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Friday, August 08, 2008

Unions and what's best for a proposed bargaining unit.

Gary Gross sent an email to Political Muse and me, about a George McGovern op ed on EFCA in WSJ, see also, here.

It's not my burning issue, and I expect some will be bothered by the McGovern view.

I urge you to read it.

Think it over.

I may post something later, but my general belief is that employer pressure between a card signing effort and a bargaining unit election can be a distorting factor. The other side believes that union organization pressure during a card signing drive is one-sided, and the secret ballot protects ones who might not think organizing a unit is a good idea but also do not want to openly look to coworkers as ones who'd rock the boat of an apparent majority consensus.

Both sides have an argument.

I will leave it there.

I may later post views about unionization and being in a bargaining unit, anecdotal and quite limited, and about how I think there can be downside fallout to something I generally think is needed, bargaining unit coherence, to come closer to a balance in relative power between large employers and individuals employed by them.

There is the small business, and it is a different situation.

There is the job out-sourcing thing, runaway plants, free use of strike-breaker labor arising from Reagan's disloyalty to the air traffic controllers who, contrary to their best interests, supported him, and there is my major complaint against union leadership - the neglect of union leadership to have a broader agenda than their narrowed interests - for example, tax reform back to "Eisenhower years" bracket rates is not being pushed sufficiency by union bosses even though it would be the one thing to be the rising tide to lift all boats (except the excessive yachts of some in the elite).

More later. Perhaps.

See what McGovern says and his reasoning --- McGovern who should have won and if he had we might be a different nation. But the allied entrenched two-party forces did him in, and declined to move to oust the weasel until after he'd been reelected. Then we had Gerald Ford, the only president in history to not be elected except by the folks of Grand Rapids Michigan. And a Rockefeller a heartbeat away from officially running the country.

The email calling attention to the op-ed said:

I'd appreciate hearing your take on the impact of this op-ed, if you think it has any impact.

If you write about it, let me know & I'll link to it.


No link needed, since there's no opinion published here either way for now of EFCA, a wedge issue, a narrow issue, a minor issue when bigger things have gone undone during Clinton years, during Bush years - it has been two party same old, same old.

Wellstone was the only one with something approaching a fair and inclusive perspective. And yes, I think the plane flight to Eveleth on the eve of the 2002 election, October 25, 2002, was tampered with.

Healthcare - the indecency of all present arrangements - to me is the issue, but it's been sidetracked by both parties, what with the bleating about pump price.

People are real dumb that way, dropping healthcare and tax fairness, and letting the likes of Newt Gingrich again lie to them in simplistic terms about complex matters.

Those who swallow the Gingrich Drill Now brand will end up with the bellyache they deserve later.

And letting EFCA a narrow noninclusive p***ing match between union leadership and organized employer representative interests get in the way of forcing politicians to be articulate over far, far, far bigger and more impending things - healthcare, tax fairness, and baby boomer "retirement," (if there will be such a thing), for instance.

Letting EFCA distract attention from bigger things is playing into the GOP hands, they have no real decent inclinations to the little guy, unionized or unorganized, and the unions only care about the former and will throw the latter under a train for a single minor alteration in labor law. Reforming the strike-breaker rules and having more friendly secondary boycott rules would do unions a lot better than letting the GOP say this EFCA snit is the battleground you and I fight on.

The unions bosses should not be deluded into letting the bosses coalition define the issues. They should have stronger thinkers than to permit that. They must read the newspapers a lot and the bosses coalition owns the newspapers and already knows what they say.

But that's all just one person's opinion.

Comments are open - unmonitored.

______UPDATE_________
Prior Crabgrassing, here.