Card Check Update

Over the past two weeks, I have received many updates on the status of EFCA/Card Check and they haven't been positive reports. Here are a few:

Removal of card-check provision makes EFCA passage more likely
Business Management Daily
Jonathan Kane, Esq.
http://www.businessmanagementdaily.com/articles/20144/1/Removal-of-card-check-provision-makes-EFCA-passage-more-likely/Page1.html#
With news from Capitol Hill that the “card-check” provision has been dropped from the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), employers need to be concerned that passage of the controversial pro-union legislation is now more likely than ever.The “card-check” provision was always intended as a bargaining chip to be taken off the table as a concession. The provision would have required employers to recognize unions after a simple majority of workers signed cards, rather than after a secret-ballot election.Now that it has been stripped out to facilitate the 60 votes needed in the Senate to prevent a filibuster, a major stumbling block to enactment has been removed.


The Wall Street Journal/Washington Wire
Solis Shifts Strategy
Melanie Trottman reports on labor.
Hilda Solis made a shift that’s certain to please unions.

The labor secretary abandon her passive support of the union-organizing bill now sitting in the Senate, telling labor unions Monday that she’ll actively work with the White House to “make the strongest case possible” for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Last month, when asked about her efforts to push the bill that would make it easier for unions to organize workers and win contracts through binding arbitration, Solis said she supported its underlying principles but was leaving the rest up to Congress. “Congress is the voice of the public and I’m just the administrator,” is how she had put.

Today, there was no equivocation. In her speech to the AFL-CIO convention in Pittsburgh, she said she and President Barack Obama “will join you in the fight for the Employee Free Choice Act.”

“I will work with the White House so that together we can make the strongest case possible” for the bill, Solis said to applause.

Though she didn’t provide specifics on what she and Obama intend to do, the pledge comes at a critical time for the Obama administration as it reaches what it hopes will be the last stretch of the push for a health-care overhaul. Solis’s health-care pitch revived slogans that energized audiences during Obama’s presidential campaign: “Are you fired up and ready to go? Yes we can, yes we will? I’m fired up,” she chanted.


Stay tuned.