Before the NLRB agent ever arrives at the workplace with the voting booth and cardboard ballot box, workers have been harassed, intimidated, spied on, threatened and fired. How can a secret ballot election cure this? It can’t and it doesn’t. What is free about your choice when your employer has threatened to relocate your work if the union wins? What is free about your choice when your employer points to a nearby sister location that voted for a union with an almost 100 vote margin and, four years later, no bargaining has taken place [but fails to mention that it’s because the employer is gaming the system]? What is free about your choice when you can plainly see that union support means being followed and harassed and videotaped? This kind of fear does not disappear when the worker is handed a ballot. It’s their job and their families’ livelihood. That’s too much to risk. It’s too much to have to risk.

The anti-union rhetoric is everywhere. Hopefully the new admin will be able to actually push through the EFCA… …until Harry Reid tells us they will never get the 95% majority needed, so why bother voting.

The day after Oregon Sen.-elect Jeff Merkley won his primary, ads started airing to attack his support for the bill, and anti-worker forces spent almost $1 million to defeat him. As the ads continued, Merkley rose steadily in the polls.

The anti-EFCA (secretly funded?) anti- Jeff Merkley ads ran endlessly during the Fall campaign and it sure didn’t work. When Gordon Smith made his concession statement, which I watched live, the air seemed leaden in the room and his wife was palpably upset.

They times that are a-changin, at least right now…

Dems pushing the EFCA will allow the Repubs another chance to further marginalize themselves in a set up for more losses in 2010. Hope the Dems see that clearly, and allow a two or three day filibuster, although I worry that Harry “Capitulation” Reid will get nervous about the potential for more Repub dissent.

Do you get better bargains as an individual or when you get a group rate from someone? Do you get better healthcare going to the insurance companies by yourself or as part of a group? Do you get better discounts at stores or other businesses from a group membership or from an individual membership?

I’d have no problems at all if folks want to not join the union, even if it is available, as long as they also elect to not take advantage of the union negotiated pay and benefits packages.

I think the labor movement is far more powerful when it’s not organized into unions, which have simply become another level of bureaucracy feeding of the efforts of the workers. A real ground level movement is almost impossible to stop, while an organized structure is easily corrupted. Then again I am biased here after some very very bad experiences with unions.

Then his buddy was laid-off one month from pension eligibility.

Now BIL thinks he may be next and maybe the boss is wrong.