of a blindly ideological position, unsupported by either logic or evidence. You didn’t even go to the trouble of making facts up, as your ideological compadres on this site are prone to do. You rolled over and admitted defeat, by failing to provide any meaningful counterargument.
The next time you want to pretend to be a genius of right wing philosophy, visit an elementary school classroom. You might get away with it there.
Even though it is a month later, I will respond.
I did not respond in more detail to your analysis because nothing there changed my position and I was tired of the subject already. Your analysis was long, but it just wasn’t very “compelling” (to me at least).
Markets aren’t the optimal mode of social organization. It’s just that the alternatives keep failing miserably.
And it is inherently logical to choose freedom of choice over lack of choice and individual liberty, and my central point is that position is supported by a host of both “right-wing” and “left-wing” ideologues.
Card Check would be a no-brainer if the secret ballot was preserved. That’s it. That’s fair. I didn’t roll over, Card Check did. It was a strategic error by the people who drafted EFCA, and it further delays the reform of the current, pitiful & bureacratic system.
And yes, criticism over the comic-book comment is justified. But you infer too much by believing I am interested in being a “genius of right wing philosophy.” I do not subscribe to traditional left-wing v right-wing ideological framework.
Or don’t you support our soldiers, who do just that when they sign up for the armed forces?
The fact is, the goal of social institutions, including markets, is to effectively align individual and collective incentives at the least possible cost and for the most possible benefit. Markets do that by facilitating multilateral exchange for mutual benefit, and they are a very robust mechanism for doing so. But, as transaction costs economics has well established (see Oliver Williamson, “Markets and Hierarchies,” for the seminal discussion of the topic), there are times when other institutional modalities accomplish the job more efficiently at lower transaction costs.
The problem with unionization has always been that it is a classic prisoner’s dilemma: I don’t want to join the union, when I will benefit from their gains at no cost to myself. In all such situations, every member of the group may desire that all members could be bound to act in a way which benefits all members, but each will prefer to let everyone else act in that way and not do so himself if he can get away with it. That is when rational people choose to subject themself to coercion for mutual benefit.
You may disagree with it, but why is it your right to decide? People should be free to elect democratically to submit themselves to coercion, in order to reap the benefits of enforced cooperation for mutual benefit.
That is exactly what a state is. I never elected to pay taxes, but we did, collectively, through a democratic process, elect to permit a government to coerce us to pay taxes for mutual benefit. There are some who are opposed to this, but most consider them fringe nut-cases who fail to understand the real need for governance, and the fact that such mechanisms are necessary to satisfy that need.
Freedom includes the freedom to choose selectively to give up your freedom in order to gain a degree of cooperation that freedom on its own can’t produce.
you’d be for it?
.
my limited capacities being pretty much occupied with other things,
but this diary post leaves me with a big, unanswered question:
How the heck do you determine if 30% want a secret ballot,
if you don’t first have an unsecret ballot to gauge that level of support ?
This argument appears prima facie to be dishonest.
Oh, and another question: why are unions so afraid of secret ballots ?
This is posted by a guy that has belonged to two unions, and benefited greatly from one of those associations (AFGE.) The unhelpful one was the Carpenters union.
.
Is giving management months to intimidate and retaliate against workers who organize, hire high-dollar unionbusting “consultants” the pull the most underhanded dirty tricks this side of Tony Soprano, and even close the store or factory or office out from under them rather than see it organized. Unions do not oppose secret ballots if that’s what the workers–even a small minority percentage of workers–want.
If you skiped the preceding paragraph, you can sum it up this way: you’re full of shit.
And maybe that’s what this will be all about.
Taking some power from employers and giving some to unions without giving either side the ability to intimidate workers or screw each other.
Unions want card check not to help workers but to generate dues they can spend backing Dems in tight political races.
leveling personal insults at someone who is defending personal liberty and pointing out that the people who drafted EFCA made a serious strategic error?
You are sad indeed.
We’ve said it over and over. EFCA DOES NOT ELIMINATE THE SECRET BALLOT. There is absolutely NOTHING in the ballot language that has anything to do with eliminating the secret ballot.
Since when has accuracy mattered to the plutocrats when they’re running a campaign?
You can’t credibly state that EFCA doesn’t eliminate the secret ballot. Card check allows paid union thugs to put a card in front of employees anytime, anywhere. The employee’s response will be immediately apparent to the union boss. If the employee says “no,” they have effectively communicated their opposition to unionization and the union boss will take note of it. I understand you don’t care about individual liberty and wish instead to advance the cause of the union bosses (this has nothing to do with employees and everything to do with empowering union bosses so they can gather more union dues and enrich the Democrat Party), but try and be intellectually honest for once.
Do you think there is some kind of prohibition on management pulling employees into the office “anytime, anywhere?” This is a total red herring, workers know where the pressure is coming from and it’s not from unions.
Your lack of intellectual honesty is stunning. You really think, as the Pols say, that 30% of workers to insist on a ‘secret ballot’ can’t be found? How then can they ‘not credibly state’ that Employee Free Choice won’t eliminate the secret ballot? Of course they can.
