Union-bashing disguised as concern for workers

[Earth Bound Misfit]

http://www.kentucky.com/589/story/490760.html

By Bill Londrigan

Kentucky's workers and voters should recognize that the recent rash of anti-union TV and radio ads are nothing more than propaganda intended to divert the attention of the electorate from the critical issues of the day: health care, good jobs, education, trade, retirement security, energy security and the war.

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The ads' principle claim is that the proposed Employee Free Choice Act would take away a worker's right to choose union representation by the traditional or ”secret ballot“ election procedure. Not true. Under this legislation, there still would be an option to have the National Labor Relations Board administer ”secret ballot“ elections at the workplace.

Under the current system, employers are the ones who make the decision whether to call for an NLRB election — which they often do because it gives them months to run an aggressive anti-union campaign.

The Employee Free Choice Act would put this decision in the hands of workers. If 30 percent of them choose to have an NLRB election they can; if they prefer majority sign-up, they will have that option as well.

Majority sign-up is not a new approach. For years, employers such as AT&T, Cingular Wireless, Harley-Davidson and Kaiser Permenente have allowed that majority sign-up, finding that it results in less hostility and polarization in the workplace than the failed NLRB process.

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Those responsible for these ads, the Center For Union Facts (more appropriately the Center for Union Mis-Information and Propaganda) and its allied organization, the Employee Freedom Action Committee, are the creation of Richard Berman, who has a reputation for mounting vigorous media misinformation campaigns on behalf of wealthy, unnamed clients.

Accordingly, Berman ”never discloses his financial backers, allowing large, mainstream companies to fund him without having to associate their brand names with his sharp-elbowed approach,“ according to the Nov. 3, 2007, Las Vegas Sun.

It is an insult to the hard-working men and women of Kentucky that someone like Berman would try to convince them that he, his organization and its rich contributors are on the side of workers.

The Kentucky backers of this propaganda include state Rep. Jim DeCesare, R-Rockville, who sponsored the 2006 ”right-to-work-for-less“ bill.


What a joke. Wealthy businessmen, CEOs and anti-union politicians — who have opposed unionization at their workplaces in the most vigorous manner and support anti-union, anti-worker legislation — want us to believe that they care about workers' rights to join a union.

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It is long past time that workers reject this wholesale undermining of their right to collective bargaining to improve their living and working conditions and support candidates who support the Employee Free Choice Act.

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