Wooster (Ohio) Daily Record: Card check could bring sweeping change

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.the-daily-record.com/news/article/4547690

By BOBBY WARREN

Staff Writer

WOOSTER -- Depending upon who is right, the so-called card check law introduced in the U.S. House and Senate recently will either turn around the economy and rebuild the middle class or it will create government-run workplaces.

The Employee Free Choice Act, known as card check, would make it easier for workers to form unions by eliminating a need for a secret ballot.

As proposed, the law would make employers recognize a union if a simple majority of workers sign authorizations (cards).

Robert Gorman, an attorney with Critchfield Critchfield & Johnston who practices in the area of labor and employment law, said by not using a secret ballot, an employer could come to work one day and discover the company's structure has changed.

But Don Lance, former president of the Ashland-Wayne-Holmes Labor Council, sees it differently, saying the law would not eliminate the choice of a secret ballot. However, employees would have to vote to conduct one.

Richard Seaman, president and chief executive officer of the Seaman Corp., says it is amazing legislators would try to make it easier for unions to be involved in companies given what has happened in the auto industry and how unions affected its cost structure.

Labor laws have remained relatively unchanged since the 1930s, Lance and Gorman said.

FULL story at link.

[ejpoeta]

1. I never realized how important unions were until my husband's work started

screwing them around. They spent months working to get a union in there. And it takes all that time because you have to be very careful that the company doesn't know who is helping to try to get the union. The company went out of their way to try to scare the workers to get them to NOT vote for the union, blatantly lying about what would happen and such. Thanks to the internet I knew they were lying. They ended up five votes short of getting the union. My husband and his fellow employees got a front row seat to the difference between an union and non union workplace. The same company, but the NYC area, had a union. The union employees got pay raises while no one else in the company did. Bob is hopeful that this time around they will have enough votes, but who knows.

As for what Richard Seaman says about unions.... it is not the unions nor the employees that are the problem with the auto industry. The problem is that the big 3 decided that instead of innovating, they would just keep selling their SUVs. By the time the gas prices got high enough last summer, they didn't have an alternative to those gas guzzlers. People who had always bought ford or chevy or dodge.... they started turning to toyota and other brands with better gas mileage. Once they did that and saw that the foreign cars were just as good as the brand they had always bought before, the big 3 just lost a customer.

The big 3 were and still are overbloated and running a losing model. You can't blame the workers for that. The workers just put the cars together. That problem goes all the way to the top. The inability to see that you need to have more than just gas guzzling cars is no one's fault but the people at the tippy top.