Employee Free Choice Act Goes Down in Senate

Backed by a wide coalition of labor unions, progressive activists and Democratic officials in Washington, the Employee Free Choice Act ran into an unsuccessful cloture vote in the U.S. Senate today.

The vote came down largely along partisan lines, 51-49, with Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania breaking party lines to vote with the Democratic majority.  Sixty votes are needed in the Senate to end debate and move on to a vote on current legislation. 

The AFL-CIO, a major proponent of the bill, posted an optimistic message about the EFCA’s future in the next Congress.

Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., penned an op-ed in today’s Pioneer Press titled “Why I oppose misleadingly named ‘Employee Free Choice Act,’ ” in which he says

I will oppose this legislation when it comes for a vote in the Senate. Unlike the secret ballot process, the card-check process does not provide the worker with the choice to freely decide in private whether to join a union. Rather, under the card-check process, unions and employers can directly lobby the worker at work, home or elsewhere. And once a worker makes a decision, it is publicly known.

…

Contrary to the claims made by proponents of this legislation, the facts demonstrate loud and clear that the workers and unions are well served by current law.

Americans United for Change, an organization that has consistently bird-dogged Coleman in the run-up to his re-election effort, released a fact check last week on Coleman’s position regarding EFCA:

MYTH: In an interview with the Capitol Hill Publication Congress Daily, Sen. Coleman said of the Employee Free Choice Act:  “The idea of taking away a secret ballot in a union election, I think it’s absurd.” [CongressDailyAM, 6/20/07]

FACT: The Employee Free Choice Act does not repeal the provision of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) that workers now use to petition for a secret-ballot election * Section 9(c)(1)(A). Workers could continue to file an *RC petition* to request a secret-ballot election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), just as they do now.  The Employee Free Choice Act creates a new provision for certification based on cards, but the old provision is still there.  The 30 percent threshold is not currently in the NLRA — it’s an NLRB rule used to interpret 9(c)(A)(1).  This is described in detail in the House Committee on Education and Labor’s report, House Report 110-023 – EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT OF 2007.

The AFL-CIO has vowed to bring EFCA up again in the 2008 elections and cites seven presidential candidates who supported it this time around.