And seriously, cut down on the gratuitous polemics. Nobody’s buying that shit.
I’m glad to see that the national media, so prone to the spin from the left on many issues, is giving an accurate portrayal of EFCA.
Because the second most dishonest person on the blog wholly endorses it.
Or are you the most dishonest person on the blog?
It’s always evidence you’ve lost an argument when all you can resort to is name calling. Disagreeing with liberal ColoradoPols group think doesn’t make someone dishonest.
Just ten minutes before you posted this bit of sophistication, you wrote:
I detect name calling here.
Are we to conclude your post at Sun Mar 15, 2009 at 20:59:51 PM MDT was your petition of surrender?
But writing dishonest things usually makes one dishonest. There’s always that rare exception who manages to say dishonest thing after dishonest thing and still maintain a reputation as honest, but it’s kind of hard to join that club. I think David Broder might be the only person in that club, and you’ll have to ask him for permission if you want to join.
of anything. In fact, the 30-second spot should always be ignored.
I am generally pro-union, but the possibility of eliminating the secret ballot should not even be on the table.
Shouldn’t you respond to what the author actually wrote instead of mindlessly bloviating?
What Coloradopols says is just dishonest spin.
but did you just notice that Pols spins EVERYTHING?
To the posters who believe that workers shouldn’t have a choice between card check and an election, do you then also believe that there should be a mandated “secret ballot” election to decertify a union (which currently is not the case)?
Not to mention that management can campaign against the certification of a union but can’t campaign against decertification. . .
Except in N. Korea.
It takes 67,000 signatures to get an initiative on the Colorado ballot. Should that be secret as well? That’s a serious question.
There is basis in history or current practice for that. I am sure you know that, but why be bothered by the facts? Unless people are being directly elected, most votes are in the open. But AGAIN, the law would give the option to the employees to decide and call for a ballot.
Okay, we all know that it is wrong for a company to spend unholy quantities of money to run campaigns against their employees’ interests that include intimidation, coercion and sometimes termination of employment.
We also know that the National Labor Relations Board does NOT even enforce the paltry labor laws that we have here.
How would you propose to “preserve” democracy being that management is the only entity with true rights when the employees try to unionize??
The Employee Free Choice Act recognizes that choosing whether or not to have a union is NOT the right of the employer, and employers should have NO say in the matter other than how they treat their employees. This includes whether or not to have a “secret” ballot at work. It is the workers’ right to choose. Since when was business concerned with their workers’ rights anyway???? They opposed the 40 hour work week, FMLA, pensions that nearly guarantee secure retirements and equal pay for women and minorities just to name a few.
Also, is anyone upset that members of the Chamber of Commerce and their $200 million dollar campaign to stop the Act have received our taxpayer bailout money and are participating in politics against the interests of their rank-and-file workers and in the interests of their top management.
It won’t sell.
even in the absence of EFCA.
Gov. Ritter just turned Colorado state employees over to the unions. Unions control K-12 schools, which is why they are run for teachers and administrators, not for the kids.
Millions more people would join if they could. They are prevented from doing so.
It will never end. People who stay neutral and never get involved are part of the problem. The epic struggle for employee rights worries the “establishment” (for lack of better term) more than any other social movement because they know it will bring about significant change that they are afraid to deal with. And to their “credit”, many people opposed to labor law reform truly do not believe in the concept of employees rights because it does meet their definition of the free market where only investors and owners are allowed to bargain. Look at the practices of many large companies, unions are attacked during employee orientations as a direct warning for any employee who even uses the word. The law is bent right to point to disregarding it and even if they have to break the law, almost nothing will happen anyway. I love newspapers, but it is no wonder the new media is taking hold. The Denver Post is a joke when it comes to objectivity on labor management issues. Furthermore, being pro-union does not mean anti-business, plain and simple. Unions understand that they need to be fair in dealing with business and that means formal rules, but so often some in business take the position, they should not have any rules imposed on them, especially when it comes to employees. The United States is one of the most anti-union nations in the world, but things are taking a new direction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H…
I have and I’ve been a union member.
Union rules don’t protect workers. They are designed to featherbed and generate more dues for the unions, whose leaders love Boca Raton hotels.
That is a sweeping generalization and you are way off the mark. Not all unions are alike. Do you think all businesses alike? Most unions protect their members to the extent they can and within reason.
And once (in another state) I organized my employees and sold them the company- nice exit if you can get it.
He did his job and reported the facts accurately.
How did he “report the facts accurately” if he lied about the “secret ballot?” How did he “report the facts accurately” by making it sound like the CFG thugs actually hurt Udall?
His piece was dishonest and you’re all giving it fellatio because it’s what you want to hear. While having the gall to accuse others of “groupthink.”
Unbelievable.
Everyone said how dangerous a one newspaper town could be. Every day I have to read some made up bullshit from Dean Singleton. He should just change the name of his paper and be done with it. The Denver Anti-Union Post.